Active History

The Dark Side of Disarmament: Ocean Pollution, Peace, and the World Wars

December 4, 2018 4 Comments

Alex Souchen

On 11 November 2018 the world paused for a moment of silence to commemorate the end of the First World War. The solemn occasion offered people around the world an opportunity to honour the dead and pay homage to peace, freedom, and reconciliation. The theme of peace will likely continue as a prominent feature at future Remembrance Day ceremonies, as 2019 will mark the Paris Peace Conference’s centenary and 2020 will be the 75th anniversary of the Second World War’s conclusion. With that in mind, it is important to deconstruct the concept of peace and explore the often overlooked “dark side” of disarmament.

Scholars have long recognized that peace is more than just the absence of war. Rather, peace is a process that means many things to different people and societies. Peace does not simply come into existence when wars end, nor is it some default condition or preprogrammed setting innate to all humanity. Instead, peace is a set of choices, actions, and strategies taken over time which are shaped by prevailing political, economic, and social factors.[1] As a result, peace always comes at a cost, though usually its price is measured by the intensity of combat or by the number of casualties sacrificed in achieving it. However, the costs of peace can also manifest in other ways and carry disastrous ramifications for the environment.

A loaded Landing Craft Tank (LCT) on its way to the ammunition dumping ground (Beaufort’s Dyke) off Cairnryan, near Stranraer, Wigtonshire, Scotland. Source: Imperial War Museum (IWM), H 42204

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Calling for Exemplary Active History Projects

December 3, 2018 2 Comments

Over the past year and a half, ActiveHistory.ca has been soliciting donations to support our work. As part of our donations policy, we want to ensure that any surplus in our accounts is repurposed to support active history projects. As such, we are pleased to announce this morning two programs to promote the work of active historians. The first are small grants to support emerging active history projects; the second is an awards program to recognize exemplary practices of active history.

Grants

The purpose of the small grants program is to provide up to $250 to support the development or promotion of a new active history project. These projects can be part of a plan to launch something entirely new or to support a new direction within an existing project.

Applications should include:

250-word description of the project relating it to our mandate
100-word biography of the applicant(s) justifying their role in the project
budgetary statement outlining how our funds relate to other funding for the project

Successful projects will be asked to keep the Active History community up-to-date about their work through our blog as well as filing a short final report outlining how the money was used.

Awards

The purpose of the awards program is to highlight and recognize exemplary practices in active history. We will be accepting nominations for awards (which include a small cash prize) in any one of the following three categories:

Active history in the press: Journalism as active history
Notable contributions to ActiveHistory.ca
Putting active history into practice (model active historians or active history projects)

To nominate an individual or project for an award, submit a letter of nomination clearly outlining the award category, a justification for why the nominee should receive the award, and how the committee can contact the nominee. Except for category #2, nominees need not be associated with ActiveHistory.ca.

The deadline for submissions for both funding programs is 31 December 2018. Queries and submissions can be sent to Thomas Peace at tpeace@uwo.ca.

These support programs are made possible through generous donations from our community. ActiveHistory.ca is entirely run and managed on a volunteer basis with support from Huron University College and the University of Saskatchewan. Donations to our project support the ongoing digital maintenance costs for the project, off-set incidental costs related to the project, and support for our small projects and awards program. Please consider donating to our project.

Open Letter Re: The Closing of the Saskatoon Office of the Provincial Archives at the University of Saskatchewan

November 30, 2018 212 Comments

November 29, 2018

It has recently been brought to our attention that the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan (PAS) has made the decision to consolidate its holdings and close its office in Saskatoon at the University of Saskatchewan. The Saskatoon office has existed as an important part of the University’s research network since the archive board was created in 1945.

The mandate of the provincial archives is to act as a repository of “both in-person and distance research into family history, government policy and accountability, educational history, past eras, business and social organizations, land settlement, local history, geographic places, cultural developments, human rights, community events and provincial celebrations.”

In performing this vital role, the archives allow both researchers, students, and everyday citizens to inquire into the province’s past, in order to examine the “documentary heritage of the province.” Archivists are expertly tasked with the important work of organizing these invaluable documents and making them accessible to the general public. Given the numerous restrictions that exist around existing catalogued material, the closure of the Saskatoon office will make it even more difficult for researchers to access necessary records.

The closure of the Saskatoon location comes on top of the dramatically scaled back hours that the archive has been offering for the past several years. In fact, the reductions in staffing and now the closure of the Saskatoon branch of the archives will have dire consequences for people attempting to access records, which could mean even longer delays in cataloguing new material while also extending the wait times for researchers to access existing records.

Even if this closure allows the Regina office to expand its collection or to hire new staff, students, faculty, and researchers coming to Saskatoon will run into a never-ending series of issues trying to access essential information. Moreover, with the closure of the Saskatchewan Transportation Company, it will be increasingly difficult for researchers to travel to Regina to access essential records.

