More: Energy History and Energy Futures

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This is the sixth post in a collaborative series titled “Environmental Historians Debate: Can Nuclear Power Solve Climate Change?”. It is hosted by the Network in Canadian History & Environment, the Climate History Network, and ActiveHistory.ca.

By Sean Kheraj

If nuclear power is to be used as a stop-gap or transitional technology for the de-carbonization of industrial economies, what comes next? Energy history could offer new ways of imagining different energy futures. Current scholarship, unfortunately, mostly offers linear narratives of growth toward the development of high-energy economies, leaving little room to imagine low-energy futures. As a result, energy historians have rarely presented plausible ideas for low-energy futures and instead dwell on apocalyptic visions of poverty and the loss of precious, ill-defined “standards of living.”

The fossil fuel-based energy systems that wealthy, industrialized nation states developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries now threaten the habitability of the Earth for all people. Global warming lies at the heart of the debate over future energy transitions. While Nancy Langston makes a strong case for thinking about the use of nuclear power as a tool for addressing the immediate emergency of carbon pollution of the atmosphere, her arguments left me wondering what energy futures will look like after de-carbonization. Will industrialized economies continue with unconstrained growth in energy consumption, expand reliance on nuclear power, and press forward with new technological innovations to consume even more energy (Thorium reactors? Fusion reactors? Dilithium crystals?)? Or will profligate energy consumers finally lift their heads up from an empty trough and start to think about ways of living with less energy? Unfortunately, energy history has not been helpful in imagining low-energy possibilities.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been getting familiar with the field of energy history and, for the most part, it has been the story of more. [1] Energy history is a related field to environmental history, but also incorporates economic history, the history of capitalism, social history, cultural history and gender history (and probably more than that). My particular interest is in the history of hydrocarbons, but I’ve tried to take a wide view of the field and consider scholarship that examines energy history in deeper historical contexts. Continue reading →

The Never-ending History Wars

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Allan Greer

How can we understand the past and what lessons does it hold for the present?

This is an issue that has always been contested with different approaches coming to the fore.  From Plutarch in ancient times to Machiavelli in the Renaissance, the predominant idea was that stories of great men from earlier times would guide and inspire elite boys.  The Enlightenment took a broader view of the history of civilizations as a vehicle for understanding humanity without recourse to divine providence.  The 1800s saw the consolidation of nation-states and history was organized more around the nation, often personified in the lives and deeds of kings and presidents.  Over the past century, history diversified tremendously, as researchers broadened and deepened their inquiries into the past, examining political leadership, wars and constitutions, but also economic and social change, the evolution of popular culture, climate change, colonialism, slavery, the situation of women, science, and a thousand other dimensions of the human story.

New angles of vision and new findings about the past can be exciting – even emancipating – for many, but they may seem threatening to those who prize a stable and reassuring sense of history. Continue reading →

Introducing the Beyond the Lecture ebook

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Andrea Eidinger and Krista McCracken

In March 2018 we launched “Beyond the Lecture” a monthly series on ActiveHistory.ca dedicated to teaching Canadian history at the post-secondary level. This series has – and continues to – create a space to expand perspectives, deepen insights, and challenge assumptions about history education. The series has presented us with an opportunity to both highlight the wonderful work already being done by educators across the country while also providing us with a forum to circulate these ideas more widely. At the same time, the series has created an online community where educators can share and circulate ideas, learn from each other, collaborate, and continue to grow.

Today, we are pleased to announce the publication of a new open-access ebook edited collection based on the series, Beyond the Lecture: Innovations in Teaching Canadian History. This ebook is available in several formats for your reading enjoyment, including a fully online version as well as downloadable versions. Our decision to create an ebook was inspired by a desire to extend the life of the original Beyond the Lecture blog posts and to highlight the broad themes which have emerged throughout the series. This open access ebook also developed out of the enthusiasm, insight, and conversations that were sparked by the Beyond the Lecture blog series. This book compiles pieces from the Beyond the Lecture series and the Active History site more broadly, as well as blogs like Borealia, The Otter/La loutre, and Unwritten Histories. It also builds more broadly on discussions taking place at all levels about the value of a university education and the importance of history as a field and a discipline.

