Active History

Archives and Social Justice

November 14, 2012 No Comments

Verne Harris (right) and Tim O’Grady at the 2012 Archives Society of Alberta conference. Photo courtesy of the Archives Society of Alberta.

By Tim O’Grady

In 1993 Verne Harris, a records management archivist at the South Africa State Archives Service, discovered some junior officials in the transitional Apartheid government had been told by the state’s security secretariat to destroy certain classified records in contravention of the nation’s Archives Act. After official efforts proved fruitless, Verne told a journalist, as well as the NGO Lawyers for Human Rights, and provided them with supporting documentation. Not only was this a breach of professional practice but it broke the Protection of Information Act which carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The South African government was taken to court and admitted violating the Archives Act. As a result the wide-scale destruction of public records ceased, and the saved documents became an important part of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation process.

This is a dramatic example of where archives and social justice meet, and is a fitting introduction to Verne Harris. In 2001 Verne left the National Archives of South Africa and began working for NGOs. He is currently the head of Memory Programming for the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory.

I got the chance to meet Verne when he facilitated a workshop with Terry Cook and Wendy Duff called “Archives for Social Justice,” a precursor to the Archives Society of Alberta conference in April 2012. The workshop and conference gave me the opportunity to think about the implications of social justice in archives and archival practice. Continue reading →

Remembering the War of 1914

November 13, 2012 5 Comments

Vimy Ridge Memorial – Dedication Ceremony

By Jim Clifford

It is very strange to celebrate the start of a war. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we have done here in Canada over the past year. The War of 1812 spanned from June of 1812 through to February of 1815, but this did not stop our government from starting their celebrations of the “Fight for Canada” during the 200th anniversary of the first months of the war. Perhaps they felt the need to keep the schedule open to celebrate the start of another war in 2014.

Canadians commemorate the end of the First World War yearly on Remembrance Day (November 11th), and with memorials, from Vimy Ridge to village cenotaphs. These monuments and sites of remembrance generally bring a somber tone, focus on the sacrifices of war and provide limited space to celebrate the glories of victory.

I hope that any additional events and publicity will bring the same tone, but considering the fanfare for the War of 1812 and the historically dubious claims that we stood side by side and “won the fight for Canada,” I worry that we’ll face an even bigger celebration of Canada’s role in World War One. The United Kingdom government recently announced plans to spend £50,000,000 to commemorate the war starting in 1914 and the Australian government has budgeted $83,500,000. Assuming the Canadian government will spend a similar sum of money, the question remains: Which First World War will we commemorate? Continue reading →

Crumbling Communities: Declining Service Club Membership

November 12, 2012 1 Comment

By Krista McCracken

Members of Royal Canadian Legion, Grand Bend, Ontario. Photo by CaseyLessard. Creative Commons License.

Declining membership rates, halting revenue and the sale of historic buildings. The media’s focus on Remembrance Day has brought the struggling state of Royal Canadian Legion membership into the light once again. Ontario Legion membership has declined almost 15% in the past 5 years and many previously vibrant branches have closed their doors or relocated to more affordable locations.

This decline in Legion membership can be at least partially attributed to the aging World War II and Korean War veterans. Many older veterans have passing away and there simply is not the same number of new veterans. However, veterans from recent wars are simply not flocking to their local Legion like their predecessors did.

This decrease in membership isn’t unique to the Legion. Many service clubs such as the Lions Club, Orange Lodge, Elks, Kiwanis etc have all seen a similar decline. Each of these service organizations has a unique history. However, service club membership as a whole has tended to wax and wane based on political, economic and social conditions of the era.

Continue reading →

Experimenting with Victorian anthropometrics: What can we learn from past scientific practices?

November 8, 2012 No Comments

Descriptive poster of Francis Galton’s anthropometric laboratory. From Karl Pearson’s The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914-1930), vol. 2, p. 358. Reproduced by permission of the Wellcome Library, London UK.

