This week I’m joined by Ian Kennedy, author of Ice in their Veins: Women’s Relentless Pursuit of the Puck. We talk about the challenge of finding sources for early women’s hockey, the sport’s development in the first half of the 20th century, and some of the challenges faced by women’s hockey pioneers. We then discuss Ian’s oral history interviews, the introduction of women’s hockey in the Olympics, and how the PWHL changed the book’s ending.
The opening session of ActiveHistory’s late-August workshop on knowledge mobilization and public history confronted the changing digital environment and its consequences. Among the digital topics discussed, artificial intelligence (AI) stood out not just for the quantity of discussion it produced, but for the nature of that conversation. Historians are thinking about AI, that much is clear, but they are not necessarily of one mind.
A range of historian opinion about AI is displayed also in the Active History archives. Since the release of ChatGPT made AI technology readily available and easily accessible in November 2022, Active History has published a number of pieces on the topic, with various opinions and perspectives on display. In short essays published last year, Sara Wilmshurst reminded us that “there are questions machines can’t answer” and Carly Ciufo was impressed, but not too impressed, by the utility of ChatGPT for prompting research.
Among the Active History essays on AI, certainly the most bullish is one from Mark Humphries, who also writes a regular blog on AI and history, and Eric Story. They argued in March 2023 that Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, are useful tools for writing, editing, teaching, and research (in other words, for the vast majority of the work that historians do). Like it or not, Humphries and Story insist, LLMs are here to stay. They conclude their article by agreeing with the Bing (Microsoft) chatbot, Sydney, that “historians and AI can work effectively together.”
Since the 1970s the proliferation of social histories has challenged once-dominant historical paradigms focused narrowly on elites and ignoring or diminishing women, colonized peoples, workers, and farmers as unworthy of consideration as agents of social change.[1] A sole dependence on archival sources for historical research had favoured the literate few and dismissed pre-literate societies as “prehistoric.” Reliance on such limited subjects and sources for history is now broadly challenged by historians. But elitist paradigms continue to predominate in global histories, largely untouched by the work of social historians. My new book, Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, attempts to retell the history of our species from the vantage point of the masses rather than the classes. Humans, privileging the works of social historians, challenges many long-accepted conclusions about various historical eras that traditional global histories have kept alive.
Newspapers from publishers ready for mailing. Credit: Post Office / Library and Archives Canada / PA-059949.
Laura Madokoro
For the past two years, I have had the great pleasure of teaching a course at Carleton University called History in the News (HIST3909A). The idea for the course came from the notion that the contemporary news sphere could benefit from more historical context (a premise behind many of my posts here at Active History). As such, the course is almost entirely dedicated to the production of research portfolios for working journalists who invite the students in the class to dig deep on issues that they believe would benefit from additional historical context. This year, the students are focused on three themes: Migration to Canada, Housing History, and Black Canadian History. They are producing rich and varied topics relating to the adaptive reuse of historic buildings, urban planning, the history of community churches, and little known sporting leagues among many others. This part of the class has been entirely gratifying.
The other part of the class, which proved a challenge last year and again this fall, is about pivoting to respond to contemporary events. We were in the middle of the semester last year when the Hamas-led attacks against Israel occurred on 7 October 2023. I knew then, and I continue to believe now, that as a historian trained broadly in histories of migration and refuge that I could guide the students in the conversations that followed to some extent. I did not, however, have the depth of expertise required to navigate the long history that preceded those attacks, especially in the heightened polarized environment that followed. The best I could do given my own knowledge was to provide students with some of the broader context by discussing the history of international human rights protections, including the Geneva Conventions, and to create as much space for dialogue as possible.
Content warning: this post contains information regarding Indian Residential Schools.
A National Residential School Crisis Line is available to provide support for former Residential School students. Emotional and crisis referral services are available by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.
Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools Kimberly Murray delivers remarks on an Indigenous-led reparations framework during a national gathering in Gatineau, Que., on Tuesday. (Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press)
Included in the report is an emphasis on the need to confront the rise of residential school denialism, or the deliberate downplaying, distorting, and misrepresentation of residential school history to shake public confidence in truth and reconciliation and protect the status quo. In fact, there is an entire chapter (Volume 2, Chapter 15: “Fighting Denialism: Reframing Collective Memory, National History, and Commemoration”) dedicated to helping people understand the hurt and harm of residential school denialism. It also contains clear recommendations on how to fight it to support truth and reconciliation.
