Active History

Indigenous histories on Wikipedia

July 28, 2020 No Comments

Screenshot of a Wikipedia article worked on by students.

Madeline Knickerbocker [1]

My earliest memories of Wikipedia in an academic context relate to being told not to use it. Profs and peers viewed Wikipedia as problematic, and certainly not a legitimate source for academic work. While these critiques still endure amongst some academics today, things have also changed: a few semesters ago, I had my students write contributions to Wikipedia as the major assignment for a 300-level Indigenous history survey.

This post focuses on using Wikipedia in the postsecondary classroom; I briefly discuss Wikipedia and pedagogy in general, and then explain my own experience of having students contribute to Wikipedia for their major class project. I’ll also talk about student responses and share some of their feedback, as well as the assignment description I used for the class, and my own reflections on what could make the process go more smoothly in the future.[2]

Wikipedia and Pedagogy

While I certainly agree with most that Wikipedia absolutely should not be the only source students consult while doing academic work, I think we do have to recognize its usefulness. Most of us use it frequently as a reference source (“what year did that happen in again?”), and so we should allow our students the similar convenience of using it as a jumping off point for deeper engagement with their own academic work. As Andrea Eidinger commented to me when we were talking about the idea for this post, there is a double standard, where some scholars use Wikipedia “behind the scenes” but don’t recognize its role as a site for publicizing and disseminating academic knowledge.

Certainly, Wikipedia does not practice academic peer review, and it is by definition not original scholarly work. That said, Wikipedia entries do have their own community-based review process, and they are consistently assessed by Wikipedia users. Moreover, writing a new entry or contributing to an existing one can require significant intellectual lifting, and should be recognized as such. A strong entry can lay bare the scholarship done on any given topic in accessible language and provide an overview of information most often locked up behind journal paywalls.

This type of work is especially important when it centers the knowledges and experiences of marginalized communities. Indeed, the other main critique of Wikipedia is that it emphasizes the voices of the most privileged, both in terms of its content and authorship. Any Wikipedia user would do well to learn more about Wikipedia’s issues such as gender bias and systemic racism. Given that Wikipedia clearly needs to add more diversity to both its entries and its editors, it seems to me that contributing to Wikipedia from a social justice standpoint, as Art+Feminism does, for example, can challenge the online encyclopedia’s whiteness and maleness. The popularity of Wikipedia edit–a–thons speaks to the growing awareness that the platform’s content and contributors need to be more inclusive.

These two concerns about Wikipedia – of legitimacy and of representation – can both be addressed through a better understanding of the platform’s pedagogical and political potential. We can use Wikipedia to teach students important skills such as critical assessment of written work, translation of academic discourse into more accessible language, and the step-by-step work of using online publishing tools. Doing this work can feel more significant for students than writing (yet another) primary source analysis, and can certainly hold more real-world value, by enhancing public awareness of scholarly knowledge. When that information also challenges top-down narratives and provides digital space for the histories of marginalized peoples, historical education can also act as a form of online social justice.

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To Put Finish to the War: Armistice in Korea, 27 July 1953

July 27, 2020 1 Comment

The United Nations and North Korean delegates sign English, Chinese, and Korean copies of the armistice agreement in a shelter built for the occasion. The signing was over in ten minutes and both representatives promptly left without ceremony. UN Photo 188574

Andrew Burtch

This year, 2020, marked the 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean War. This conflict, classified at the time in North America as a “police action” for political convenience was of course anything but. Though three years of bitter fighting followed, the Korean War has been rightly classified as a “forgotten war”, unfolding as it did against a backdrop of a “postwar” domestic economic boom at home, far away, in a country few Canadians understood or cared much about outside of its status as a Cold War battleground. Perhaps the most forgotten aspect of the war is how it ended, sixty-seven years ago today, though the impact of a divided Korea is still very much present.