By Efram Sera-Shriar

Imagine yourself as a nineteenth-century naturalist living in Britain. You are working on a project that seeks to examine differences (both cultural and physical) between the various peoples of the world. You want to collect information from distant locations scattered throughout the globe, but you are unable to travel abroad because of vocational and familial obligations at work and at home. To compensate for your inability to travel afar you send instructive questionnaires to people living in different regions asking them for their help. Your hope is that by using a complex network of informants to collect your data you will be able to use the material for substantiating your research claims.

For much of the nineteenth-century this was one of the most effective ways to collect data for scientific research. There is a lost art to creating and maintaining these informant networks, and Victorian researchers worked tirelessly at building strong rapports with their correspondents. In my new research project I aim to recreate a scheme to collect anthropometric information on people living throughout the world. By using some of the practices of nineteenth-century naturalists, it is my hope that I will better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their research programmes. I am interested to see what historians can learn by doing a kind of Victorian experiment. At the crux of this project is a desire to see if historians will be better situated to understand the kinds of problems these nineteenth-century researchers experienced as they attempted to collect their data. Continue reading →

Swimming Against the Current: Sexual Citizenship After Harper and Homonationalism

November 7, 2012 4 Comments

By Steven Maynard

This is the first in a series of posts originally presented as part of a roundtable entitled “What’s the Use of History? Citizenship and History in Canada’s Past and Present,” held in Toronto on October 16th 2012. The event was organized by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project.

Mark Tewksbury Speaking at the Suncor Energy/COC Partnership Announcement Event in Calgary on February 22 2012. Source: iwilldreambig Flickr Photostream.

In Canada, “we let our gay people swim.” So quipped Justin Trudeau, would-be PM with the good hair, when asked for his reaction to the Conservative government’s revised citizenship guide, Discover Canada. He was referring to the photo of Mark Tewksbury, the 1992 Olympic gold medallist in the backstroke and the guide’s only visual representation of gay/lesbian life in Canada. In drafting the new guide, staff at Citizenship and Immigration Canada had proposed including historical highlights of the gay/lesbian movement, from the 1969 decriminalization of homosexuality to the 2005 legalization of same-sex marriage. But the public servants’ political masters were not nearly so historically minded. As we now know, Jason Kenney, Minister of Immigration and Citizenship, ordered his staff to remove the references to gay/lesbian history and same-sex marriage, something Kenney had opposed in 2005.

The outcry was swift in coming. NDP MP Bill Siksay said “Jason Kenney can’t edit gays and lesbians out of Canadian history.” But the truth is he could and he did. Even after public pressure to reinsert the gay material, the new edition does not include the historical reference to decriminalization (perhaps it too readily evoked that other Trudeau) and the proposed paragraph on gay rights was watered down to a single sentence about how gay and lesbian Canadians enjoy equal treatment under the law, including access to civil marriage. This episode brings into focus the contested connections among history, citizenship and sexuality. Continue reading →

Beyond the Classroom: Taking a Large University Class on a Field Trip

November 6, 2012 2 Comments

By Britt Luby

At all levels of classroom instruction, history teachers are faced with the challenge of meeting the needs of tactile learners in an environment that favours auditory learners. Large classes – York University’s Keele Campus averages 57 students per class – mean that lectures remain the most effective means of relaying information. This year, I was assigned to TA for Professor Molly Ladd- Taylor’s popular course “Growing Up in North America.” Her success as an educator is reflected by high levels of enrollment. Ladd-Taylor’s class can boast close to 200 students. The success of her lectures can be tracked through student comments online. In 2003, one student exclaimed “Makes the material interesting, is very accomadating [sic], is very well structured in the [sic] lesson plan.” Consensus remained in 2012 when one student posted “Amazing lectures….Easy to understand, great, interesting!!!” Needless to say, I was thrilled to join Professor Ladd-Taylor’s teaching team. And, my excitement grew when Professor Ladd-Taylor expressed an interest in alternative learning methodologies and provided me with free range to design and develop a voluntary field trip. Continue reading →

Unpacking Public Opinion in Oshawa and Durham Region: A Tale of Two Polls

November 5, 2012 2 Comments

By Christine McLaughlin

Mark Calzavara, Christine McLaughlin and Gail Bates (Friends of Oshawa’s Waterfront General Meeting, 1 November 2012). Photo courtesy of Robert T. Bell.