Nov 8, 1962; Nashville, TN, USA; Picketers, calling for an end to segregation in places of public accommodation, demonstrated during Nashville City Council meeting Nov. 8, 1962. One of the leaders of the group is John Lewis, second from left in the picket line. Mandatory Credit: Harold Lowe Jr./The Tennessean-USA TODAY NETWORK
Against the backdrop of the American election, and the vow to make America great yet again, I am reminded that there is a competing, and more expansive, definition of great with a long and inspiring history.
But first, Donald Trump. He has co-opted the word, made it his own, and compelled it to do his bidding. Make America Great Again isn’t just a political slogan, it’s also a movement in search of some stolen golden age, before porous borders, higher taxes, liberal judges, out-of-touch elites, and free trade agreements weakened America from within.
Drawing on a long tradition of racism, nativism, and fear of the Other in American history, MAGA offers a narrow, parsimonious, and mean-spirited definition of great.
It was this definition that was on full display, proudly and for everyone to see, at Mr. Trump’s profanity-laced, hate-filled Madison Square Garden rally in October: a comedian’s racist jokes about Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and African Americans; Tucker Carlson’s abhorrent comment about Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage; and Mr. Trump’s appalling references to migrants. “The United States,” he said, “is now an occupied country.”
Fighting his last election, an unleashed Donald Trump pushed his rhetoric to new extremes, even for him, and it clearly worked.
Kamala Harris pushed back – with dignity and assuredness – when she appealed to Americans’ better angels. This is not who we are, she would say. And she was right, but only to a point.
After all, Mr. Trump’s nativism and racism are part-and-parcel of the American experiment. It was present at America’s founding when the promise of equality existed alongside the practice of slavery; it took root after the Civil War when emancipation, the end of slavery, and Reconstruction were met with sharecropping, Jim Crow, the KKK, and the unspeakable horrors of lynching; and it was present across much of the 19th-century and into the second half of the 20th-century as America at once welcomed new immigrants and contested – often violently, sometimes legally – those immigrants that it deemed unassimilable and therefore undesirable.
The contradiction at the centre of the American experiment is the contradiction between the promise of freedom and equality and the reality of racism and nativism
In the 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement set out to resolve this contradiction. In the streets and at lunch counters across the South, it imagined a better and brighter future. In February 1960, for example, a group of young men and women at Fisk University and the American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee – two historically Black institutions of higher learning – decided that enough was enough. Led by John Lewis, then a twenty-year-old student at the Baptist College, they began a years-long series of eat-ins, watch-ins, kneel-ins, and sleep-ins at Nashville’s segregated lunch counters, movie theatres, churches, and hotels, often at tremendous risk to themselves.
In a November 1962 demonstration, two young people carried signs that read, “Make Nashville Great Desegregate.” Like Donald Trump’s red baseball hats, their simple, handwritten signs drew on a long tradition in American history, or what Kamala Harris, in her concession speech, called America’s “extraordinary promise.” And it’s this tradition that offers a wide, generous, and gracious definition of great.
The struggle to desegregate Nashville, to make it great, launched the remarkable career of John Lewis who became a national civil rights leader, voting rights advocate, and a long-time member of the House of Representatives.
When Mr. Lewis died in 2020, Barack Obama reminded America of his friend’s courage and example, and described him as “a founding father of a fuller, fairer, and better America.” Mr. Lewis, he said, “loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise.” For his part, Donald Trump made it about himself, noting that Mr. Lewis had not attended his inauguration.
In a posthumous essay published in The New York Times, John Lewis issued a challenge to all Americans. It was the same challenge that the Civil Rights Movement had issued. “When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression, and war. So, I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”
In the coming years, MAGA’s definition of great will be proclaimed, over and over again. But in those handmade signs carried by Nashville civil rights activists in 1962 lies a competing definition that is at once reassuring and empowering.
Donald Wright is president of the Canadian Historical Association | Société historique du Canada.
This week, I talk with Holly Miowak Guise, author of Alaska Native Resilience: Voices from World War II. We talk about the lived memory of the Second World War in Alaska, the American occupation of Alaska, and the diversity of the local population. We also discuss local community responses to the war, forced relocation, and how colonial structures shaped the post-war experiences of those who fought.
Photos are from Joey Hollingsworth’s personal collection. Photo with drum by Roy Kumano. Photo with sunglasses by Zahra McDoom.
Joey Hollingsworth (b. 1936) is a tap dancer, creative force and one of the first Black performers on CBC television.