Cover of Beyond the Lecture ebook, circle of blueberries on blue and yellow background

Beyond the Lecture ebook, click on cover to visit ebook.

This launch coincides with the launch of Active History’s new Publication section and the new ActiveHistory.ca ebook series. The Active History ebook series brings together some of the best writing published on ActiveHistory.ca in an accessible, open-access format. Its thematic collections focus on connecting historians to the public and the past to current events. A second publication in this series will be launched next week. Continue reading →

What do you do when a course goes wrong?

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By Andrew Nurse

What do you do when a course goes wrong? This is not a title but a question. One that I am asking, perhaps, while treading on thin ice.

There is a chance that a student of mine (perhaps even a student in the course that is on my mind) will read this and wonder if I am talking out of turn. I do feel bad about that and I have thought fairly long and hard before writing these words; I write them, though, because problems keep magnifying and I think this is worth broader discussion, especially as many of us are shifting our pedagogies in response to emerging literature about teaching and learning.

What I want to do with this post is report on that course without, I hope, calling anyone out or intimating that it is all the students fault. Inspired, in part, by Andrea Eidinger’s recent post in Unwritten Histories on rejection, I want to talk about what sometimes seems like another form of rejection: a course that goes off the rails.  More exactly, I want to ask:

  • Is this my fault?
  • What could or should I have done about it?

If you have taught even a little while (as a TA, tutorial instructor, lecturer, running an extra help session, LTA, faculty member), I’m going to gamble that you know the deal. Continue reading →

The Nuclear Renaissance in a World of Nuclear Apartheid

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Castle Bravo, March 1, 1954

This is the fifth post in a collaborative series titled “Environmental Historians Debate: Can Nuclear Power Solve Climate Change?”. It is hosted by the Network in Canadian History & Environment, the Climate History Network, and ActiveHistory.ca.

Toshihiro Higuchi

Nuclear power is back, riding on the growing fears of a catastrophic climate change that lurks around the corner. The looming climate crisis has rekindled heated debate over the advantages and disadvantages of nuclear power. However, advocates and opponents alike tend to overlook or downplay a unique risk that sets atomic energy apart from all other energy sources: proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Despite the lasting tragedy of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, the elusive goal of nuclear safety, and the stalled progress in radioactive waste disposal, nuclear power has once again captivated the world as a low-carbon energy solution. According to the latest IPCC report, released in October 2018, most of the 89 available pathways to limiting warming to 1.5 oC above pre-industrial levels see a larger role for nuclear power in the future. The median values in global nuclear electricity generation across these scenarios increase from 10.84 to 22.64 exajoule by 2050.

The global nuclear industry, after many setbacks in selling its products, has jumped on the renewed interest of the climate policy community in atomic energy. The World Nuclear Association has recently launched an initiative called the Harmony Programme, which has established an ambitious goal of 25% of global electricity supplied by nuclear in 2050. Even some critics agree that nuclear power should be part of a future clean energy mix. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S.-based science advocacy group and proponent of stronger nuclear regulations, recently published an op-ed urging the United States to “[k]eep safely operating nuclear plants running until they can be replaced by other low-carbon technologies.”

