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,

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Negotiating the Personal: Working with the Diaries of Ida Martin

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Bonnie Huskins & Michael Boudreau

Ida Martin, a working-class housewife from Saint John, New Brunswick, kept daily entries in a series of five-year diaries from 1945 to 1992. These diaries are the basis of a manuscript for McGill-Queen’s University Press that we are currently revising. They are the focus of the reflections here, which also consider the importance of “life writing” and inter-generational writing contributions to what might be termed a family diary project.   Although the diaries provide a unique glimpse into the social and working-class worlds of post-war Saint John, we initially approached the idea of a monograph with some trepidation, for Ida Martin is Bonnie Huskins’ maternal grandmother. This project has become a manifestation of what Ruth Behar calls “vulnerable writing,” in which one feels more exposed than usual by drawing attention to the personal.Historians have been more reticent than scholars in other disciplines to incorporate the “I” into their research and writing. So how have we overcome this dilemma? How have we negotiated our personal connection to the diarist?

Photograph of a woman wearing a dress standing in a garden

Photo of Ida Martin

In our interactions with the diaries, we have found it useful to borrow insights from feminist literary scholars. Helen M. Buss argues that having a “special passion” for the “archives of those close to us…encourages the full revelation of bias.”  Literary scholars also point out that “each of us has a certain autobiographical impulse” and that we have an “ethical responsibility to acknowledge and respect” our personal interactions with the source material.

We have found the concept of “life writing” to be a helpful framework for describing our analysis of Martin’s diaries. Diaries allow readers to “explore how women, otherwise often silent in the public realm, represented themselves through writing.” Life writing is an interdisciplinary feminist approach that encourages the “writing out of a life” as well as the personal connection between scholar and subject. In essence, as Mary McDonald-Rissanen has posited, writing in their diaries allowed women to write themselves into existence. As Ida solemnly noted in her diary following the death of her husband in 1986, “I ate supper alone. Lonesome.” Life writing describes and enables collaboration in two forms: intergenerational and the partnership between the authors of this project.

As the diarist, Ida Martin is the centerpiece of this intergenerational life writing exercise. Continue reading →

Family archives and research at Assumption College’s French Institute

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Leslie Choquette

As director of the French Institute at Assumption College, a research center focused on French-Canadian migration to New England, I have worked with three donors of family archival collections, not just to give their materials a good home, but to use them to shape their family stories for different audiences. This experience both convinced me of the usefulness and significance of family history and gave me the confidence to explore my own family’s history when the opportunity arose to engage with a novel written by a relative of my grandfather.

The French Institute’s archival holdings include collections related to three families that immigrated to New England from Quebec during the period of mass migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Jobin Family Archive concerns a middle-class couple, Joseph and Marie Flore Lapointe Jobin, who moved from Quebec City to Boston with their nine children in 1890.

An envelope with an 1890 postmark and hand written address

Figure 1: Letter of Joseph Jobin to his 18-year-old daughter Anne Marie, 1890, Jobin Family Archive, French Institute, Assumption College.

The collection includes several hundred letters exchanged between American and Canadian family members over many decades as well as a memoir by one of the immigrant children, Marie Eugenie Jobin. The donor, Rev. Philippe Thibodeau, is a grandchild of the oldest son, Theodore Jobin. Father Phil translated family documents and wrote an impressionistic family history for his American nieces and nephews, who never learned French. It is an important narrative as a guide to the collection, but also for anyone wishing to use it for scholarly research. Father Phil never tries to sugar coat his family’s experience. For instance, despite being a Catholic priest, he writes candidly about his beloved Uncle Antoine’s lifelong loss of faith while touring the battlefields of World War I as an interpreter for U.S. General Stanley Ford. Continue reading →

Professional Historians, Personal Histories: A Roundtable on Objectivity, Subjectivity and Family History

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Laura Madokoro

This week, Active History features a roundtable on history called “Professional Historians, Personal Histories: A Roundtable on Objectivity, Subjectivity and Family History.” As the title suggests, the four contributions from Benjamin Bryce, Leslie Choquette, Bonnie Huskins and Michael Boudreau and Brittany Luby focus, from different perspectives, on the question of the relationship between professional historians, family histories and the issues that arise from pursuing research related to people with whom one has a personal connection.