Joey danced in the era of medicine shows, big bands and civil rights. He was backed by the Samuel Hershenhorn Orchestra on CBC (1954), directed by Norman Jewison – CBC Special Christmas with the Stars (1956); and acted with black opera singer Portia White – Playdate: In the Good Time (1961), appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show (1962), and was the dancing salesman on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He collaborated with major talents like jazz guitarist Lenny Breau and Metis singer Ray St. Germain. But like many Black Canadians the details his life and contributions were largely neglected in dominant sites of culture and collective memory.
After recording the first of many oral histories with Joey Hollingworth in February 2022 – now a person who is blind, in his late 80s, in a nursing home, sitting across the table tapping rhythm patterns with his fingers adorned with large gold rings, I felt an urgency to preserve his story. He spoke with humor and details as smooth and precise as his tap.
Joey grew up in London, Ontario in the 1930s in a three-room apartment:
We shared the bathroom with the people downstairs. They had eight people living downstairs… they were Irish … there was just one toilet … we were poor. But I grew up [not realizing] … because my dad had a car, and he had white walls … he kept it spotless … I always wanted a car without a running board [laughs] … my mother wanted a tap dancer – and lessons, at that time, were 25 cents … I started when I was three and a half. When I was ten, Bill Bojangles Robinson came … he called me from onstage to come backstage … He didn’t dance with taps on his shoes, he danced with wooden soul shoes. It was wood on wood.
Joey lived in Black London which was often distinct from the White London. He acquired Black style tap on his own, but he learned school tap at Holloway School of Dance (London). He was the only Black child amongst ninety white girls.
I was the star of the shows … they wouldn’t allow me to tap dance with … any white girls. And so, I was always by myself … My father made me an Uncle Sam outfit … And, I had a line of girls behind me. They had brown outfits on with little guns … I was always out in front … they weren’t going to allow black and white to dance together … my mother got Vi Douglas [her Black friend] to get her daughter … and she became my partner.
Isolated from other dancers, Joey learned Afro-diasporic rhythm and soul from his grandpa Huskey Henderson, railway porters, jazz drummers, and Black tappers. Born in 1866, his grandfather lived in Ingersoll, Ontario, and sang him songs with rhythm and soul:
My grandpa used to sing, [Joey sings] ‘Well, I don’t mind playin’ anytime y’all can make me drunk. But Mr. Pinetop is sober now. Now I’ve been playin’ the Blues around here the whole night long, and you ain’t brought me the first drink somehow. Now if the house catch on fire, and there ain’t no one around, mammie, throw out the jug and let the shack burn on down.’
Joey embodies the Black Atlantic. Tap is a form of intangible heritage with rhythms passed through the dispersal of enslaved Africans. In conversation, Joey said, the “dancer always puts down rhythms … Gregory Hines [master tap dancer] puts down the rhythms … Teddy Hale [master tap dancer] made innovations that no drummer can do.”Tap transmits Afro-diasporic knowledge.
Through Joey’s perspective we glimpse London’s Beth Emmauel Church, a Black Church built in the 1860s, now vacant. He discusses Black Opera singer Garnet Brooks grandmother playing a ‘rockin’ gospel piano:
It’s got to be rooted in black history and black feelings. Gospel is, you know? And blues and rhythm is and that’s where we get our roots from … we get our roots from the rhythms of tap dancing – I mean from the drumming of Africa … we get the rhythms, they’re all intertwined.
Joey’s memories speak of a Black presence in London that has fallen into an archival silence at the verge of erasure. At the London Arena, Joey saw the Nat King Cole Show with legendary tappers like Peg Leg Bates, who lost his leg in cotton gin, and Teddy Hale.
Now stories of the London Arena focus on sport but Joey tells a different story. Similarly, his parents took him into a local swanky night club, the Brass Rail.
My mum and dad used to work at the Brass Rail, they were washroom attendants … I used to sit a lot with the waitresses, and they used to give me grenadine drinks … I saw Roy Ranker and the Three Peppers … some of the drummers tap danced at one point in their life, and they would show me little steps, yeah.
Joey was immersed in a Black experience. He speaks of performers not typically recalled in the cultural memory of Londoners like dual trumpeter Frank Motely with black transgender performer Jackie Shane and Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Joey would become an international tap dancer, sent to places like Japan and Peru to by government to represent Canada.
