In Praise of a Nondescript Government Facility (or, The Most Canadian Title Ever)

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Nondescript government facility.

Alan MacEachern

As I drove deeper into a suburb in the small town of Matane on Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, things got busier instead of quieter. More and more parked cars lined the streets. There were no sidewalks, so the many people walking were all in the street, all of them headed toward the same low-slung, nondescript office building in the distance. To anyone who has watched Stranger Things, or a Bond movie, or any number of movies or TV shows, it all screamed “top secret government facility.”

Which it was. Or if not “secret” at least “little-known.” And certainly under-appreciated.

In 1977, the government of Canada opened the René-Tremblay Building in Matane to be the terminal destination of all government cheques. It still takes in tens of millions of cheque stubs – staff told me proudly that any specific one could be retrieved within two minutes – retains them for six years, and shreds them. But the advent of direct deposit banking in the new millennium threatened the future of the facility – which, as a leading employer, threatened the future of the town. As a result, many of the staff retrained, and soon became some of the nation’s frontline experts on digitization. Starting with a single flatbed scanner, Matane’s Document Imaging Solutions Centre [DISC] has grown to become Canada’s principal facility for digitizing government material – including of historical material. If you’ve used or perused the First World War attestation papers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force online, for example, you know their work. Continue reading →

Tenth Anniversary Repost: The Role of Historical Monographs

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Active History is celebrating its tenth anniversary! As part of our anniversary celebrations we are sharing glimpses of how Active History developed and showcasing our favourite and most popular posts from the past ten years. 

In 2009 Active History launched with a focus on soliciting paper length contributions. Within the first year we shifted our focus to blogging. Many of our posts in that first year were written by the Active History editors. Founding editor Ian Milligan’s post on “The Role of Historical Monographs” (republished below) was one of our most popular pieces in 2009. Want to know more about the early days? Check out our very first year in review post.

The Role of Historical Monographs

At a recent workshop in London, I had a conversation with a fellow graduate student about the relevance of history as an academic discipline. He held that the entire academic world was a farce: professors spent too little time in the classroom, producing books that nobody read, were overpaid, and basically a general waste. Beyond my initial confusion that a fellow history graduate student would have such low esteem of his profession and peers, I think its a trenchant criticism that needs to be dealt with. This echoed the recent discussion begun by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail about lazy professors, and rebutted by Clifford Orwin.

The teaching debate was played out between Wente and Orwin, and I think its an important one. But another important issue is the role of historical monographs.

The largest criticism is that many monographs are not widely read and are not accessible. This is true, in some ways. Part of the rationale of ActiveHistory.ca, for example, is to take research and analysis from these academic works and turn them into easily digestible pieces for public consumption. Print runs are short at academic presses, a few make their way to book stores, the rest to university libraries. Few make their way into the majority of Chapters/Indigos, for example, although recent works by Steve Penfold and Bryan Palmer have certainly had quite a bit of shelf space. Between the Lines Press has also been doing a spectacular job in marketing academic books to a mass market (Congrats to Ian McKay who was honoured by the Governor General a little over a week ago!). Continue reading →

Why Blackface Persists and What Historians Can Do to Change It

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Still image from a 2013 scene from Mad Men, in which Roger Sterling (John Slattery) wears blackface.

Cheryl Thompson 

Years ago, my former Banting-postdoctoral supervisor Stephen Johnson, Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Theatre, Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto was to appear on a radio talk show to explore the question, “Why has there been a resurgence in the use of blackface in contemporary society?” The interview never took place because seemingly more newsworthy events took precedence at the time.

Now that I’ve taken up the mantle of doing this work, and reflecting on conversations I’ve had with Stephen about such questions, the reality is, blackface has never gone away.

Films like Tropic Thunder (2008), starring Robert Downey Jr. in blackface as Kirk Lazarus, to a 2013 scene from Mad Men (set in the 1960s), in which Roger Sterling (John Slattery) wears blackface to serenade his fiancée with My Old Kentucky Home (a minstrel song written by Stephen Foster in 1853) at a public gathering. It is always there. And Canadians have never stopped consuming its imagery.

