Active History

In memory of Jarrett Rudy (1970-2020), friend and colleague

April 6, 2020 6 Comments

(This week, historians across Canada are mourning the loss of an exceptional person and colleague, Jarrett Rudy (McGill), who passed away at his home in Montréal on 4 April 2020).

Magda Fahrni

Jarrett and I were the same age, both born in the fall of 1970. Over the 20 years that we knew each other and worked together on various projects, our shared age always seemed to me to be something that linked us, as historians: it gave us, I always thought, a common vantage point from which to assess the past and observe the present. We drew on the same pool of historical and cultural references and, like Gen-Xers everywhere, we shared an appreciation for irony and a slight suspicion of dominant groups and narratives. Continue reading →

Curating Ododo Wa/Our Stories

April 6, 2020 1 Comment

This week, we are honoured to share a series of posts reflecting on the development of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights’ exhibit, “Ododo Wa: Stories of Girls in War.” Today, you will read about Isabelle Masson’s curation of the exhibit. Tomorrow, professor Annie Bunting and Masters student Patricia Trudel discuss the role of York University’s Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnerships for the study of enslavement, marriage, and masculinities in the exhibit. Later in the week, you will read stories from Grace Acan and Evelyn Amony; the exhibit is largely based on the experiences of both of these women. Lastly, you will read a post by Gilbert Nuwagira outling the exhibit’s travel from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Kampala, Uganda and beyond. Together, this series of posts outlines a unique approach to the curation of human rights stories that serve as an example for collaborative and thoughtful museum work. – Carly Ciufo

Isabelle Masson

The exhibit “Ododo Wa: Stories of Girls in War” launched at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) on October 23, 2019. Located in the heart of the Rights Today gallery, the exhibit combines images, artefacts, and films presenting the stories of Grace Acan and Evelyn Amony. Both Acan and Amony were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. They were forced into conjugal slavery during years of captivity.

My curatorial approach seeks to amplify women’s voices and foreground their agency by focussing on their experiences before, during, and after armed conflict. Spanning three years, the process of exhibit development was one of critical engagement in the (un)making of cultural representations of the experiences of girls and women in war. Curatorial decisions were taken in close collaboration with Acan and Amony as well as with our exhibit partner, Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnerships for the study of enslavement, marriage, and masculinities (CSiW). CSiW is a SSHRC-funded (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) research project and international partnership of organizations working with war-affected communities on the issue of sexual violence. It is directed by York University Professor Annie Bunting and coordinated by Véronique Bourget.

Continue reading →

Covid-19: An Unprecedented Militarization of the Canada-US Border or a Return to the Old?

April 3, 2020 No Comments

“Alaska – Yukon boundary,” 1900, Library of Congress

By Benjamin Hoy

On March 26, 2020, news reports circulated across Canada and the United States that President Donald Trump was considering deploying more than a thousand military personnel near the Canada-US border.

The decision seemed baffling to many. Who President Trump hoped to protect Americans from was not altogether clear. Within a few days of the proposal going public, the United States possessed the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world (84,000 confirmed and 1,209 deaths). That number has only grown with each passing day. New York City alone had more instances of the disease (37,877 confirmed cases, 281 deaths) than all of Canada combined (3,409 confirmed cases, 35 deaths).

Numbers amidst a pandemic of course are always going to be tricky. Insufficient test kits and supply chain problems means we only have estimates. If the confirmed cases evenly vaguely represent the real number of cases in each country, Americans have more to fear from one another than they do from their northern neighbors.

So why is the United States considering deploying the military and what kind of precedent is there for using soldiers to guard the longest undefended border in the world?

Dozens of reasons may explain the odd behavior. President Trump may have hoped the policy would test the waters for future border policies, achieve economic concessions from Canada, or perhaps save face amidst an increasingly dire crisis. Whatever the case, stationing troops near the border is unlikely to be of any benefit to the public’s health.

If the proposed policy remains odd, is the deployment of troops unprecedented?

As weird as it may sound, the use of military troops to protect 49^th parallel has historically been far more common than Canadians often remember. Continue reading →

Listening During a Pandemic, and beyond

April 2, 2020 No Comments

Surveyor looking up a small tributary glacier, 141st Meridian, Kluane Glacier, Y.T. Credit: Canada. Dept. of Interior / Library and Archives Canada / PA-04465.

