Evania Pietrangelo-Porco
This essay is part of a series.
Last week, I provided an overview of sex work legislation in Canada- heavy-handedly hinting at its cyclical and unchanging nature. Today, I do much the same. I argue that Canada’s “new” sex work legislation is a regurgitation of the laws that have been in place since the 1980s.
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By Sean Graham
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.
Historical Headline of the Week
Timothy Andrews and Susan Colbourn, “Canadians will be glad to know,” Policy Options, November 25, 2021.
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Evania Pietrangelo-Porco
This essay is part of a series.
“…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.
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Sara Wilmshurst
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.
Continue readingBy Alan MacEachern
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.
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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.
Historical Headline of the Week
“6 PWHL teams added to EA Sports video game NHL 25 to be released Dec. 5,” The Canadian Press, November 13, 2024.
Continue readingMack Penner
The opening session of Active History’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.”
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Alvin Finkel
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.
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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.
Continue readingSean Carleton
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.
Last week, Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Residential Schools, released her final report in Gatineau, Quebec.
After years of research and consultation with Indigenous communities, the report, Upholding Sacred Obligations: Reparations for Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada, is now freely available to read. It contains important information regarding the truth about residential schooling as well as 42 legal, moral, and ethical obligations that governments, churches, institutions, and Canadians must meet to implement an “Indigenous-led Reparations Framework for Truth, Accountability, Justice, and Reconciliation.”
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.
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