This week I talk with Cristina Vatulescu, author of Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges. We talk about the Soviet archives that have been declassified over the past 20 years, how to approach newly available material, and how trustworthy the Soviet documents can be. We also discuss the individuals who were followed by the Soviet police as well as those who were creating the documents, how the material changes our understanding of the Soviet Union, and how historians can approach future declassifications.
“…Bill C-36…It’s a first in Canada…we make the buying of sex illegal. We target the predators…Bill C-36 has recognized that a lot of [prostitutes] are victims…If [prostitution] becomes an ‘industry,’ if this Bill doesn’t go through, we will have everything legal as of December 2014. Is that the Christmas present you want to give to your children?”[1]
In her interview with Dr. John Hull for the television show 100 Huntley Street, Joy Smith (former Member of Parliament representative for the Kildonan-St. Paul region in Manitoba) overzealously promotes Canada’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (the PCEPA or Bill C-36). The moralistic rhetoric found across Smith’s entire interview paints Bill C-36 nearly flawlessly. However, what struck me most was her claim that Bill C-36 was a “first” in Canada – simply because that’s not true.
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.
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.
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.