Laura Madokoro

In 2005, historical geographer Julie Cruikshank published her widely-acclaimed work, Do Glaciers Listen? : Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (UBC Press) in which she explored the history of environmental change in the Pacific Northwest. She looked specifically at Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions to understand glaciers as actors, as sentient beings that “take action and respond to their surroundings.”[1] Her intention in doing so was to trace an environmental history of glaciers that took into consideration their encounters with humans, and vice versa, during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries when the Little Ice Age and colonialism intersected. Cruikshank also wanted to highlight the tensions and connections between Indigenous and European ways of knowing, highlighting “struggles over conflicting meaning” and challenging notions of authority in the process.[2]

I have always found the title and the contents of Do Glaciers Listen? provocative, as if the onus was on the glaciers to do the listening. In my mind, I have always subtitled the work, And Can Humans Hear What They Have to Say? As societies around the world have wrestled with the potential scope and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself thinking about issues around hearing, listening and, in some sense, responsibility. And so I have returned to Cruikshank’s work in recent days. With this post, I hope to share both how some of how Cruikshank’s ideas connect to our present condition and how the COVID-19 pandemic might invite a revisiting, or visiting, of her work and broader issues around what we hear, how we listen and how we make sense of things.

Continue reading →

Humorous History: Bram Stoker’s Wilde Side

April 1, 2020 1 Comment

This is the first in our series on humour in history. Submit your tales of humour in the archives or historiography to tpeace@uwo.ca.

By Estelle Clements

A few years back, I was asked to reconstruct the wedding of Bram Stoker for the city of Dublin. In this capacity, I conducted archival research, focusing on his life, to formulate the script.

Stoker is known, predominantly, for writing Dracula, and being the manager of actor Henry Irving, but the material about his life gives a real sense of the man’s character, mischief, and humour. Continue reading →

A Time for Research Distancing

March 31, 2020 11 Comments

Alan MacEachern & William J. Turkel

Imagine being suddenly told that you cannot research online when writing history. No electronic journals, no ebooks, no Internet Archive, no Wikipedia, no search engines. You will instead be forced to rely exclusively on available print copies of books and journals, on microfilm, and, most important of all, on archives scattered across the country and around the world. Welcome to 1970.

This summer offers historians the very opposite predicament. We lack our accustomed access to most material sources, and physical archives are utterly unavailable. Beyond what we already had on hand, what we hurriedly pulled from the library before the lockdown, or what we’re able to buy on Amazon, all that we have to make sense of the past are the digital sources on the screens in front of us. Welcome to 2020.

And that’s fine, that’s enough. The historical material produced from 2020 research will not require an asterisk any more than the material of 1970 did. Historical research is never strictly about accessing everything we need, but about accessing what we can, and stopping when time, resources, and the availability of sources tells us to.

Faculty members may feel the shock if they are in the habit of summer trips to far-flung archives. Archival work is an important rite of passage in our discipline, and doctoral students may also need to adjust their research schedules, pushing off archival visits to 2021. But more than anyone it will be Master’s students who will have to adjust their research plans the most and the fastest. Fortunately, they might also benefit from having the fewest expectations of what historical research is and must be.

Research done this summer will be different, to be sure, in three key ways. Continue reading →

“When is a Bear a Frog?” : Examining Material Culture Interpretation

March 27, 2020 1 Comment

Amy Woodson-Boulton

As someone interested in the history of museums, I have thought for a long time about how we can use the objects in museums’ collections along with their archives to enrich our understanding of both. Recently I have been studying how ideas about art and the discipline of anthropology shaped the reception, display, and interpretation of Indigenous material culture in the late nineteenth century. At the height of the British Empire, British missionaries, anthropologists, and other collectors brought back and exhibited objects of the peoples whom they had conquered — peoples they defined as “primitive.”

Anthropology as a discipline emerged at this time, entangled with colonial power structures, and some anthropologists embraced and helped to popularize racist ideas of socio-cultural evolution. These legacies continue to haunt our relationships to Indigenous material culture. Understanding these relationships is part of the broader project of decolonizing museums, and Indigenous communities and scholars have made it clear that we need to be aware of the colonial context of the acquisition and display of these objects. The rightful ownership of Indigenous arts and historical artifacts is the subject of intense debate, particularly in the case of objects held by former colonial powers.

Alongside their original meanings and histories of acquisition, it is also important to show the ways that material culture acted within the cultures that collected it. Examining this question allows us to place museums and their collections in their own historical and cultural contexts and to remember that objects have meaning in British and European contexts, and not just in their cultures of origin. In thinking about Indigenous art and culture in this way, the objects themselves are vital, because they often give us clues to their histories of use and interpretation. When used in conjunction with museum archives, such objects can help us see some of the distortions that took place in the moment of their collecting and display, and how they functioned in their collectors’ culture.

To illustrate these ideas, let’s consider one particular Haida object, now in the collection of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, England.

Photograph of label on dagger handle from Pitt-Rivers Museum, 1891.49.41. Haida, Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. See http://objects.prm.ox.ac.uk/pages/PRMUID4988.html

Continue reading →

The Branded Puerto Rican Drink with Cuban Connections

March 27, 2020 1 Comment

Carlos A. Santiago

In 1893, Puerto Rican poet Lola Rodriguez referred to Cuba and Puerto Rico as “two wings of the same bird.” Both islands experienced colonialism under the Spanish empire and were exploited by the hegemonic power of the United States. Although they have had similar experiences, these two islands have historically been viewed differently.