The fighting in the Korean War ended on 27 July 1953 in an armistice signed at Panmunjom, Korea. American Lieutenant-General William K. Harrison Jr. sat at a wide table in a clapboard building. Twenty feet away, North Korean General Nam Il sat at a similar table. Harrison, representing the United Nations Command, and Nam Il, representing the North Korean People’s Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers, barely acknowledging each other as they signed eighteen copies of the armistice agreement, six in English, six in Korean, and six in Chinese. The document was the product of more than two years and 158 meetings where the delegates sparred over how best to end the war that began when North Korean invaded South Korea to unify the peninsula by force on 25 June 1950. The agreement established a military armistice commission which would oversee a demilitarized zone which separates North and South Korea to this day, and arrange for the exchange of prisoners of war taken by both sides during three years of combat.

The unceremonious, if somber, signing ceremony reflected the mood further down in the stalemated defensive lines in Korea where the United Nations forces, including the 25th Canadian Infantry Brigade (25 CIB), had continued to fight vicious battles in the two years since the armistice talks had begun. As the war diarist for 25 CIB Signals Troop summarized the day of the armistice signing, it was much like any other: “There was a heavy artillery duel all afternoon to put finish to the war. The [Royal Canadian Regiment] received a good portion of the incoming rounds and their only casualty was line communication which was completely taken out.” The military police noted that one of the last Chinese artillery shells to fall in their area, a dud, had crashed into a section cook-house, and that they made arrangements to have it retrieved, defused, and sent on to their museum. Already the war was becoming history.

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K’jipuktuk to Halifax and back: Decolonization in the Council Chamber

July 22, 2020 No Comments

By Thomas Peace

For nearly nine decades visitors to Halifax, arriving by boat or train, were welcomed to the city by Edward Cornwallis. Encased in bronze, Cornwallis stood tall, his stern face peering towards travelers pouring out from the city’s main train station and the famed Pier 21, site of first arrival to Canada for over 1.5 million immigrants. In 2018, Cornwallis was removed from his prominent perch at the south end of Barrington Street. Yesterday evening, Halifax Regional Council solidified that decision, voting to accept a report from an expert task force on the Commemoration of Edward Cornwallis and Commemoration of Indigenous History.

The Edward Cornwallis statue, in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia, on July 15, 2017. (Ben MacLeod, Wikimedia Commons)

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Beyond The Lecture: Pandemic Edition

July 21, 2020 No Comments

Photo by Bára Buri on Unsplash

Andrea Eidinger and Krista McCracken

In January 2018 the Beyond the Lecture series launched with the goal of sharing blog posts focused on best practices for teaching Canadian history at the post-secondary level. Since 2018, Beyond The Lecture has highlighted innovative course design practices, the use of digital history, experiential learning, and new approaches to teaching Canadian history. The series has also created a community of dialogue and in April 2019 we released the Beyond the Lecture ebook which highlighted some of the most read posts from the series.

Covid-19 has significantly impacted post-secondary education and the ways in which education is delivered. Given the impact the pandemic has had on instructional practices and the many ways educators have pivoted online we have decided to put out a call specifically connected to teaching during covid-19. Continue reading →

What’s the Beef with COVID-19?

July 20, 2020 1 Comment

By Catherine Carstairs and Philip Rich

As restaurants across the country closed in March to prevent the spread of COVID-19, fast-food chains stayed open. In the first quarter of 2020, McDonald’s Corp global sales decreased by only 3.4%. This is remarkable given that McDonald’s had to close over 300 stores in China as well as restaurants in France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. In Canada, according to research from Ipsos Foodservice monitor, drive-through dining was up by 17% in April. Apparently, the explosion in sourdough bread-making barely made a dent in the demand for burgers.

Photo by Amirali Mirhashemian, Unsplash

As Andrew F. Smith explains in his book, Hamburger: A Global History, the hamburger started as a sandwich. As factories mushroomed in American cities, lunch wagons fed the workers easy-to-eat meals including sausages and hamburger steaks, served in a bun. In the 1920s, the first hamburger chain, The White Castle, began opening in the United States. After World War II, the McDonald brothers who had long operated a drive-in burger bar in California began to standardize and speed-up their processes. Ray Croc, who had formerly sold multimixers for milkshakes, stepped in to expand their franchising operations, subsequently turning McDonald’s into a global brand.