But the justified focus on energy production vis-à-vis climate change obscures the debate that until recently had defined the nuclear issue: weapons proliferation. It is often said that a global nuclear regulatory regime, grounded on the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s safeguards system, has proven successful as a check against the diversion of fissile materials from peaceful to military uses. There is indeed a good reason for this optimism. Since 1968, only three countries (India, Pakistan, North Korea) have publicly declared possession of nuclear weapons – a far cry from “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that President Kennedy famously predicted would go nuclear by the 1970s. Continue reading →

Remembering Richard Allen

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By Christo Aivalis

A couple weeks ago, historian of the Canadian Christian left Richard Allen passed away at the age of 90. This piece is not meant to be an obituary, nor a reflection of the deep impact he had upon Hamilton, which he represented as an Ontario NDP Member of Provincial Parliament during much of the 1980s and 1990s. Those matters are covered better in other places. Rather, I want to reflect on Allen’s scholarly influence, as well as our brief—but meaningful—personal interactions.

Allen was raised in a Christian family, being the son of a United Church minister, and this no doubt influenced his academic interests, which took him to Duke University where he completed his doctoral studies. Out of this came his first major work, and one which still inspires scholars of Canadian socialism and Christianity to this day: The Social Passion: Religion and Social Reform in Canada, 1914-28. Published in 1971, it served as a defining work for how scholars understood the figures, events, motivations, ideologies, and theologies which shaped the social gospel movement in Canada. While of an age that many might deem ‘dated,’ this book was deeply influential on my own understanding of the Christian left in this country, which existed in rudimentary form given my interest in key CCF figures like J.S. Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas, but wasn’t developed in a meaningful way until graduate school. In Allen’s writing, I saw figures and movements that—however imperfectly—melded the ideas of secular social justice with a conviction that Christ was sent to earth not only to teach us about the afterlife, but about how to build a New Jerusalem in the here and now.

Continue reading →

Research Diary II: A Small Island in Low Season

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Alban Bargain-Villéger

This is the second and final part of the diary I kept during a research trip to Groix island in December 2018. The first episode covered my journey to Paris and the train ride to Lorient. The following pages begin on the evening of my arrival, after a rough, though bearable, ferry ride across the Courreaux Strait.

Approaching Groix. Author’s photo.

December 9, 2018 – Port-Tudy, L’Auberge du pêcheur, 8:00pm

J. X. [my contact in Groix] is absolutely lovely; a tad territorial when it comes to local history, but very helpful. We had a drink at the Mojo, the bar located on the ground floor of the Hôtel de l’Escale, where I’m staying. My room is on the third floor, with a view on the harbour. At some point, the clinking of cables against masts lulled me into a reverie. I was on the brink of dozing off, when I thought I could make out “Jingle Bells.” Continue reading →

A Narrow Vision: Politics in Canada in Historical Perspective

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By James Cullingham

As the imbroglio concerning Jody Wilson-Raybould, Jane Philpott and the Liberal government emerged, an immediate wave of sentiment broke across social media. The panicky message can be summed up:  “In light of this scandal, Canadians will inevitably end up with an Andrew Scheer government.”

This type of thinking reflects a reductive historical and political fallacy that assumes Canadians have only two choices.

It also seems that many cannot distinguish the Conservative Party’s identity from that shaped under the tenure of Stephen Harper. The assumption that any conservative government is a right wing threat to Canadian civility seems baked into the perception of many who consider themselves progressive.

Actually it is too early at present to discern whether Scheer will discover electoral good sense and distance himself from the harder social conservative elements of his Conservative party as October’s federal election nears. From a historical perspective, however, the belief that a Liberal regime is automatically more righteous than a Conservative one is based on thin historical evidence. Continue reading →

Using Infographics to Teach about Canadian History

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Krista McCracken

As part of my work at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC) I’ve recently been working with a group of colleagues to update some of our handouts, educational material, and brochures. As part of this work we’ve created promotional banners, postcards, brochures, and an infographic.

The infographic we created (below) was designed to discuss the history of the Shingwauk Residential School in a way this is accessible to a wide range of audiences. We aren’t the first organization to consider using infographics to teach about Residential Schools. For example, the Alberta Teachers’ Association created one in 2014 and Athina Lavoie created a “Canada’s Indian residential schools by the numbers” infographic in 2018. Indeed, infographics have become an increasingly popular education and outreach method over the past decade.

