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. Today we are highlighting our most popular post from 2010, written by Karlee Sapoznik this post originally appeared on June 30, 2010. Want to know… Read more »
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… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/History-Slam-126.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham It’s that time of year again where people yell about Christmas being under attack while others scream about how the festive season is too long. Oh, and sometimes people buy each other gifts. The commercialization that surrounds Christmas is a big reason why retailers immediately replace Halloween costumes with Christmas decorations… Read more »
Edward Dunsworth While a small but vocal minority of historians have embraced the use of generative artificial intelligence in their research and teaching,[1] many of us find ourselves trying to hold the pedagogical line against what we perceive as serious threats to students’ ability to learn, reason, and express themselves intelligently.[2] In this post, I share my attempts to “teach… Read more »
Nastasha Sartore Earlier this year, over forty people logged in to Zoom to attend a CHA webinar titled “Generative AI and the Practice of History.” Introduced as a “show and tell” for AI tools and strategies, the webinar included a panel of three expert historians who each presented on a distinct topic related to agentic AI, the tech that’s been… Read more »
Felicia Gabriele The expression, “May you live in interesting times,” seems on its face, pleasant enough. Resembling a well-wish, its sunny exterior deftly cloaks the dark, cavernous depths within. To live in interesting times, is quite simply, to be cursed. To teach American History in interesting times, is, well… akin to having a staring contest with the evilest of evil… Read more »
By Amelia Palacios, Molly Blake, Jenny McBurney and Kirsten Delegard; co-founders of Save Our Signs On the corner of Sixth and Market streets in Philadelphia sits a contested site at the heart of the origin story Americans tell one another. Nearly two decades ago, this particular National Park Service (NPS) site was the focal point for heated debates about the… Read more »
James Cullingham Canada and Mexico approach an historic juncture in their relations with the United States. Both countries face a July 1 deadline over the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2020 under the auspices of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. CUSMA is due to be formally extended… Read more »
Stéphane Castonguay and Colin Coates This is the ninth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posed with NiCHE The relationship between agriculture and the Anthropocene unfolds across a temporal and conceptual spectrum punctuated by the various proposals for a “Golden Spike.”1 At one end… Read more »
Jim Clifford When did the Great Acceleration start? Saskatchewan might hold the answer. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the settler population exploded, and these newcomers broke 20 million acres of prairie grassland into wheat farms. The transformation released vast quantities of CO2 held in the soil and was inseparable from the genocidal dislocation of Indigenous people from their land.1… Read more »