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Remember/Resist/Redraw #23: All Eyes on Wet’suwet’en – Shut Down Canada

July 17, 2020 No Comments

Earlier this month, the Graphic History Collective released Remember/Resist/Redraw poster #23 by Gord Hill and Sean Carleton.

The poster looks at the Shut Down Canada movement and the long history of police violence and Indigenous resistance in what is currently Canada.

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 Episode 154: War Junk

July 16, 2020 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

During the Second World War, Canada, along with all combatant countries engaged in a massive mobilization effort that included shifting industrial production to supply the war efforts. During the six year conflict, Canadian factories transitioned from consumer products to military production. For instance, the Canadian Cycle and Co. Ltd. in Weston, ON, a company that manufactured skates and bikes in the 1930s started to produce items for guns, including tri-pods and pivots. In Quebec, the Liquid Carbonic Canadian Corporation had its soda fountain division build parts for new tanks. Across the country, the total production of war goods was nearly $10 billion.

Once the war ended, though, countries including Canada not only had to shift back towards consumer production, but also had to account for all the military goods they had. While the majority of the 800 ships, 800,000 vehicles, and 4 billion rounds of ammunition were used during the war, there was still a mountain of stuff left over. After the First World War, nations struggled with what to do with the excess material, with some economists and politicians citing that as a contributing factor to the Great Depression. As a result, properly dealing with the excess stuff became a priority.

That effort is the subject of the new book War Junk: Munitions Disposal and Postwar Reconstruction in Canada. In the book Souchen explores how the Canadian government approached its excess of goods in the years after the war. From partnering with organizations to recycling to disposal, a variety of options were considered. An incredibly challenging logistical project further complicated by the fear of deflating markets with excess goods, the book examines how the process was an integral part of Canadian postwar reconstruction.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Alex Souchen about the book. We talk about the amount of goods Canada produced during the war, the influence of the First World War on Canada’s disposal efforts, and the environmental issues that ensued. We also talk about the impact on the economy, the shift in industrial production, and the unintended consequences of disposal.

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From ME to WE to the CYC – Liberals and the Controversial History of Youth Volunteerism

July 15, 2020 1 Comment

Kevin Brushett

On June 25, 2020 Justin Trudeau announced the creation of Canada Student Service Grant, a program that encouraged young Canadians to volunteer in their communities while paying them up to $5000 to do so. Within days however, Trudeau’s feel good announcement began to turn sour as questions arose over the program’s links to the ME to WE charity, the NGO chosen to administer the program. Some of the controversy stemmed from stories about abusive behaviour by the Kielburger brothers who run it, while others have pointed to the “white saviour complex” and “voluntourism” that WE fosters in its approach to its work in the Global South. But the biggest part of the controversy stemmed from the intimate links between the charity and the Trudeau family, including his wife, Sophie, his mother, Margaret, and his brother, Alexandre. Though it turns out that the charity has fostered relationships across the political spectrum in Ottawa, somehow the controversy seems to have stuck to Trudeau and the Liberals.

Youth volunteer programs have a long Liberal history, particularly during the reign of Justin’s father Pierre in Ottawa in the 1960s and 1970s. Links between volunteer programs and Canadian governments got their start in in the early 1960s with the formation of Canada’s version of the American Peace Corps – Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO). Though CUSO’s activities were largely ignored by the Conservative government of John Diefenbaker, they captured the attention of the Liberals when they returned to office. Minister of External Affairs Paul Martin, in particular, found ways to support its work and volunteers, including using the airlift functions of the Canadian Forces to deliver CUSO volunteers to their destination projects. The founders of CUSO, such as Dr Francis Leddy had strong links to the Liberal Party, as did the first president of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Maurice Strong. During Strong’s leadership at CIDA he hired CUSO founder Lewis Perinbam to develop the agency’s NGO Division, which provided matching grants to help fund community development work overseas.

Lewis Perinbam, founder of CUSO and Director of CIDA NGO Program 1969-1991. LAC e999919838-u.