Then, last month, in response to Canadian Lilly Singh’s late-night talk show, writer McKensie Mack told Teen Vogue that the ways in which Singh, as a brown woman, performs Blackness is akin to a minstrel show. “It’s the blackface without the actual painting of the face,” McKensie said, adding, “Black culture is many things, but one thing it’s not is a joke.”

These examples are not from one hundred years ago. They point to the persistence of blackface in the contemporary, and help to contextualize Justin Trudeau’s brownface, a variation on blackface, performed at an Arabian Nights’ themed party in 2001, and the subsequent photographs of him in blackface.

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Hacking History 3.0: Writing History One Wikipedia Page At A Time

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Jessica Knapp and Krista McCracken 

Image of a woman yelling with the word [edit] For the past two years we have hosted a Canada Wide Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Canadian history. This national event has encouraged folks from across Canada to join us in editing Canadian history content on Wikipedia. As of 21 August 2013, there were 113,554 articles on Wikipedia relating to Canada, a mere 1.92% of the articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a place so many Canadians turn to for information but there are so many parts of Canadian History that are not covered on Wikipedia. 

Creating new articles and improving existing content on Wikipedia has the potential to impact what the general public knows about historical events, improves learning experiences, and shapes historical narratives.

As historians and educators, we have skills that can be directly applied to editing Wikipedia. We know how to write clearly and concisely, we know how to do solid secondary source research, and we know how to build citations. All of these skills can be used to improve Wikipedia content.

On October 23, 2019 we will be hosting the third annual Canada Wide Canadian History edit-a-thon. We’re inviting folks from throughout Canada to join us in editing Canadian history content on Wikipedia.  Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 136: Why I Like History & Being a Historian

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By Sean Graham

A cartoon that a colleague sent me depicting a historian.

For the past couple of years, it has become really easy for us historians to be pessimistic. Whether its the job market, shrinking enrolments, or very partisan debates surrounding commemoration, the news surrounding historians has not always been positive. As a result, it can be tough to remember why we got into history in the first place. I have definitely been guilty of this, despite my best efforts to avoid it.

In this episode of the History Slam, I try to feed the positive and talk about the main reasons I love history and being a historian. I talk about the fun struggle of research, the discovery of new stories, and the humanity of studying the past. I also talk about the opportunities that I have been fortunate enough to have from studying history and the relationship between mortality and history.

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The Historical Reality of Queer Families

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Erin Gallagher-Cohoon

In this morning’s post, I focused on how parliamentarians were invoking a sense of history and nationalism to argue both for and against legalizing same-sex marriage. In this post, I explore the history that is often left unsaid in this debate: the history of queer parenting.

By 2005, when many parliamentarians were arguing that marriage rights should not be extended to same-sex couples because they could not “naturally” procreate and raise children, researchers had been studying children raised in same-sex households for decades. The consensus among social scientists was, and remains, that such children are not negatively affected. Children may, in fact, benefit from being raised in non-heteronormative families, with some studies reporting findings of greater empathy and open-mindedness.[1]

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“We as parliamentarians can feel the gaze of history upon us”: Historical Consciousness and Bill C-38, the Civil Marriage Act (2005)

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Erin Gallagher-Cohoon

In 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage. During the House of Commons’ debates on Bill C-38, an act respecting certain aspects of legal capacity for marriage for civil purposes, parliamentarians on both sides argued that what they were contemplating doing was unprecedented; whether a brave or a reckless act, it was historically significant. Fourteen years later, the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples is no longer a contentious issue for most Canadians. This was not, however, always the case.

(Mis)conceptions of history were mobilized during these debates to argue both for and against the bill, and parliamentarians positioned themselves as historical actors in unique ways. These misconceptions are evident not only in what politicians said, but also in what was not said. There was history left out of this debate, whether through ignorance, neglect, or rhetorical strategy. In this morning’s post, I analyze the ways parliamentarians mobilized different conceptions of history in their debates about how marriage should be defined and legislated. In this afternoon’s post, I will elaborate on the neglected history of queer parenting that should have informed this debate more often. Continue reading →

Public Historians at the Playhouse

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Front elevation of the Grade II* listed Playhouse Theatre, Williamson Square, Liverpool, dating to 1868. Internal alterations in 1912 and extended to left in modern style c. 1967. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 Internationa Author: Rodhullandemu

Paul Ward

On a cold Monday morning in late autumn last year, nearly 30 first-year undergraduate History students from Edge Hill University visited the Playhouse Theatre in Williamson Square, Liverpool, UK. They delivered informal short presentations about major historical events including Napoleon at Waterloo, the rule of Margaret Thatcher, the suffragettes, and other historical figures such as Marie Curie.

