Between Postwar & Present Day: The Possibilities and Perils of Contemporary History

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Service, Office and Retail Workers Union of Canada (SORWUC), “Join Us” n.d, Rise Up Feminist Archive “Unions as Sites of Feminist Action”.

Kevin Brushett, Sarah Nickel and Nancy Janovicek

We live in polarized times. After preaching for years that “the world needed more Canada” because of our “exceptional” ability to politely navigate the politics of diversity, Canadians no longer seem immune to the forces of division and dissatisfaction that have led to Brexit, to Trumpism, or to a myriad of other worrying signs of incivility stalking the globe. The lines of division go beyond where one stands on issues of reproductive choice, gun control, vaccine safety, or climate change. Socioeconomic disparities have been increasing over the past twenty years and with this growing disparities in the access to levers of power across Canadian society. These inequities are exacerbated by Indigeneity, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexual and gender identity. Growing disenfranchisement driven by these inequalities has deepened social and political polarization between those who advocate for greater state intervention to address them and those who argue for smaller government and more personal responsibility for solving them. In short, the “Age of Fracture,” as Daniel Rodgers once called the late 20th century, seems even more so in the 21st century. Understanding the contemporary historical origins of these fault lines has never been more important.

The upcoming online conference “Between Postwar and Present Day” (May 6-8, 2021) seeks to do just that by bringing together more than 80 graduate students, public historians, and scholars across 25 sessions to explore both the emerging scholarship as well as the lacuna within the field of Canadian contemporary history. Continue reading →

Take a Look Inside: What did we learn from a prison riot fifty years ago?

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By Catherine Fogarty

In November 2019, Structured Intervention Units (SIUs) were implemented by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) in all federal prisons to replace the old solitary confinement system. This new system was supposed to improve the lives of segregated prisoners who were often confined twenty-three and a half hours a day in small windowless cells with one hour of exercise and limited human contact. Inmates placed in the new structured intervention units would receive four hours out of their cells and at least two hours of meaningful human contact.

SIUs were introduced after the passing of Bill C-83 in June 2019. The bill was the government’s response to two lawsuits. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association and the John Howard Society of Canada sued the federal government over the use of solitary confinement, arguing it was unconstitutional, increased inmates’ suffering, and discriminated against offenders who are Indigenous or have mental-health issues.

The primary legislative intent was to abolish solitary confinement as defined by the United Nations Mandela Rules (confining inmates for twenty-two hours or more a day without “meaningful human contact”). The new system was to impose an initial limit of no more than fifteen days of confinement and introduce judicial oversight or independent adjudication for any length of stay in segregation beyond that time.

But an independent report and investigation released a year later in October 2020 indicated that very little has changed with respect to the number of hours and days prisoners spend in solitary confinement in Canada’s sixteen federal prisons, and in fact Corrections Canada was unable to supply the correct data to a panel of academic experts reviewing the implementation of the new structured intervention units. It appears that SIUs are just a fancy new title for a barbaric practice that has been going on behind closed prison doors in Canada for a very long time.

The Warden and Inmates Negotiate (Photo provided by the author).

Fifty years ago, on April 14, 1971, inmates at Kingston Penitentiary, Canada’s oldest prison, overpowered unsuspecting guards and instigated one of the most violent and destructive prison riots in our country’s history. Prisoners were protesting against decrepit living conditions, overcrowding, inadequate rehabilitation programs, and harsh punishments. Step out of line and you went to the “hole” an escape-proof cellblock located in a concrete bunker. There were twenty metal doors and behind each door an inmate was confined twenty-three and a half hours a day, with one half-hour of exercise in a small, segregated yard. Sound familiar? Continue reading →

Finding History on Wilberforce Street

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By Isabelle and Ian McCallum

In the middle of March 2020, education for students in Ontario became a different reality. Learning in a classroom with peers was replaced with online learning as precautionary measures countering COVID-19. Students participated in learning at home, attending “google meets.” The postponement of extra-curriculars such as after-school activities, clubs and teams meant that the “busyness” of the week was now “quiet.”

For my daughter, Isabelle, this change was marked by a sense of loss. “Online learning is much different than in-school learning” she reflects, “because you are looking at a computer screen at a google meet, zoom etc.. thus, creating an environment with less engagement because it isn’t face to face.”

Distance learning offered an exciting opportunity to explore and to engage with questions new and old with deeper consideration than time usually offers. At different times, Isabelle and I often visited different points of interest near our home. These stops included historic buildings, churchyards and abandoned houses.

She would have many questions about the context of these places: Who lived there? What did it look like? What happened?

For more than twenty years I lived in a small, rural central Ontario community. I did not grow up on a farm, I was, however encouraged to help out on the local farms that surrounded our property. This involved planting, harvesting, cleaning cattle pens, haying and taking care of animals. Our home was located on Line 1, Oro Township in the County of Simcoe. Of historical significance, line 1 or Wilberforce Street was the location of a British government sponsored settlement of veterans from the War of 1812, specifically veterans of Captain Runchey’s Corps of Coloured Men. Continue reading →

Historia Nostra: Parks and Profit at Kejimkujik National Park

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By Erin Isaac, 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.