The most infamous link between the Liberals and youth volunteerism was the creation of the Company of Young Canadians in 1965. Continue reading →

That Other Time the Toronto Police Tried to Solve the Race Problem: The Ethnic Relations Unit, 1970s-1980s

July 14, 2020 No Comments

Metropolitan Police officers, 1976. Kevin Beaty/Toronto Star Archives tspa_0114223f

David M. K. Sheinin

In the early 1970s, to gain insights into the Italian immigrant community in Toronto, the police set up an Ethnic Relations Unit. In 1975 the unit created a “Black Section” followed by Jewish, Southeast Asian, and other sections. The experiment in building bridges to ethnic communities failed because this solution to growing police-community tensions reinforced rather than challenged police assumptions about ethnic and racial differences in the city. The unit blurred the meaning of racial violence; rejected the criticisms of dozens of community leaders, politicians, and civil rights organizations; and reasserted a police position that they, along with “white” Torontonians, were often key victims of the tumult.

Tensions Rising

Through the 1970s, many Torontonians clamoured for reform in light of discriminatory police violence against LGBTQ, African Canadian, Southeast Asian, and other communities. But police-community tensions persisted through the early 1980s, reaching horrific apogees in the police killings of African Canadians Buddy Evans (1978) and Albert Johnson (1979). By and large the police weren’t listening to community complaints.

The Ethnic Relations Unit may well have been a dinosaur from the outset. In early 1970s multicultural Toronto, the notion that the police had to do outreach to gain insight into longstanding ethnic and racialized communities underlined the growing distance between the police and the people they served. In 1977, the president of Ryerson Polytechnic Institute, Walter Pitman, submitted a report to the Council of Metropolitan Toronto on behalf of the city Task Force on Human Relations. Now is Not too Late urged dramatic change in police conduct to end frictions with Toronto communities.

The report challenged the flawed notion of an Ethnic Relations Unit structured to reinforce, rather than break down, an old Toronto dividing line; a police force still largely made up of officers whose ancestors hailed from the United Kingdom felt it had to reach out through the unit to other Torontonians as though they were foreigners. Continue reading →

In memory of Greg Donaghy (1961 – 2020)

July 13, 2020 3 Comments

Greg Donaghy, speaking at McGill University in 2016.

Jill Campbell – Miller

“I just hope he’s at a cottage without a cell signal and wi-fi.”

I said that to my mother-in-law several times during a recent visit to Cape Breton. After all, I told her, the book project that Greg Donaghy was co-editing with myself and fellow historian Stacey Barker had recently been progressing ahead of schedule (Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order, UBC Press, 2021). Perhaps he felt no need to respond to my texts and emails quickly. But even as I said it, I knew it was not right. If Greg was anything, he was conscientious and dedicated to his work. Emails, texts, and phone calls rarely went unanswered. The thought of him lounging at a cottage while his inbox filled up was, in fact, patently un-Greg-like, but I did not let myself think about alternative explanations. I had been waiting to hear from him for some guidance before I undertook a few revisions to our introduction. On July 5, we all learned the terrible truth – a heart attack left Greg in a coma, which led to his death on Canada Day.

Greg had recently retired from a career in the civil service as the head of the historical section of Global Affairs. There, his achievements were many, including editing six volumes of the Documents on Canadian External Relations (DCER) and serving as General Editor for the series. In “retirement,” he became Director of the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at Trinity College, a perfect fit for his interests. He was well known as an prolific writer. Often, in researching a paper, I wished for information on some particular nook or cranny of post-war Canadian foreign policy, only to find out that Greg had already published a paper on it, or co-written a paper on it, or it was the subject of a chapter within a collection he had edited or co-edited. His writing was not only voluminous, it was eloquent. As I write this now, I am thinking about how Greg might edit it, trying to avoid the cumbersome style he disdained.

Others who knew him longer can better speak to his long career as a civil servant and academic. How I, and many other scholars of foreign policy will remember him best, is by his unofficial career as a mentor. Continue reading →

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