Active History

“No Historical Significance Found”: Clashing with ChatGPT

September 5, 2023 No Comments

In this series, Active History editors are asking ChatGPT about their own areas of expertise and commenting on the process and answers.

Sara Wilmshurst

A black-and-white photograph of seven men and two women sitting around a conference table that is covered with papers and magazines. At the head of the table sits an older white man with a moustache.

Health League of Canada Meeting ca. 1947-1948. Library and Archives Canada, MG28 I 223, Box number: 1B DAP-10A-1. Copyright: Expired.

Unlike most of Active History’s editorial team, I’m currently neither a student nor an educator. I haven’t had to resist the temptation of assigning my work to artificial intelligence or had to bust students for succumbing to that temptation. I hadn’t interacted with ChatGPT at all.

So, when some of the Active History editors decided to ask ChatGPT questions about our areas of expertise, I steeled myself for an immediate spiral of doubt when the program spat out a competent response. However, my experience was unexpected. Continue reading →

ActiveHistory.ca repost — Aboriginal History in Ontario’s Cottage Country

August 28, 2023 No Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is slowing down our publication schedule this summer, but we’ll be back with more new posts in September. In the meantime, we’re featuring posts from our archive. Thanks as always to our writers and readers!

The following post was originally featured on April 3, 2012. This summer, learn whose land you vacation on.

Editor’s note: Several outdated links throughout the article have been updated for this repost.

Credit: Frank W. Micklethwaite / Library and Archives Canada / PA-132099. Restrictions on use: Nil. Copyright: Expired

Thomas Peace

Frequently, when I am ‘up north’ and discussing my research on northeastern Aboriginal peoples during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, I am asked one of two questions: Why were there no Aboriginal people living here? Or, what happened to the Aboriginal people who were here?

The questions are good ones, and reflect the absence of Aboriginal people from general discussion of Muskoka’s (and much of cottage country’s) past. Continue reading →

What’s the Point in Talking About it: Community Responses to Enslavement in Shelburne, NS

August 23, 2023 No Comments

By Erin Isaac

The thoughts and sentiments shared in this essay are my own and do not represent the Nova Scotia Museum or Shelburne Historical Society.

The Ross-Thomson House & Store Museum, in Shelburne, NS, has always been known as a site of enslavement in this community. Most people around here reference this by speaking about a pair of leg shackles that were once in the basement—“do you know, there were shackles in the basement?” Like many 18^th-century Maritime communities, Shelburne’s early economy was inextricably tied to the institution of slavery—through the goods they imported, the buyers for goods they produced, and the actual labour of enslaved Nova Scotians. But even as many of our communities have houses that are remembered as enslaved spaces, like Ross-Thomson House, it is my impression that this is where (for many of us) our curiosity ends. There is a simultaneous impulse to remember shackles in the cellar and to distance ourselves from their implications.

In Shelburne, people lower their voices when they speak to me about slavery. Continue reading →

ActiveHistory.ca repost — Historia Nostra: Parks and Profit at Kejimkujik National Park

August 21, 2023 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on April 9, 2021. As Canadians hike and camp their way through the summer, Erin Isaac and Elisabeth Edwards’ post about Indigenous land acquired for national parks is food for thought.

Erin Isaac and Elisabeth Edwards

Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic Site is situated in Mi’km’aki, the traditional lands of the Mi’kmaq. Visitors to the park can learn about the region’s Mi’kmaw past by viewing the site’s many petroglyphs and burial grounds that attest to thousands of years of Mi’kmaw presence or by participating in programs led by Mi’kmaw crafts people such as Todd Labrador, who builds birch bark canoes in the park.

Yet, the history Parks Canada presents at the site is incomplete and obscures a darker truth about Kejimkujik’s past—the history of exploitation and dispossession that made the Park’s creation possible. Continue reading →

ActiveHistory.ca repost — Decolonizing Cottage Country

August 14, 2023 1 Comment

The following post was originally featured on February 22, 2018. Since then, Drew Hayden Taylor has released Cottagers and Indians in print and directed a documentary of the same title.

Peter A. Stevens

Photograph of a calm lake with a brown wooden dock extending away from the viewer. There are red and green leaves on a tree branch in the foreground.

Bbadgett/Wikimedia Commons

In Canadian popular culture, few symbols are as iconic as the family cottage. The summer home appears regularly in Canadian novels and films, and it has long been used by governments and private corporations to signify what the good life looks like in this country. Cottaging thus represents escape from the cares of the world, and immersion in a natural landscape that is dedicated to pleasure, relaxation, and tranquility.[1] Continue reading →

ActiveHistory.ca repost — Simcoe Day and the Politics of Reclaiming and Renaming

August 7, 2023 1 Comment

The following post was originally featured on July 18, 2017 As Canadians mark Simcoe Day and the August long weekend, Elliot Worsfold’s post on the complicated politics of reclaiming and renaming remains as relevant as ever.