During the nineteenth and twentieth century, Cuba was often viewed as “sexy” by Americans while Puerto Rico was seen as unattractive. Following the Cuban Revolution this perception began to shift and the unfolding of this change can be seen through changes in material culture.

Today, many of us know Bacardi as a Puerto Rican rum. The Bacardi brand often conjures images of sandy beaches and the iconic Bacardi black bat. While the black bat symbol that is branded on every bottle of Bacardi has existed since its inception, the words “Puerto Rican Rum” were not always there. That is because Bacardi was established in Cuba during its national period.

Bottle of Bacadi rum, 1862.

The differences between an 1862 Bacardi bottle and one bottle from 2020 highlights how a Cuban brand has been reinterpreted as a Puerto Rican brand aligned with capitalism. In 1862, a Bacardi bottle would have the words “Santiago de Cuba” rather than “Puerto Rico” inscribed on them. After the Cuba Revolution, Bacardi’s Cuban roots began to be erased.

Bacardi is not just a brand of rum. It is the surname of a prominent Cuban family, Don Facundo Bacardi was the company founder in 1862. The establishment of Bacardi rum happened before Cuba engaged in the Ten Years’ War. Led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, this was a conflict that set the stage for Cuban independence from Spain in 1898. Even before this event, Cubans were expressing themselves as people who were different from their colonizers. Tensions rose in the 1860s, alongside the rise of nationalism across the island as many Cubans demanded independence and the abolition of slavery. Continue reading →

The Toronto Church Memorials to Soldiers of the Great War Project

March 26, 2020 No Comments

Ross Fair

The City of Toronto cenotaph unveiled, November 11, 1925. City of Toronto Archives, Globe and Mail fonds. Fonds 1266, Item 6584.

Each Remembrance Day, Torontonians assemble for services of remembrance at public cenotaphs such as the civic cenotaph at the front steps of Old City Hall, the University of Toronto’s Soldiers’ Tower and at the Cross of Sacrifice in Prospect Cemetery, where hundreds of Great War soldiers are buried. Yet, these public sites of remembrance represent but a small fraction of the memorials to the fallen in Toronto.

As a way to explore the history of other memorials to the fallen, in 2014 I launched the Toronto Church Memorials to Soldiers of the Great War project as an experiential learning initiative. With funding from Ryerson University’s Department of History, I have hired six different undergraduate research assistants on individual short-term contracts. They have conducted all the research and writing for this project, which aims to identify and contextualize the material culture of war memorials to the fallen of the Great War erected in Toronto’s churches. Using textual records this project aims to identify and catalogue all memorials erected in all churches, including those churches that have been repurposed, demolished, or destroyed by fire.

The goal for a future, final phase of the project is to produce an online, mapped database of these memorials. This virtual work will identify the location of each church, its memorial(s) and the individual(s) they memorialize. The database will restore, in a virtual sense, the geography of memory established by Torontonians in the immediate postwar era. Continue reading →

Tombs with a View: Memorial Stones and Transatlantic Family Histories

March 26, 2020 No Comments

Krista Barclay

New Calton Burial Ground Entrance Gate (photo by author, Sept. 2018)

As I entered Edinburgh’s New Calton Burial Ground in the fall of 2018, I was struck by the placard on the front gate advertising ‘tombs with a view’ – the view from the cemetery’s perch on Calton Hill really was spectacular. I was visiting the site as part of my dissertation research on the families formed by Indigenous women and their British husbands, who worked as officers with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in the early nineteenth century.

New Calton Burial Ground certainly delivered on its advertised ‘tombs with a view’, but my visit also left me thinking that gravestones and memorial stones give us a view (or views) on family relationships, power dynamics, mobility, and material circumstances. Like other examples of material culture, people construct meaning from these objects, and these meanings change across time and context. The subtleties of family relations are read differently by mourners and friends, distant descendants, artists, tourists, archaeologists, or historians.

View from New Calton Burial Ground (photo by author, Sept. 2018)

I visited the cemetery looking for the grave of Sarah McLeod Ballenden, a 33-year old woman of Indigenous and Scottish heritage who was born in what became Canada and died in Edinburgh in 1853. Rather than the individual gravestone I expected, Sarah’s grave was marked by a large family memorial stone that included the names of her husband (retired HBC officer John Ballenden), four of their children, and several Ballenden relatives.

Twelve members of the extended Ballenden family who died between 1817 and 1872 in Canada and Scotland are commemorated on this stone. Most of these relatives were either born in Indigenous territories claimed by the HBC or spent their adult lives dependant on incomes from the HBC’s North American fur trade. From its perch on Calton Hill, this memorial stone demonstrates the transatlantic webs of connection that held British imperialism together in what became Canada. Continue reading →

Last »