Anita Cortez, El Cordobés, Joey Hollingworth, Pacific International Trade Fair, Lima, Peru 1967 (courtesy of Joey Hollingsworth)
From a line of freedom seekers, he danced in civil rights performances sharing the bill with the likes of Oscar Peterson, Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory. I asked Joey why he did the civil rights shows. He recalls a Black woman he met in London from Selma Alabama:
Mary Lamar was her name … She said, ‘I’ll die before I give up my voting rights’ … she was the same age as my mother, I couldn’t imagine my mother getting beat up because she wanted to vote … I know my father he’d be dead because he’d fight so hard … They’d kill him. And then it really struck home, the awful thing of slavery …
Joey shares his words with us, so we don’t forget. He’s given us sound and feeling of multi-generations of Black people in Canada that unsettles established memory. He is beginning to get the recognition that his legacy deserves.
Zahra McDoom is a public historian and the TD Curator of Collections at Museum London.
Joey Hollingsworth as the Hot Mikado, David Bell Productions, San Jose, 1998 (Courtesy of Joey Hollingsworth)
Draft of The Spokesman, Charles McElman fonds (MC2988), Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.
On 21 October 2024, New Brunswickers elected Susan Holt as their premier, the first female to hold that office in the province’s 240-year history. Politics has long been gendered as a male game, and for an equally long time men have excluded both from voting and running for office.[1] Given that Holt’s win was accompanied by the election of a record number of women MLAs, it is tempting to see this as a sharp break with the past and the beginning of a new era.[2] But to do so would be to lose sight of the larger local and global context, in which anxieties about gender and sexuality in the public sphere were (and remain) heightened,[3] and it would also downplay how deeply-seated and slow to change such concerns have been.
The Cold War era is a fruitful place to examine these deep roots and aversion to change, for it was another period in which concerns about gender and sexuality were at the fore. Indeed, historians have documented how concerns about returning to traditional, patriarchal gender norms in the aftermath of the Second World War only intensified with the onset of the Cold War. As Patrizia Gentile notes, the period’s “cultural and national insecurity … led to a rallying cry for the strengthening of the family and heterosexuality. Family stability was considered the only ‘antidote’ to ‘moral fallout.’”[4]
The following case study of how Liberal politicking in the early 1960s was deeply gendered demonstrates how rural New Brunswick was not immune from anxieties over nuclear weapons and nuclear families. It does so by examining the content of The Spokesman, “N.B.’s Biggest Little Newspaper,” published in the small town of St. Stephen. Unusually, in an era of decreasing overt partisanship in the press, the short-lived Spokesman was explicitly designed to be a “weekly tabloid newspaper of Liberal news.”
The paper was the brainchild of publisher George E. Copping. On 15 August 1961, he pitched the idea to Charles McElman, who was simultaneously working as the Executive Director of the New Brunswick Liberal Association and as Executive Assistant to the newly elected Liberal Premier, Louis J. Robichaud. In a follow-up letter, Copping explained that neither the government nor the Liberal Party would be responsible for it, “yet at the same time we are inviting the Liberal Organization to make the rules.”[5]
The Spokesman was both a partisan and a gendered project right down to its name. Styled as a male mouthpiece for the Liberal Party, and aimed primarily at the heterosexual male reader, it presented the worlds of work (outside the home) and politics as male. The first issue set the basic format that subsequent issues would follow. The cover featured a group of rugged young men, the first class of the government-sponsored training in shipbuilding in Saint John, which emphasized that the government was getting men back to the workplace. (This image had won out over the original cover image, shown above, which was to feature Premier Louis J. Robichaud posing with a beauty pageant winner.)
Inside each issue were fairly crude attempts to attract the male gaze. These included a photo of a scantily clad woman with a risqué caption, sexist cartoons, and a heavy emphasis on topics considered manly, like sports such as boxing or hunting. For maximum effect, these were sometimes combined, such as a picture of a “showgirl” hoisting a rifle and a bird to mark the beginning of hunting (“bird-busting”) season. Yet the paper also had small attempts to reach female readers by including content aimed at the imagined domestic housewife: typically, recipes, a dress pattern, and a note on a significant woman’s achievement. Even the advertisements also reflected the gendered assumptions of the age. For example, the New Brunswick Telephone Company recommended a gift-boxed extension telephone as a perfect gift “for Mother in her kitchen” and “for Dad in his den.”