Debates over “renaming” Canadian buildings, universities, and other institutions have generated significant attention in the media over the past several weeks. On National Indigenous Peoples Day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that the Langevin Block on Parliament Hill would be renamed the more perfunctory Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council. Trudeau cited Sir Hector-Louis Langevin’s involvement in the residential schools system as the primary reason for the building’s name change. In early July, the Ryerson Students Union and Indigenous Students Association similarly gained attention for their proposal to change the name of Ryerson University. They also cited Egerton Ryerson’s complicity in the residential schools system as the motivation to change the university’s name. That same week, a hostile confrontation between the right-wing “Proud Boys” and Indigenous activists at Halifax’s Edward Cornwallis statue on Canada Day sparked renewed calls for the statue’s removal. All these events prompted pundits to try to explain just why Canadians seem to be obsessed with the “politics of renaming.”

The critics of renaming generally cite the same list of arguments. Renaming institutions or removing statues effectively erases history. The men (for it is almost always men) commemorated in these places must be understood in the context of their time. By removing their names, you are robbing future generations of learning about their past. Why, they may even be doomed to repeat it.

These criticisms have been addressed elsewhere. My contention is that referring to this process as “renaming” or “removal” indirectly supports the aforementioned criticisms. “Renaming” implies a loss. “Removal” implies that something is being destroyed to make room for something else. Describing this process as renaming, I think, is misleading. Continue reading →

Historia Nostra at the Fortress of Louisbourg

August 2, 2023 No Comments

By Erin Isaac

I first reached out to Dr. Amy Scott (University of New Brunswick) about visiting her in Cape Breton in February 2020, after attending a public lecture she gave at New Brunswick’s Provincial Archives. In her talk, Dr. Scott told us about the things her team was learning about 18^th-century disease, injury, and lifeways from the grave goods and skeletons they excavated at Louisbourg National Historic Site. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard about their findings, but it was the first time I saw pictures and maps of the excavation site.

Nicole Breedon and Marisa Forbes dig a test pit at Louisbourg National Historic Site.

My first encounter with skeletal remains from Louisbourg was at the Bioarch Teaching and Research (BART) Lab at UNB during their Open Lab Day in 2019. Under the watchful eye of graduate students, myself and other visitors were allowed to glove up and feel bones for places where cancer had metastasized or breaks hadn’t healed quite right. Continue reading →

ActiveHistory.ca repost – The Northwest Territories and the Manhattan Project

July 31, 2023 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on December 22, 2022. As the film Oppenheimer hits the big screen and renews discussion of Canada’s role in the Manhattan Project and the dawn of the nuclear, it is worth revisiting Sean Graham’s interview with Richard Van Camp, in which he discusses the legacy of uranium mining in the Northwest Territories.

<a href="https://rss.com/podcasts/whatsoldisnews/735965/">A Samurai Suit in Fort Smith & A Blanket of Butterflies | RSS.com</a>

Samurai armour at the museum in Fort Smith, NWT.

Fort Smith, NWT is probably not where you would expect to find a suit of samurai armour and sword, but at the local museum that’s exactly what you can find. When he first saw it, author Richard Van Camp started to think about all the possibilities of how it got there. The result is A Blanket of Butterflies, which is the first volume of The Spirit of Denendeh. This beautiful new edition, illustrated in full colour for the first time, tells the story of a young Dene boy and his grandmother helping a Japanese man recover his grandfather’s armour. Through the story, Van Camp addresses questions of colonialism, knowledge transmission, and the complicated legacy of Second World War-era mining in the North.

Historical Headline of the Week

“Echoes of the Atomic Age: Cancer Kills Fourteen Aboriginal Uranium Workers,” Calgary Herald, March 14, 1998,

To learn more about Richard’s work, visit him at RichardVanCamp.com

You can watch A Village of Widows here.

Continue reading →

Fear of a Black Nation – What’s Old is News

July 13, 2023 No Comments

By Sean Graham
<a href="https://rss.com/podcasts/whatsoldisnews/1040383/">Fear of a Black Nation | RSS.com</a>A landmark work when it was first released a decade ago, David Austin’s Fear of a Black Nation is now out in its second edition. In this episode, David stopped by to talk about the second edition, what has been added, and how the societal context has changed. He also discusses what made Montreal such a hotbed of international activism and politics in the 1960s, the legacy of slavery, and how economics influences these conversations.

Historical Headline of the Week

Celina Aalders, “Legendary African Nova Scotian Boxer George Dixon Receives Historical Designation,” CBC.ca, June 12, 2023.

Continue reading →

Restrictive Immigration – What’s Old is News

July 7, 2023 No Comments

By Sean Graham

<a href="https://rss.com/podcasts/whatsoldisnews/1027570/">Restrictive Immigration | RSS.com</a>Since Confederation, Canada has implemented a number of restrictive immigration policies, including on Jewish immigrants during the 1930s. Norm Ravvin, author of Who Gets In: An Immigration Story, joins the show to talk about one story of a Jewish immigrant coming to Canada and challenging those restrictions, We talk about researching what was a hidden story, how prospective immigrants fought against the rules, and the power of community.

Historical Headline of the Week

Jadine Ngan, “A Look Inside the New Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver’s Chinatown,” Maclean’s, July 6, 2023.

Continue reading →

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