Sara Wilmshurst
In August 2024 representatives from multiple online history projects, universities, and public history institutions met in London to discuss key topics in online knowledge mobilization. Over the next several months attendees will publish essays reflecting on the topics we discussed. One, from Mack Penner, is already live. In the meantime, here are some open-access resources that intersect with workshop content.
Continue readingBy Alan MacEachern
I drew, when I was a kid. I drew goalies and traded them for hockey cards with guys in my class. I drew horses and gave them to girls, no exchange required. But as chapter books replaced pictures books, school drilled into me the hegemony of text. As I got older, because my drawing didn’t improve – and neither teachers nor I tried to improve it – my results seemed more and more childish. Like most people, I eventually stopped drawing altogether.
University’s deification of the written word confirmed the soundness of this decision. My chosen field of history seemed especially dedicated to turning innumerable scraps of text from the past into a single one in the present – ideally, one of 8-10,000 words, written for likeminded scholars, and containing the word “hegemony.” Although we have had movies for more than a century, photographs for two, and images for millennia, these were only occasionally to be used as sources, and generally as colour rather than play-by-play. And even when used as sources, it was assumed that they would not be communicated as such: their meaning was to be transmogrified into text. As was history itself.
Yet as a historian, I kept enjoying the relatively few historically-themed graphic novels that appeared.
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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.
Historical Headline of the Week
“6 PWHL teams added to EA Sports video game NHL 25 to be released Dec. 5,” The Canadian Press, November 13, 2024.
Continue readingMack Penner
The opening session of Active History’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.”
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Alvin Finkel
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.
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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.
Continue readingSean Carleton
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.
Last week, Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Residential Schools, released her final report in Gatineau, Quebec.
After years of research and consultation with Indigenous communities, the report, Upholding Sacred Obligations: Reparations for Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada, is now freely available to read. It contains important information regarding the truth about residential schooling as well as 42 legal, moral, and ethical obligations that governments, churches, institutions, and Canadians must meet to implement an “Indigenous-led Reparations Framework for Truth, Accountability, Justice, and Reconciliation.”
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.
Continue readingDonald Wright
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.
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By Sean Graham
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.
Historical Headline of the Week
Zachariah Hughes, “Researchers locate and photograph 3 undersea shipwrecks, remnants of bloody WWII battle for Attu,” Anchorage Daily News, August 4, 2024.
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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.
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.