Polish Immigrant Family. Source: Library and Archives Canada, PA-148294. Author’s note: I debated about inserted a picture of either my Rothfels, Manning, Kimoto or Madokoro family here but my own desire for professional distance made it more attractive to select an archival image of a family with whom I had no connections to complement this post.

Any tension in professional historians pursuing research related to family arises from the longstanding expectation in the discipline that historians should be objective and distant from the subjects they study. This distance has often been described in temporal terms, with sideways glances if one proposes to undertake historical research deemed too recent. The craft of history thrives on distance, cherishing the decades and centuries between historian and subject. The idea is that distance enables scholars to better comprehend the historical record, the contingencies that led to particular events and phenomenon, and to assess their full implications.

The celebration of distance means that there is considerable concern when historians propose to undertake more intimate research, research that is literally closer to home. As Benjamin Bryce acknowledges in his essay, “Our discipline clings to a belief in a certain degree of objectivity, and historians shy away from flagging our subjectivity more than other scholars.”

Rather than shying away from subjectivity, or from the topic of family histories, the four essays in this week’s Active History roundtable centre their experiences and approaches as professional historians engaged with family histories. Continue reading →

Biidwewidamoog Anishinaabe-Ogimaakwewag: Mnidoo Mnising Neebing gah Bizh’ezhiwaybuck 2019

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Women’s Leadership Echoing Through Generations: The Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute (MISHI) 2019

by Carolyn Podruchny and Katrina Srigley

Ancestors, elders, leaders, youth, and those yet to come met together for the seven-day summer institute (MISHI) from August 19 to August 25, 2019 on Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island) to explore the theme of women’s leadership. Co-sponsored by the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation (OCF), an organization devoted to Anishinaabe history and culture, and the History of Indigenous Peoples (HIP) Network, a research cluster embedded within the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University, MISHI brought together 50 established and emerging scholars, graduate and undergraduate students, librarians, administrators, Elders, and knowledge-keepers to explore all things Anishinaabe through site visits, lectures, stories, and activities (the video below encapsulated MISHI 2018, see the end of the post for more about the film).

For Anishinaabeg, the gendered world is deeply contextual. Gender roles, experiences, and meanings are shaped by dynamic relationships to land, animals, and spirits, as well as, family, community, and self. To reflect on gender for Anishnaabekwe (Anishinaabeg women) is to acknowledge the complexity of this engagement: gendered meanings rooted in time immemorial, the binary of the colonial and western world, or an individual’s own understanding of their being can be simultaneously present (or absent) and powerfully reconfigured across time and place.

In present day and historic contexts, knowledge, skills, contributions to community, and emphasis on balance can be far more important markers of gender than prescribed meanings. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 135: The Nature of Canada

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By Sean Graham

With the federal election campaign in full swing, the environment has emerged as a prominent issue for the parties vying to form the next government. The news of hundreds of young Canadians pledging not to have children until Canada takes significant steps towards addressing its carbon emissions highlights how environmental policy continues to sway voters.

For environmental historians, the ever-increasing importance of environmental policy has further highlighted the need for all Canadians to better understand the nation’s relationship with nature. The country’s imagination and the image it projects to the rest of the world is one where open space, beautiful vistas, and majestic wildlife are pristine and easily accessible. The reality, however, is not always as worthy of a commercial.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Colin Coates, one of the editors of the new book The Nature of Canada. We chat about the book, its approach to Canadian environmental history, and the process of putting it together. We also talk about the role of nature in informing Canadian identity, understanding the environments role in reconciliation, and Canadians’ relationship with nature.

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Once Were Brothers: Reflections on Rock ‘n’ Roll revisionism

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By James Cullingham

I first saw The Band at Massey Hall in January 1970 when I was a Toronto high school student. It was a highly anticipated comeback show just around the corner from the bars and strip clubs they had played when they were known as The Hawks.

