Historia Nostra Bookclub: Why I Don’t Like Guns, Germs, and Steel

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By Erin Isaac

2021 has been a long year. It’s only June, but I’m calling it—2021 has been a year to endure or make the most of rather than one rife with opportunities. At least, that’s been my experience. My YouTube project, Historia Nostra, has pushed through it and, I hope, given viewers a chance to “visit” places they couldn’t physically go during the pandemic. While I’ve got more of those videos in the works, this month we’re taking a step back from travel videos to try something new.

The Historia Nostra Bookclub is my way to take advantage of the daunting amount of reading history that PhD students are required to do during their first years of study. While we’ve been locked down I’ve had the pleasure and pressure of reading for my comprehensive fields exams—many of which I want to talk about here. I’ll share my thoughts about some of the books I’m reading and hope that viewers will be challenged to read along with me or contribute their own reflections in the comment section.

First up to bat is an old foe of mine, Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Over the years, this is a book my non-academic historian friends and family have often referenced in discussions about history or recommended to me for a “fun” read. As a younger scholar I wrote it off as a “popular history” that was, in my biased and frankly conceited opinion, not worth my time. Continue reading →

History Slam 183: American Refugees

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By Sean Graham

On January 1, 2015, Rita Shelton Deverell landed at Miami International Airport from Santiago, Chile for what was scheduled to be a brief layover on her way back home to Toronto. When US border agents scanned her passport, they noticed that it listed her birthplace as Houston, Texas. A Canadian citizen who had lived in Canada for the past half century and a Member of the Order of Canada since 2005, Deverell was quite surprised when border agents detained her to tell her that she was still a U.S. person and that “the United States still loves you.” That incident proved a strong motivation to expediate a book project that had been in the works for the previous two years.

That project is American Refugees: Turning to Canada for Freedom. In the book, Deverell explores the history of Americans moving to Canada at various points over the past two centuries. From the underground railroad to Vietnam War resistors to Americans crashing the Canadian immigration website following the 2016 election, the idea of Canada a safe haven for some Americans has loomed large in the Canadian imagination. In the book, Deverell uses powerful personal stories to contextualize the mythology that has been built around American immigration to Canada. By telling these stories, the book is an important contribution to an oft-discussed yet understudied element of Canadian history and the country’s relationship with its southern neighbour.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Rita Shelton Deverell about the book. We discuss her personal story and its influence on the book, American immigration to Canada in the popular imagination, and what has traditionally drawn American immigrants to Canada. We also chat about racism in Canada and the United States, colonialism’s influence on perceptions of diversity, and the current state of Canadian-American relations.

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The Perils of Digital Humanities for Academics

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Dominique Clément

Why does historical training at universities place so little emphasis on research methods? The rise of digital humanities presents a fundamental challenge to how we train historians. But for anyone pondering a career in academia, it’s a perilous journey where the risks might not be worth the rewards.

We are in the digital age yet historical research remains primarily a modified pencil and paper discipline – laptops instead of paper, cameras instead of pencils. I’m an historian who happens to teach in sociology. Research methods are central to the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in sociology. In contrast, historical training remains the equivalent to throwing your kid into the deep-end of the pool – head off to the archives and figure it out on your own.

The lack of training in digital research methodologies is a profound failing of our discipline. There are few Canadian conference sessions, workshops, publications, or networks where historians can dialogue about their experiments with new technology. In a special edition of the Canadian Historical Review in 2020 on the use of digital tools for historical research, Ian Milligan discusses his survey of historians’ use of digital cameras for archival research: 92 per cent used a digital camera but 90 per cent had no formal training. Over 40 per cent took over 2000 images for their last project. But 70 per cent simply used their own device rather than professional equipment.

Technology is changing, but not our training. Most historians have to teach themselves how to use digital tools. Continue reading →

Accountability for the Roman Catholic Church’s Role in the Residential School System: Urgent Actions Needed Immediately

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By Carling Beninger

Trigger Warning: This article discusses the residential school system and the Roman Catholic Church. The National Residential School Crisis Line is 1-866-925-4419.

In the 1880s, the Canadian federal government created the residential school system in an attempt to assimilate Indigenous children and destroy their Indigenous culture and traditions through cultural genocide. Residential schools were run by Christian churches, with the Roman Catholic Church operating 60% of the institutions. The last residential school closed in 1996.

Indigenous children who attended these institutions were forcibly taken from their families and communities and faced horrible living conditions, trauma, and abuse. Many Indigenous children were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. In 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s role in the residential school system and recognized that “the consequences of the Indian Residential Schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language.” In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), held from 2008-2015, released its final report that included 94 Calls to Action, which included several calls directed towards the churches. To date, only 10 of the TRC Calls to Action have been completed.

The Roman Catholic Church’s response to its role in the residential school system continues to be harmfully insufficient. TRC Call to Action 58 calls for the Pope to apologize, which has yet to occur. The Roman Catholic Church continues to withhold archival records that it was legally required to provide to the TRC. Additionally, Roman Catholic entities, comprised of 47 Catholic defendants, did not paid full compensation as was determined by the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), a comprehensive response to the residential school legacy that included compensation to survivors, establishment of the TRC, and commemoration and healing initiatives. Continue reading →

Anti-Racism and Archival Description Work

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by Krista McCracken

In May as part of the Archives Association of Ontario conference I was able to participate in a workshop on Anti-Oppressive Description and Re-Description Workshop. Facilitated by Aaron Hope, Catherine Falls, Renee Saucier, and Danielle Robichaud, this workshop discussed records which contain racist, sexist or other discriminatory content and potential ways archivists can call out problematic materials in archives.