The centre spread of the fourth issue typified these divisions and anxieties. “All We Can Do Is Point It,” the headline on the left read, above a collage of photos of Bomarc-B missiles, which captions noted were designed to carry conventional or nuclear warheads. Across the page, however, was the “Especially for Women” section, filled with “Recipes, Patterns, and Chit-Chat.” This was followed by a two-page spread of spring fashions “from some of the world’s leading Fashion Houses” in New York.
Ironically, these fairly weak attempts to reach female readers inadvertently served to undercut some of the paper’s foundational assumptions, namely by highlighting the place of women in formal party politics. So, for example, the paper ran a letter from Senator Muriel Fergusson (Liberal) approving of the venture. Fergusson had been New Brunswick’s first female judge of a probate court, Fredericton’s first female city councillor, first female deputy mayor, and was the third woman to be appointed to the Senate; she would go on to become the first woman Speaker of the Senate in 1972. Similarly, the paper satirized the (Progressive Conservative) government’s immigration policy with a cartoon featuring Minister of Immigration Ellen Fairclough, Canada’s first female Cabinet minister and the first woman to ever be given the duty of Acting Prime Minister.
In reflecting on gender and the Cold War, Gentile remarks that “Men and women together had to play their part in the gender game in order to secure the safety and future of the nation … Gender practices were therefore central to the construction of the Canadian national security state.”[6] While the election of a female premier suggests that in New Brunswicker fewer people are interested in playing the gender game, or that its significance has diminished, unfortunately this is not necessarily the case. Indeed, the anxieties around gender and sexuality that marked the Cold War in New Brunswick have been forced the forefront again by the intentional cultivation of a moral panic around the use of preferred pronouns in public schools.[7] That a candidate who has “been accused of harbouring extreme views on issues such as gay rights” lost by less than three percent of the vote suggests that the politicization of gender and sexuality is not yet past.[8]
Daniel R. Meister is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University and an Archivist (Private Sector Records) at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick. The views expressed in this post are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
[4] Patrizia Gentile, “‘Government Girls’ and ‘Ottawa Men’: Cold War Management of Gender Relations in the Civil Service,” in Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies, ed. Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman (Toronto: BTL Books, 2000), 131-41, at 131.
[5] These quotes and all otherwise uncited material in this article are drawn from the unprocessed Senator Charles McElman fonds (MC2988), Provincial Archives of New Brunswick.
[6] Gentile, “Cold War Management of Gender Relations,” 139.
Last week, I wrote about my “collections” of dogs and sheep, and how humans bred farm dogs as “enlightened wolves.” I’d like to share a bit more about the history of the human-wolf relationship.
Hermanubis, the canine-headed god combining Hermes of Greek mythology with Egyptian god Anubis, associated with accompanying souls to the afterlife. Popular during era of Roman control of Egypt. Statue housed at Room IV, Gregorian Egyptian Museum, Vatican museums. Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
Early pastoral nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples idealized canine predatory power. Wolf packs, with their strength in numbers and cooperation as a social unit, were able to survive and proliferate across the globe at the apex of the ecological food chain, rivaled only by humans. Wolf folklore was born of this recognition of the similarities between human groups and wolf packs. Ancient societies idolized and occasionally worshipped wolves as deities, powerful spirits, or companions of the gods: ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Romans, Greeks, and Persians had both positive and negative attitudes towards wolves.[1] Lycanthropy, or shape-shifting, was often associated with festivals or wolf-warrior-like initiation ceremonies in Greece, Rome, and among Germanic peoples.[2] The wolf played various roles in many Indigenous North American creation stories.[3] Two wolves, Geri and Freki, and two ravens served as guardian-companions for the Norse God Odin; the evil wolf Fenrir ushered in the destruction of the Norse universe (Ragnarök), and his wolf offspring, Sköll and Hati, regularly chased the sun and moon across the sky.[4] The wolf in Japan, as a type of Shinto nature spirit, “Oguchi no Magami,” the “Large-Mouthed God,” received offerings of gratitude for guarding children and for protecting peasants’ crops, which would otherwise be consumed or trampled by the Japanese deer and boar populations.[5] Nomadic Turkic and Mongol peoples in Central Asia possessed origin mythology in which their actual ancestors were believed to have been wolves, or wolf deities who guided their tribes in times of trouble to new lands where they escaped death and lived on to become powerful empires in later centuries.[6] The wolf is everywhere in human societies’ consciousness. In fact, humans have such a deep connection to wolves that they have never been able to live without the wolf in some form, whether positive or negative, imaginary or real.