The Band’s sound drew on Appalachian music, Country & Western, Delta and Chicago blues, rockabilly, R&B and Indigenous musical forms that powerhouse guitarist and principal songwriter Robbie Robertson grew up with. Even with all these influences, at its best, this band sounded only like The Band. As Bruce Springsteen says, “they were loaded for bear” because in bassist Rick Danko, drummer Levon Helm and pianist Richard Manuel, The Band possessed three singers who could have sang lead for any group. The combination of their voices is still thrilling decades after they cut The Band’s records. In keyboardist and saxophonist Garth Hudson, The Band also featured a singularly brilliant musician equally steeped in Christian church music, jazz and experimental forms.

In 2019, the saga is being revisited through Robertson’s eyes. Once Were Brothers – Robbie Robertson and The Band directed by Daniel Roher launched the Toronto International Film Festival. It is the first Canadian documentary to be so chosen. Robertson was on hand for the premiere. Toronto Mayor John Tory presented him with a key to the city where he grew up. (Full disclosure: I was briefly consulted by Roher and one of the film’s executive producers Peter Raymont in the film’s pre-production phase.)

Once Were Brothers begins with funky black and white old timey titles on a decayed background. Continue reading →

University Donations and the Legitimization of Far-Right Views

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by Asa McKercher

In 2016, Western University’s Department of History announced the establishment of a variety of graduate awards and scholarships named for Kenneth Hilborn, who had bequeathed $1 million to the university in his estate. A faculty member at Western from 1961 to 1997, Hilborn (PhD, Oxford) was of a generation where one could apparently secure tenure without having published a scholarly, peer-reviewed book. Rather, in the early part of his career, Hilborn’s writing – and here is where I am familiar with him given my research on Canadian international history – consisted mainly of op-eds focused on the Cold War and Canada’s foreign policy. A fixture in Canada Month, a long forgotten conservative – small ‘c’ and quite opposed to the federal Progressive Conservative Party – magazine, he maintained a column offering strident anti-communist positions and criticisms of the Pearsonian status quo (multilateralism, peacekeeping, less than full-throated support for the United States). Hilborn also devoted his time to defending the white minority regimes in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. While his defence of apartheid was ostensibly rooted in his anti-communism, it is telling that his columns on this subject were often reprinted in the Canadian Intelligence Service, a newsletter published between 1951-2005 by Ronald Gostick, whose hatreds included communists, socialists, Pierre Trudeau, Jews, race-mixing, and fluoride.

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Seeing What Lies Beneath Paintings

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By Brett Liem and Michael Robertson

Last year we published a short article in Active History where we described optical techniques for recovering the contrast from faded documents.  A range of light sources from ultraviolet (UV) to near-infrared (NIR), filters, and a camera adapted to form images with light outside or the normal visible spectrum were used to reveal residual ink that was no longer visible due to damage or aging.  This year, we extended the work to investigate the use of similar optical techniques for imaging a pencil sketch underneath a painting.  The inspiration for this work was a paper by Delaney et al [1] where three layers of underdrawings were imaged beneath Picasso’s The Tragedy.

In order to understand the optical properties of the acrylic paints used in this study, optical transmission spectra were obtained from 8 colours of acrylic paint applied to a glass slide as well as from the glass slide itself. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 134: Advocate

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By Sean Graham

Since I started doing the podcast back in 2012, there have been a lot of topics and discussions that have surprised me. Perhaps nothing was as surprising, though, as when I learned of the new documentary Advocate, which premiered earlier this year. The film tells the story of Lea Tsemel, an Israeli lawyer who has spent her career defending political prisoners, including many from Palestine. Her story is one of strength, perseverance, and the power of standing up for principles in which you believe. It premiered earlier this year and has earned positive reviews following its screenings at Hot Docs in Toronto.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with filmmakers Rachel Leah Jones and Philippe Bellaiche about their documentary. We talk about Lea Tsemel, her career, and how she is perceived in Israel. We also talk about the challenges of putting together the film, its narrative structure, and why this story is so important to share.

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