We urge the PAS to reconsider this decision. The archives are essential for citizens to access necessary public information. Such a closure will be a loss for students, faculty and the general public at the University of Saskatchewan.

Respectfully,

Charles Smith, Associate Professor of Political Science, St. Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan Continue reading →

When to Speak, When to Act: Reflections on the Recent MS St. Louis Apology

November 29, 2018 No Comments

Screenshot of Trudeau Apology for MS St. Louis.

Andrea Eidinger and Laura Madokoro

On November 7th, 2018, Justin Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons and issued a formal apology to the families of passengers of the MS St. Louis as well as the entire Jewish Canadian community for the Canadian government’s decision to refuse to allow the ship to dock in 1939. As historians with expertise in these areas, both of us paid close attention to the apology. While we were pleased that to see the Prime Minister drew attention to this shameful event in our history and acknowledged the long history of antisemitism in this country, we felt that it ultimately rang hollow.

While the Prime Minister vowed to fight antisemitism and to learn from the past, the speech was short on specific details. As Trudeau noted in his apology, even today, Canadian Jews are the most frequent target of hate crimes in this country, at seventeen percent. In the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, Christine Chevalier-Caron and Philippe Néméh-Nombré published a piece on Histoire Engagée, demonstrating how antisemitism is normalized in Quebec and Canada, as well as the prevailing belief that Canada was (and is) a place of refuge for those in need.

In our minds the contradiction is striking and not easily dismissed. How is it that antisemitism can be a quotidian part of life in Canada while the country is also associated with being a place of refuge? How did this fundamental contradiction come to be and what are the implications for the present and future? Part of the answer lies in the ease with which politicians can speak in morally righteous terms when apologizing for historical wrongs and the gulf that often exists between the symbolism of their words, their actions, and the lived experience of those most affected by the subject and substance of their apologies.

We have seen the power of words and actions before, both domestically and on the international stage. While today Canada likes to think of itself as a bastion of human rights, this is not reflective of historical or contemporary reality. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 125: The Trans Generation

November 28, 2018 1 Comment

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By Sean Graham

During its convention earlier this month, the Ontario PC Party passed a resolution calling gender identity “a highly controversial, unscientific ‘liberal ideology'” and pledged to remove all references to gender identity theory from the provincial curriculum. Premier Doug Ford later backed away from the resolution, claiming that it would not become official government policy. but for many the damage was already done. Similar policies have been enacted elsewhere, with plenty of attention on bathroom legislation.

There are plenty of reasons why these bills continue to be tabled, one of which is ignorance of the issues associated with trans rights. That’s why books like Ann Travers’ The Trans Generation: How Trans Kids (And Their Parents) Are Creating a Gender Revolution can be so important. A sociologist at SFU, Travers spent five years interviewing trans kids and their parents in researching the book. The result is a unique insight into the realities of trans youth that is both informative and engaging. At the same time, it looks at the disparities in representation within the trans community and sheds light on how to build more inclusive environments.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Professor Travers about the book. We talk about conducting interviews with kids and their parents, the trans rights movement, and the social markers associated with gender. We also talk about biology and gender, opposition to the trans community, and the importance of treating everybody with dignity and respect.

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Difficult History, Monuments, and Pedagogy: A Response to Levesque

November 27, 2018 1 Comment

By Gabriel A. Reich

In his two part series, posted on Active History earlier this month, Stéphane Lévesque puts forward a “new approach” to considering the role of historical monuments as an object of study in history education. That approach frames the pedagogy of historical monuments as a historiographical problem that can be best approached using the tools of historical thinking.

Following Jörn Rüsen, Levesque described the role of education as helping students become more sophisticated thinkers by drawing together the knowledge of history, and the knowledge of how history is produced and contested. In that framework, the ultimate goal of history education is to move students towards a genetic historical consciousness, marked by a dispassionate understanding of change over time, and a reflective self-awareness of one’s own perceptions of that change.

I agree that goal is a worthy one, and that it is at times a good basis from which to design inquiry into public monuments that represent difficult histories.¹In a time when deeply divisive politics have reduced truth to an expression of identification, the educational goal of moving towards greater care for truth, dispassionate analysis, and critical self-awareness is very appealing, and at times necessary. Moreover, school is, perhaps, the only institution in which the young can apprentice into disciplinary modes of thought that may encourage more empathetic dispositions towards others.

Monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Richmond, Virginia. Photo by Melanie Buffington.

I will argue here, however, that in the case of controversial monuments, pedagogical goals should equally consider how democratic politics work, the affective dimension of history education, and the social, cultural, and political context in which one is teaching.