Commemorative monument at Kejimkujik National Park and National Historic site with Jean (Muin’iskw) Augustine McIsaac (who designed the monument). Courtesy of Dan McIsaac. http://www.muiniskw.org/pgHistory3c.htm

Parks Canada acquires Indigenous land, including at Kejimkujik, through means that many would deem illegitimate. Continue reading →

CFP: Pandemic Methodologies Twitter Conference 2021

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CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS, June 24-25, 2021
@PMTC2021
#PandemicMethodologies

Sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association (CHA)

In the past year, archives and libraries have closed (either permanently or periodically), non-essential international travel has been heavily discouraged or impossible, and anyone who can has been encouraged to work from home. In these circumstances, historians have had to adapt how they do research, perhaps relying more heavily on digital methods or developing more collaborative projects. Because so many of these strategic decisions have been made in the midst of crisis and, at times, as temporary emergency measures, there has been little discussion of what the historian-at-work looks like right now. How have personal experiences of lockdown, ill health, family caretaking, and working from home influenced how we write history? How is research being shaped by contemporary constraints and creative solutions? How does it feel to do historical research in our historical moment? Continue reading →

Bringing Black studies to Canadian universities is still an uphill battle

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Dr. Afua Cooper. Photo: Historica Canada

Afua Cooper

Since my time as a graduate student to my present appointment as professor at Dalhousie University, I have been involved with championing and developing Black studies in universities and beyond.

Previously, within Canadian universities, not many scholars who work in creating knowledge about Black people called it Black studies. For many, “Black studies” was something that happened in the United States. In the 1990s, as a doctoral student conducting research in Black Canadian history, I developed and taught courses that consciously used the terms “Black” or “African Canadian.” Such courses included “African Canadian History,” “Black Ontario” and “Black Feminist history.”

As a result, I have come face-to-face in dealing with the resistance to implementing Black studies, and the pitfalls involved in the process.

Classroom encounters

I learned very early on that teaching Black and African Canadian history was dangerous. Continue reading →

Life with Marcel Proust

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By James Cullingham

I began reading Proust as I launched into writing my dissertation in about 2006. I was on a beach in Cuba when I first opened Du côté de chez Swann the first of a seven-volume novel totaling some 3,000 pages. I finished the novel en français earlier this year. That’s correct, it took me 15 years to read À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).

Proust has been my companion on airplanes, in the bath, on canoe trips and in libraries and cafés from Oaxaca, Mexico to Paris and points in between. As I taught journalism, history, and Indigenous Studies, completed my dissertation, made a number of documentary films and laboured over a book manuscript, I was under the spell of Marcel Proust.

Reading Proust in Silent Lake Park c. 2009. Photo by Li Robbins.

Proust (1871 – 1922) finished his masterwork on his deathbed. The last three volumes of the novel were published posthumously. A sensation during his lifetime, Proust won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1919 for À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), the second volume, the novel that has been obsessed over by other authors of fiction, historians, filmmakers, philosophers and various savants for a century. Continue reading →

“Racial Incidents” are Clothespins Hanging on a Clothesline of Institutional Whiteness

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Saint Joseph’s Parish opposite Tabaret Hall. The University of Ottawa was founded by the Oblate fathers, a male Catholic religious order with a long history as the vanguard of settler colonialism — including the operation of, and employment in, Residential Schools— across Canada. Photo by Meredith Terretta.

Meredith Terretta (for the uOttawa Antiracist History Group)

Too often, a consideration of students has gone missing in conversations about race unfolding on university campuses across Canada this year. It is as if one skill professors have yet to learn is how to actively listen to their students. All of them. Including racialized students for whom our institution, perhaps like yours, has for too long had a tin ear, at best. And yet, we’re here: professors who care about the wellbeing and belonging of students, and who would rather find common ground with them than view them as our adversaries.

At uOttawa, a group of historical educators and researchers, independent of any institutional or departmental structure, launched a website called Histoire antiraciste uOttawa Antiracist History during Black History Month (February 2021).

The website evolved from an antiracist group that began in the summer of 2020 with conversations among a few uOttawa historians in the wake of the killings of Ahmad Aubery, George Floyd, and the local movement No Peace Until Justice dedicated to seeking justice for Abdirahman Abdi. We knew our work had to go far beyond declarative virtue signalling, and started to think about what kind of substantial change was necessary and possible on our own campus.

Then, an “n-word crisis” emerged on our campus in October 2020, generating public discussion across Canada.

Continue reading →

To Test or Not to Test: Assessment and Learning in Historical Education

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By Andrew Nurse

Do midterms have any point? Do tests? Quizzes? Finals?

These questions outline the scope of a discussion that recently drew considerable discussion among historians on Twitter.[1] The conversation was both apt and timely. It is apt because it goes to the heart of teaching and learning; it is timely because Covid-19 — and a range of other factors — have encouraged a reconsideration of pedagogy.

“Back in the day” exams of various sorts were common. In fact, a range of disciplines still examine as a fundamental component of their pedagogy.

Why do they do this? Do such modes of evaluation serve a useful purpose in higher education?

The short answer to these questions depend on course objectives, the course level, the goals and purposes of the course, and a range of other factors. I am sure there are important and intricate distinctions between tests, exams, midterms, and the like.

I’d argue, though, that these distinctions are less important than pedagogical design and I’d like to try to use this blog post to address this question under the general rubric of testing. Continue reading →

Historia Nostra: Getting Living History Right at Plimoth Patuxet OR Plimoth Patuxet vs. Jamestown Settlement, a comparison

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This post is part of a monthly series introducing new videos in Erin Isaac’s Historia Nostra public history project.

Of all the living history museums in the United States, Jamestown Settlement in Virginia and Plimoth Patuxet in Massachusetts are arguably the most famous. Understandably, these museums are very frequently compared. Both were built in the 1970s. Both recreate early Anglo-American colonial settlements. And both celebrate America’s “founding.”

For me, however, there is no comparison—Plimoth Patuxet’s approach to living history is simply better.

Plimoth Patuxet succeeds in several ways that Jamestown Settlement, a museum that is very similar on paper, does not. Continue reading →