I recently wrote about an ongoing struggle in Oshawa around the city’s waterfront – the federally-appointed Oshawa Port Authority (OPA) has approved an ethanol refinery at the harbour, despite longstanding local opposition. The battle over public opinion has coalesced around two polls conducted on this topic. The first, commissioned by the OPA, shows a majority in support of the ethanol plant. A second poll, commissioned by the Council of Canadians, shows a majority opposed to the ethanol plant. I was rather disappointed to read an “analysis” of this in a local paper that reached an immensely disappointing conclusion: “ignore both polls, demand accountability, answers.” There are many valid reasons why two polls can show contradictory results – none of these provide good reason to discount polling entirely, or to ignore any poll. There is no need to demand answers- they are readily available to us all if we just take the time to ask the right questions. Continue reading →

Upcoming public roundtable in Winnipeg: “Canada, Citizenship, and the Politics of Belonging”

November 4, 2012 No Comments

“Canada, Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging”

Tuesday, November 13^th, 7:00pm
Carol Shields Auditorium, Millennium Library
21 Donald Street, Winnipeg

Inspired by the recently published People’s Citizenship Guide, this roundtable will discuss the relationship between citizenship and community, past and present. Panelists include Debra Parkes (Law, Univ of Manitoba), Ian Hudson (Economics, UofM), Nora Sobel (MA Education candidate, UofM), Ali Saeed (Human Rights and Refugee Advocate), and Naw Kay Seng (Refugee and Community Activist).

For more information contact Esyltt.Jones@ad.umanitoba.ca

Sponsored by the People’s Citizenship Guide Project with financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Call for contributions

November 3, 2012 No Comments

Shopping for Change: Consumer Activism in North American History

Editors: Louis Hyman (Cornell University) and Joseph Tohill (York University)

We invite proposals from academics and activists for a collection of essays, Shopping for Change: Consumer Activism in North American History, that will bring together different historical and contemporary perspectives on consumer activism in the United States and Canada between the turn of the twentieth century and the present.

In the aftermath of the Occupy movement—a grassroots global movement that originated in North America and that sought to alleviate the social and economic inequalities of present-day global corporate capitalism—we are once again looking for historical perspectives on sustaining successful social movement struggles. If Occupy was able to become so important so quickly, why did it seem to fade away almost as quickly? Like many other social justice movements, Occupy confronted the contradiction between building a broad movement that maximizes participation and maintaining the ideological focus necessary for sustaining activism over the long haul. This balancing act is nothing new for social movements, particularly those grounded in consumer politics.
Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Eight with Aaron Boyes: Anti-Americanism in Canada

November 2, 2012 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Has there been a week in recent memory that has been this scary? Start off with an earthquake in the Pacific, then the ‘Frankenstorm’, and top it off with Halloween. Given the fear associated with these events we wanted to do a podcast that really addressed some of this country’s greatest fears. But then it dawned on me – is there anything scarier to Canadians that the United States? Since the American Revolution, people in the northern colonies have been leery about the United States and the possibility of an American takeover. Certainly the invasions in 1775 and 1812 didn’t help that perception, nor did the Oregon or Alaska boundary disputes, the Fenian Raids, or the Civil War. Throw in unpopular 20th American policies and personalities like Herbert Hoover, the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon and this country has long history of anti-Americanism.

In this episode of the podcast, I chat with Aaron Boyes about anti-Americanism in Canada. We talk about anti-Americanism as a founding principle of the country, the use of anti-Americanism in Canadian politics, and try to identify some the American most disliked by Canadians. Given that November 1 is perhaps my favourite day of the year (cheap candy!) it’s fitting that we’re talking about one of my favourite historical issues. So sit back, relax, and enjoy your sugar high while you listen to the latest episode of the History Slam.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

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