I’m really grateful for the space this workshop provided to dig into archival challenges and share ongoing work around re-description. In archival practice typically archival materials are only described once. This means that records researchers encounter may have been described decades ago by a staff member. Language changes and how we interact with and interpret records can also change. Archival re-description has become a more common practice.

Likewise, there has been a growing practice of archivists calling out racism in their records and acknowledging the potential harm of historical racist language. This sometimes looks like including content warnings about racial slurs, notes about blackface, or similar contextual notes. It can also look like new descriptive notes or new titles being added to existing records, to fill in contextual information that may have been missing from the original description. For example, records that were labeled as “John Smith and Wife” may have a new description added reading “John Smith and Jane Smith.”  Continue reading →

Remember/Resist/Redraw #30: Intergenerational Resistance in Vancouver’s Chinatown

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The Graphic History Collective recently released RRR #30 by erica hiroko isomura and Kaitlyn Fung that highlights intergenerational resistance and community organizing in Vancouver’s Chinatown. In particular, the poster emphasizes the role of women in preventing the building of a freeway through the community in the 1960s as well as ongoing efforts to resist displacement and gentrification.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for social change. Learn more about how you can support the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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History Slam 182: Shelter

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By Sean Graham

Shelter has its World Premiere tonight as part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. If you’re in Ontario, you can buy tickets to the virtual screening here.

In the decade following the Second World War, the population of Toronto doubled, in large part because of a steady influx of immigrants. By 1971, the population doubled again to over 2 million, causing the city to expand geographically as the agricultural fields that surrounded the downtown core became part of the urban sprawl. Central to this was the expansion of the subway, near which developers to built high-rises, thus allowing more people to live within walking distance of mass transit. With immigrants from around the world looking for housing on arrival in Canada, these communities were diverse and held up as examples of Canada’s multiculturalism policy put forth by the Pierre Trudeau government.

While the housing boom created communities, the people behind the new developments created a community of their own. Many Toronto developers at this time were Jewish immigrants. Some had escaped anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia while others were Holocaust survivors and those experiences shaped their careers in real estate development as they actively sought to create welcoming, loving communities.

This is the subject of Ron Chapman’s terrific new documentary Shelter. Using first hand accounts, it explores the lived experiences of a prominent group of Toronto real estate developers. It discusses anti-Semitism in Canada and Toronto before delving into the backgrounds of the people who helped shape the city. These include harrowing details of surviving concentration camps and escaping Nazi forces in Poland, which serve as powerful context to their later careers in Toronto. As they tell their stories, the viewer can see how real life experiences influence careers and, perhaps just as importantly, one’s perception of their professional life. As real estate developer and Holocaust survivor Mendel Tenenbaum says in the film, “I think I had the best life. And I also think I had the worst life that anyone can have.”

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Ron Chapman about the film. We discuss the origins of the project, the decision to go into detail about anti-Semitism in Europe, and immigration following the Second World War. We also chat about the development of communities, how personal experience shapes professional pursuits, and multiculturalism in Toronto.

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Being a Professor is Just a Job

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David Calverley

I don’t want my comments to come across as insensitive or uncaring towards people struggling to get a university position. I attended the first CHA panel about precarity in the historical profession. I felt a lot of sympathy for those who outlined their anger and disappointment with either not obtaining a full-time academic position or the stress they felt as they worked to find academic employment. I’m also not criticizing the many valuable suggestions put forth by Steven High in his earlier article.

I’ve followed the discussions around academic employment—specifically the lack of opportunities—for many years. I’ve read numerous essays written by people who obtained their doctoral degrees, but can’t find a job in their field. These essays are often personal. So, in that spirit, I want to relate my experience with precarity and a lesson I learned twenty years ago: Being a professor is just a job.

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Black Identity and the Great War: History from the Bottom Up

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by Roger P Nason

About a dozen years ago, I began researching community identity. I was expanding on questions I asked as an historian and trained archivist who was studying the settlement of St. Andrews, New Brunswick (NB) after the American Revolution. While most tend to focus on military campaigns, political leaders, and elites, I wanted to figure out the identities and motivations of rank-and-file refugees who were fleeing the conflict. What compelled them to settle in this new colony?

I began asking these sorts of new questions and found myself exampling “history from the bottom up.”

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How a Belfast Immigrant to Canada Came to Testify Before the Undercover Policing Inquiry in the UK

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Ernie Tate and his truck, late 1950s.

Bryan D. Palmer

In the summer of 1955, Ernest (Ernie) Tate, a young immigrant from Belfast, wandered into the “Toronto Labour Bookstore” on Yonge Street north of Wellesley.

The proprietor of the bookshop was Ross Dowson, a founder of the small Canadian Trotskyist movement. It espoused the ideas of Marx and Lenin, but was critical of the Soviet Union and what Stalin had done as its leader from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Dowson introduced Tate to the idea of socialist revolution and the organizations that claimed they could bring it about.

Tate’s education, terminated in Belfast when he left school before the age of 14, now began in earnest in Toronto.

A quick study, Tate soon graduated at the top of his class, a seasoned Marxist, joining the small political current that would eventually become the League for Socialist Action (LSA). He then travelled to New York to work with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and spent time at its educational centre in New Jersey, the Mountain Spring Camp, before coming back to Toronto.

When he wasn’t spray painting “Ban the Bomb” on a government-built Shelter near Ontario’s provincial legislature, Tate might be facing an “obstruction” charge arising out of a picket line scuffle. A lot of his time was taken up with organizing support for bodies like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He also traveled the country, living out of a truck and selling revolutionary pamphlets and Marxist texts to pay for his meals.

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