Shingwauk IRS infographic

Creating good infographics is challenging. Infographics often condense large amounts of information or statistics and a lot of choices have to be made around content and presentation. Infographics are a type of data visualization which create narratives.

In the case of the SRSC infographic we wanted to communicate important information about the Shingwauk site, but we also recognize that this infographic will work best when contextualized. We intend to use it accompany other educational resources and programming. The legacy of Residential Schools is a complex and challenging topic that can not be neatly summarized by an infographic. Continue reading →

Research Diary I: A Small Island in Low Season

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Leaving Lorient (To the left, Keroman Submarine Base). All photographs by the author.

Alban Bargain-Villéger

This post consists of excerpts from the research diary I kept during my research trip to Groix, France, in December 2018. Groix is a small island off the coast of Brittany, France’s westernmost region. This investigation into Groix’s understudied past is part of a long-haul project on three small northern European islands that I presented in a previous post. I am currently in the final phases of research for the Groix portion of the trilogy, as I have now read all of the secondary literature on the topic and scoured several Parisian and Breton archives. After another trip to the departmental archives (in Vannes) and the Lorient harbour and navy archives (also located in Lorient), I believe I will have enough material for a solid, well-documented book.

By the summer of 2018, I finally managed to scrounge up some funds for a one-week trip to the island; enough time, I believed, to peruse or photograph an unknown number of documents stored at the bottom of the town hall’s cupboard. Thus, I was well aware, before I even began writing the following pages, that a trip to Groix’s barely catalogued fonds would be a leap into the unknown. While every archive is a world of its own, ridden with idiosyncrasies, any well-organized researcher should not experience any major issue navigating such places, as long as he/she abides by the local etiquette. In the present case, however, it took me approximately two years to find out who was in charge of the municipal archives, only to realize that they were, in fact, the island’s best kept secret.

For the purpose of full disclosure, I would like to clarify that the idea of publishing excerpts from my research diary preceded the writing process. Although I tried my best to let the words flow, the outcome could be anything but the result of spontaneity. I could not adopt a stream-of-consciousness approach either, as this was intended as a research diary, not a creative writing experiment. Thus, I would not be surprised if some found the published version somewhat contrived. In my defence, I will simply answer that many primary sources historians use are also written with ulterior motives. In that regard, I plead guilty as charged: this report is artificial and has been proofread and amended. In addition to correcting the occasional typo or awkward sentence, I have taken the liberty of discarding the few paragraphs that have nothing to do with research, or history in general. In addition, although the “spirit” of the diary has been preserved, I must admit that I did censor some of its contents. Just as historians frequently engage in cherry-picking, source producers naturally select (more or less consciously) what they want to record and share with others.

That being said, I deemed it appropriate not to censor the few contemplative, frivolous moments that punctuate the diary. Since the present post purports to give a general idea of what a research trip looks like, it would have been unfair to portray historians as workhorses unconcerned with the real world. Also, not all researchers are alike, and no one trip to the archives is the same. The following pages reflect my own experiences and how I go about my business during the research phases of my projects. From the discussions I have had with various historians, I came to realize that each one of us has their own routines and strategies, which not only stem from our respective personalities, but are also shaped by the subjects we choose to investigate.

By now, you have probably realized that this diary should be treated like any other source. First of all, you should not take what follows at face value. Testimonies often are impressionistic, even when they aim for objectivity. Emplotment is, at the end of the day, a necessary evil. Secondly, please keep in mind that three simultaneously interdependent and autonomous dimensions are at play in every source, namely, (1) the intentio auctoris (the author’s intention), (2) the intentio operis (the work’s intention, or how a text can take a life of its own), and (3) the intentio lectoris (the reader’s intention).[1] While I was always aware of (1), the power and personality (so to speak) of (2) occurred to me while copying the text. As for (3), it is now your business. Continue reading →