This was the start of Edge Hill University’s partnership with the Everyman and Playhouse Theatres. Across the year, from autumn to summer, our History students developed a set of resources exploring the considerable changes of the Playhouse and Williamson Square over the last 150 years. Providing students in the Time Detectives module the opportunity to research historical documents such as newspapers, street directories, and maps, this partnership also gave them some time to think about how History is made public. The module introduces students to some of the tools and research methods that they need to develop to become independent historical researchers.

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Serving Indigenous Community-Oriented Scholars in the Ivory Tower

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Brittany Luby

The academic landscape is changing. In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, many Canadian universities have committed to increasing the diversity of their faculty. They have also committed to improving Indigenous programming. Many universities have associated these action items with two goals: (1) combatting the perpetuation of colonial knowledges, and (2) attracting and retaining more Indigenous students. However, if we are to attract more Indigenous scholars, we need to adapt our teaching toolkit and better advise individuals pursuing community-oriented research. Given that Canada is a colonial state with federally-regulated processes for addressing grievances, Indigenous scholars may face unique pressure to conduct research that tracks and responds to historic traumas.

As an Anishinaabe community-oriented scholar, I am struck by advice columns that present higher learning as an individual pursuit. A common response to the question “Should I do a PhD?” is “Deepening your knowledge of a subject you love is an excellent one…. But seeing it as a fast track to a cushy academic job probably shouldn’t be one of them.” The Canadian Historical Association advises prospective graduate students to “select a topic with potential for publication.” This topic should also be “something that interests you, as it will dominate your thoughts for a long time.” Such advice focuses on the individual rather than the community. Advisors speak of self-growth more than community service when discussing the pros and cons of graduate studies.

This advice does not always serve Indigenous community-oriented historians. Continue reading →

Subjectivity and Objectivity: Photography, Family, and the Historian

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Benjamin Bryce

I recently submitted an article manuscript to a scholarly journal about my great-great grandfather, Cooper Robinson, and his photography in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a social historian of migration, I have long been interested in family, but I had never done work on my own family. My personal, albeit distant, relationship to Robinson makes me, the professional historian, uneasy. In the research phase and when writing the journal article, I worried about how my subject position would negatively affect my analysis. Did I care more than I should about one Canadian missionary and his photographs? Was I being sufficiently critical? By looking at just one, albeit large, photo collection, did I miss the opportunity to make a bigger intervention on missionaries and photography?

Cooper Robinson was the first and one of the longest-serving Canadian Anglican missionaries in Japan, and he worked mainly in Nagoya and Gifu between 1888 and 1925. He also left behind over four thousand images of Japan recorded on glass plates, printed pictures, and postcards, which were recently donated by my father’s cousins to UBC Rare Books and Special Collections. Over three hundred of his photographs also found their way into the General Synod Archives of the Anglican Church of Canada and many were published in religious periodicals in the early twentieth century.

The images offer glimpses of landscapes, workers, converts to Christianity, the Robinson family, and other missionaries,but they also tell us about the photographer himself and, as a result, about the life and the history of Canadian missionary activity in Japan. These visual sources uncover angles that text alone cannot. In his lantern lectures that he gave at churches across Canada when on furlough and in the postcards he made and sent across the Pacific, Cooper Robinson curated a visual message of Japan and shared it with thousands of Canadians.

A man with two small children on his back.

Figure 1 – Cooper, Hilda, and Cuthbert Robinson, 1900, Source: UBC Books and Special Collections, John Cooper Robinson collection, RBSC-ARC-1757-PH-2985,

Continue reading →