Ultimately, the reason we teach history in our public schools is to prepare the young to engage with their communities as citizens. That aim presents us with a paradox, however. Continue reading →

From Trudeau to Trudeau: A Violation of the Right to Strike and Bargain Collectively

November 26, 2018 1 Comment

by Christo Aivalis

At the time of writing, Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government is quickly going through the procedural motions to legislate Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) members back to work. While the Liberals’ strong parliamentary majority—along with support from the Conservative opposition on this issue—means such legislation will likely pass, it may be delayed slightly by concerns in the Senate, and by the New Democratic Party, who have pledged support for the striking workers, and have walked out of Parliament in protest of back to work legislation. Regardless, the legislation is expected to pass early this week.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

This move is controversial, for while business groups have claimed deep harm due to the CUPW’s rotating labour stoppages, the Supreme Court of Canada has been clear that the right to strike and bargain collectively are protected under the Charter. Thus, CUPW and the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) have proclaimed that they will take all legal means to resist such legislation which they deem unconstitutional. But beyond the constitutionality of such legislation, it creates potential political difficulties for a Trudeau regime which owes its 2015 victory—at least in part—to strong support from organized labour who backed him as the strategic alternative to the Stephen Harper Conservatives. Indeed, Trudeau has attempted to preserve this relationship with labour—painting himself and his party as their ally in the building of an economy which serves ‘middle class Canadians.’ Legislating away postal workers’ right to strike may not on its own endanger Trudeau, but it will drive some individual and organizational labour support back toward the NDP.

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For a Francophone University in Ontario

November 23, 2018 1 Comment

The following open letter, written by the leadership of the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française, was published in French by Le Devoir on Wednesday and HistoireEngagee.ca yesterday.

With two lines in its 15 November budget announcement, Doug Ford’s government abolished l’Université de l’Ontario français. Tied to the closure of the French Language Services Commission, this act removes the rights Franco-Ontarians had gained in July 2017 to receive postsecondary education exclusively in their language.

As far as we know, nowhere else has this type of decision been made. For the first time, a state has abolished a university due to budgetary constraints. This action calls into question important principles about the role of higher education and the place of community, which lay at the heart of our society.

Far more than an institution that prepares people for the job market, a university is a crucial institution for any society. Continue reading →

Meaning Making in the Digital Age

November 22, 2018 No Comments

Sean Kheraj

This week, I’ve been invited to speak on a panel about digital technologies and open access in the university. I’ll be addressing these issues as they relate to my field of Canadian history.

We have been provided with a series of questions to address. Here are two of the most significant questions that we will consider on this panel:

How does the digital – tools, technologies, methods, instruction, etc – connect with the ways you make and find meaning in your discipline?

Digital tools, technologies, and methods have transformed the discipline of history in three primary areas:

Scholarship
Teaching
Public history

The ways in which the digital has changed history as a discipline are numerous, but I will provide a couple examples in each of these three areas.

Scholarship

Digital technologies have changed the scale of historical research and precipitated a need to develop new digital methods for search, analysis, and communication. These changes begin with the digitization of research sources. In the discipline of history, digitization has had its most transformative effects on primary source research, working with original historical records. Mass digitization projects have created enormous digital archives of primary source records easily available online.

The availability of digitized primary source records has created the need for the development of better systems of metadata for searching these new digital archives. Digital historians are also developing their own custom search engines to meet their particular research needs.

The ability to search and access large digitized primary source collections has created “big data” challenges for historians. Researchers can now collect more records than they have ever been able to before. When once a historian might have scoured a newspaper archive on microfilm using labourious (and arguably inefficient) search methods of manual review, she can now use keyword searching and other digital search methods to acquire mass databases of digital records that exceed a scale that can reasonably be analyzed with traditional close reading methods. Making sense of that massive digital archive now requires what some digital humanists call “distant reading,” the use of machine reading technologies to organize data and even generate analytical insights that cannot be observed via traditional methods. Digital text analysis tools and geographic information systems are two technologies that facilitate distant reading that have become more common in historical research today. Continue reading →

Remembrance Day 2018 and Canada’s First World War Centennial

November 21, 2018 1 Comment

By Nathan Smith

This past Remembrance Day I was at Don Heights Unitarian Congregation in Toronto to speak about the armistice of 1918 and commemoration. I arrived feeling grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts on the centennial of that moment in time, and was surprised to immediately encounter the congregation’s exhibit of items from the era of the First World War. The congregation held an opening ceremony for the displays the day before I visited, and the WWI Keepsakes and Propaganda exhibit received attention from a number of media outlets, including CBC, CTV, Toronto.com.

As the news reports and poster included here reveal, the exhibit is open to the public. I spent some time viewing the displays after my talk and was impressed by the quality and engaging historical content of the material. Some of the material is from a trunk discovered in an attic, full of publications a French teacher collected and used in her classes. Another part of the exhibit is from a family collection of items from First World War veterans, one of whom is William Andrew White, an important figure in the Canadian history of anti-racism who served in Canada’s segregated No. 2 Construction Battalion.

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