Reviving the Canadian Hero

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Portrait, Samuel Benfield Steele, 1891. Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta (2008.1.2.1.6.1.8).

By Lauren Wheeler

Sam Steele was the Forrest Gump of Canadian History.  He was involved in some way with the Fenian Raids, the Long March West, the 1870 Riel Uprising, the establishment of the North-West Mounted Police, the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the 1885 Northwest Uprising, the Klondike Gold Rush, the Second Boer War, the First World War, the Spanish Flu epidemic, and the Winnipeg General Strike. None of the first five Prime Ministers could make claims to have experienced that many of the key events of the country’s first fifty years!  Today Steele is a relatively unknown figure of Canadian history.  Aficionados of RCMP history know of him and there are corners of the country where his life is celebrated – like Fort Steele, BC, Fort Macleod, Alberta, and Dawson City, Yukon.  If you walked up to the average person on the street and asked “Who was Sam Steele?” they would probably give you a blank look and respond “Sam who?” Continue reading →

What Counts as History in Toronto? Digitally Exploring Toronto’s Heritage Plaques

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The locations of Toronto’s heritage plaques

By Ian Milligan

When professional historians think of heritage plaques, some have knee-jerk reactions (“dead white man history!”) while others may see it as an engaging way to bring people into contact with the past in places they might otherwise not. On a leisurely stroll through the city, I enjoy checking out the few plaques that I pass: learning about the history of a building, somebody famous who lived there, or even just being reminded of a historical event such as a rebellion, skirmish, or maybe even a tavern. I thus had a few general thoughts about them: mostly 19th century, perhaps, concentrated in older parts of cities, and maybe yes, disproportionately about political, economic, and military leaders. But since the plural of anecdote isn’t data, I figured I’d try to find out some systematic things about plaques in the City of Toronto.

Luckily, they’re all digitized online. From these text files, we can learn a few things: where they’re located (and make an interactive map!), what they’re about (through topics), and what time periods they cover. From this, a few conclusions can come: that yes, there’s some truth to the fact that they do deal with topics of political, economic, and well, elite importance. They do skew towards the 19th century, although a surprising number of plaques discuss the late 20th century. Why? Read on! Continue reading →

Speak, Recipe: Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories

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By Ian Mosby

As a historian of food and nutrition, I’ve amassed a substantial collection of cookbooks, old and new, over the years. But one cookbook I often find myself coming back to amidst the hundred plus dusty volumes cluttering my office is a 1930 edition of the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Meals Tested, Tasted and Approved: Favorite Recipes and Menus From Our Kitchens to Yours. I purchased it for $12 from a Toronto vintage shop and consider it one of my favourite purchases to date.

On the surface, at least, the cookbook seems unremarkable. Good Housekeeping cookbooks from the period are common enough, and like many others in my collection it’s well worn and smells vaguely of mildew and decades-old flour. Its spine is broken and held together with clear tape. Its pages are stuffed with dozens of handwritten recipes on cards as well as a number of others cut from newspapers and magazines. These include a fading recipe for Dandelion Wine written in pencil on a piece of scrap paper and a Campbell’s Soup can label with a recipe for Oven Glazed Chicken. In other words, it’s a cookbook like hundreds of others that could be found in kitchen cupboards in households across the country, and my personal collection includes its own fair share of similarly well-worn, well-loved volumes.

But what makes this particular cookbook remarkable – to me at least – is the inscription in the front cover left by its original owner, Jean Stephenson.[1] Continue reading →

Language Use on the Historical Playground

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On Monday afternoon Christopher Dummitt responded to my Active History post “Colonialism and the Words We Choose” on his blog Everyday History. In his critique Dummitt argues that Monday’s post is representative of how disconnected some academic historians are from everyday society. He suggests that the argument I make is fuelled by a drive to avoid talking about inequality in the past. Continue reading →

Colonialism and the Words We Choose: Lessons from Museum and Academy

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About two months ago I was in a local museum with my family learning about the eighteenth century history of the community in which the museum was located. In many ways we had a typical country museum experience. We were met by costumed interpreters and told the stories of the building and the people who lived there. Then we learned about some of the broader historical context. For our guide, the story this museum told hinged on the European settlement of the “savage wilderness inhabited only by Indians.”

As a historian who studies Native communities during the eighteenth century in the places best-known today as Quebec, New England and Maritime Canada, I felt that I had been transported to a different era. Though wilderness remains pervasive, isn’t the noun savage an artifact from an earlier century? And don’t Native people have a history that predates their encounter with Europeans? Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 3 with Guest Craig Heron, Author of Booze

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By Sean Graham

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with the author of Booze: A Distilled History, Craig Heron from York University. We chat about the place of alcohol in Canadian history, changing patterns of consumption, and what we think about our politicians’ drinking. Special thanks to the history department at the University of Toronto for allowing us to record in the best seminar room I have ever seen!

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.

Gin and Tonic: A Short History of a Stiff Drink

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Gin and Tonic. Image from Wikipedia.

By Jay Young

The Gin and Tonic – what better a drink during the dog days of summer?  Put some ice in a glass, pour one part gin, add another part tonic water, finish with a slice of lime, and you have a refreshing drink to counter the heat.  But it is also steeped in the history of medicine, global commodity frontiers, and the expansion of the British Empire.  Continue reading →

Reunions as an Oral History Source

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Constructing a tipi at the Home Again 2012 reunion. Photo by the author.

By Ryan O’Connor

One of the defining countercultural phenomena of the 1970s was the back-to-the-land movement. During this period, tens – maybe hundreds – of thousands of North Americans abandoned their urban dwellings for a rural lifestyle. This movement, which eschewed the postwar consumer culture, brought thousands of people “from away” to Prince Edward Island. Some stayed a few weeks; others a few seasons. Some never left. Continue reading →

Capitalist Theology on the CBC

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By Dr. Joseph Tohill

There’s nothing like a bit of neoconservative propaganda gussied up as a hip, edgy CBC radio program to get your blood boiling on a hot summer’s day. The Invisible Hand, a mid-week staple of Radio One’s summer schedule hosted by Vancouver broadcaster Matthew Lazin-Ryder, bills itself as “a defiantly non-dismal take on the ‘dismal science’ of economics.” Revelling in its role as cheeky iconoclast, the show seeks to upend the conventional wisdom about greedy price gougers, rapacious capitalists, and exploitative sweatshop owners.

Behind The Invisible Hand’s irreverence, however, runs a deep-seated conservative ideology that the show seeks to pass off as hipster wisdom or indisputable truth. From beginning to end, each episode of the show is a resounding affirmation of the basic tenet of capitalist theology, that nothing promotes the public good more than the grasping, amoral pursuit of individual self-interest. Greed is good; government is bad; and any well-meaning attempt to interfere with the invisible hand inevitably causes more harm than good. Continue reading →

Combating the ‘Haters:’ Social Media and Public Memory in Contemporary Germany

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Völkerschlachtdenkmal Leipzig, Anti-Nazi-Plakat, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

By Erica Fagen

Share. Like. Tweet. Favourite.

Social media has a large presence in today’s culture, but how can it be useful for historians? For the past three months, I have worked on “Hate 2.0: Combatting Right-Wing Extremism in the Age of Social Technology,” which looks at how individuals and organizations are using social media to counter hate. I am exploring this question of social media for historians in an article I am co-writing with Jennifer Evans (article excerpts and reflections on the project can be seen here). Beyond the questions of what social media can do for historians, the research done for this project makes me think of the role of social media in public memory and historical consciousness. This is apparent in both activists who get rid of Nazi symbolism, and those who use Nazi imagery to oppose neo-Nazis. Continue reading →