Active History

Digital History in the Classroom (For Beginners!)

September 19, 2018 No Comments

Samantha Cutrara

Digital History (or Digital Humanities and/or Social Sciences, more generally) has exciting possibilities for knowledge mobilization, community engagement, and access to primary documents and secondary analysis. I see Digital History (Humanities/Social Sciences) as being more public-facing than traditional engagements in the discipline(s) because of how the emphasis on the digital forces a more networked approach to both the process and product of historical work. Digital history, or #DH, can then be thought of being part of, and developing, a greater conversation between history/historians and the public because digital tools and technologies invite more space for collaboration. As a history education strategist, I find this especially exciting for classroom practice.

York University Library

I recognize, however, that one may have felt like one needed to know programming or code to engage in #DH. But the ubiquitous presence and use of today’s digital technologies means that we can now engage in #DH without needing to know how to program. One could simply “do” DHSS by focusing on the meaning making potential of digital tools and technologies.

Many of us already do this without calling it #DH. When we ask our students to search for a website or an article, to map something on Google, to collaborate on an online document, to participate in a discussion on Facebook – these are all practices that invite students to find, collect, organize, and/or analyze using digital technologies. What makes practices explicitly #DH practices is when we’re thoughtfully and explicitly using these technologies to develop skills of critical thinking, doing, and communicating. This means that students are not just creating digital products but engaging in the process of digital development, argumentation, and presentation. Through the explicit combination of digital tools and technologies with course content, students are experientially learn how to develop and communicate their learning of history with historical evidence and for a wider audience. Continue reading →

A Historian’s Reflections on the 2018 CUPE 3903 Strike

September 18, 2018 No Comments

Picket line at York University’s Keele Campus, March 2018. Photo by *Youngjin, CC BY-SA 3.0

Alban Bargain-Villéger

[T]here is a peculiar illusion incidental to all knowledge acquired in the way of education: the illusion of finality. —R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946).

As a rule, historians do not often question their role as historical agents. While some simply do not think about it, others seem rather reluctant to imagine themselves as objects of investigation and source-producers for future generations of researchers. As (usually avowed) bookworms, we tend to take our bird’s-eye view on the past for granted and are used to distancing ourselves from our topic. Granted, some prominent scholars, like Marc Bloch and, on the Canadian scene, Bryan Palmer, have engaged in historical reflections on a past they themselves inhabited, but these do not include conjectures on the “future perfect” dimension of their present, namely how it might be interpreted by historians in the future.[1] In that regard, the latest strike by York University’s CUPE 3903 has given me fodder for thought. The dispute, which ended on July 25, 2018, was a three-month affair for me, as contract faculty members (aka “sessionals”), of which I am one, went back to work on June 15.[2] During the time spent on the Glendon picket line as a rank-and-file member, I witnessed countless discussions, debates, and observed several changes and continuities with the previous labour disruptions I was involved in, namely the 2008-9 and 2015 strikes. The notes I took during those three months inspired me to write this somewhat unusual, experimental post, which reflects on the dizzying amount of sources that can be produced in a short amount of time.

In our line of work, historiography is often treated as a necessary evil, a distant arena that not only enables us to locate our own work within the discipline, but also implies a certain distance from the topics under study. Simply put, historiography deals with the ways in which historians have conceived of the past, and what sources and methodologies they have used in order to make sense of it. It also investigates the various trends, schools of thought, and debates that have marked the development of history even before it became an academic discipline in its own right. Essentially, historiography straddles the realms of historical investigation and philosophy. Although I have taught historiography for the last three years at York University’s Glendon College, it only recently occurred to me that historians – and historiographers in particular – tend to adopt a totalizing view of the past, often taking an “end-of-history,” Fukuyamesque approach to their subjects. However, Collingwood’s “illusion of finality” quoted in the epigraph to this post does not systematically stem from a temptation or (sub)conscious will to see one’s field or discipline as complete and unalterable. Faced with countless sources and multiple possible approaches to any given topic, researchers have no choice but to resort to heuristic techniques and to pretend that they fully master their subject. Whereas humility is a prerequisite to any intellectual endeavour, timidity can prove as damning. Therefore, I believe that historians should not refrain from getting out of their comfort zone and embrace the present as the antechamber of history. Continue reading →

Historical Practice and Media Engagement

September 17, 2018 1 Comment

Photo by Jeremy Galliani on Unsplash

Krista McCracken

How many media interviews did I think I would do when I started working in an archive? Zero. How many media interviews have I done in the last two months? Eleven. These media interactions have included interviews for television, radio, magazines, newspapers, and online only forums. This work has centered on promoting the work of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre and the recently unveiled Reclaiming Shingwauk Hall exhibition at Algoma University.

This rapid increase of interview requests got me thinking about public historians in the news and ways to work with the media. Both academic and public historians have a role to play in providing important historical context to the general public. Indeed, the mission of Activehistory.ca reflects just that desire as a website that “connects the work of historians with the wider public and the importance of the past to current events.” The desire to extend historical conversations beyond academia are something that fuels Active History, public historians, and many scholars who work in the public sphere. Continue reading →

Say Cheese? The Dilemma of Photography at Traumatic Heritage Sites

September 14, 2018 1 Comment

Visitors in the Anne Frank House. Anne Frank House/ Cris Toala Olivares. CC BY 2.0

Kaiti Hannah

There is an ongoing debate in the field of public history regarding the acceptability of taking photographs in museums. Though history museums seem to be leaning more towards allowing or even actively encouraging photography in their galleries, there are many who object to this phenomenon. Open up any think piece about Millennials and you’re sure to see complaints about those of this generation (of which I am a member) being glued to their phones and constantly taking selfies. Selfies in most history museums seem to me to be fairly unobtrusive. Usually it only takes a few moments for people to pose in front of an interesting scene or artefact and snap a photo or two of themselves or a group of friends.

Many museums are leaning into this. Some museums (including “made-for-Instagram” museums like the New York Museum of Ice Cream or California’s Museum of Selfies), have dedicated “selfie areas” where visitors can pose in or around replica artefacts, try on period costumes, or pose with mannequins representing important historical figures. Photography in many museums is seen as a way to attract and engage visitors (especially younger visitors) and make them active participants in the museum instead of passive observers.

Photography in art museums has been discussed repeatedly, but debates have focused on the damaging influence of flash photography, the interference of photographers on the aesthetic experiences of visitors, copyright concerns, and the concern that those who photograph art see it through a lens, rather than with their own eyes, lessening their own appreciation. But history museums have their own set of issues to grapple with. There may not be such issues associated with many museums or heritage sites, but what about somber or traumatic sites of history? The Anne Frank House Museum in Amsterdam, for example, explicitly bans all photography out of concern that cameras could interrupt visitors’ emotions in the site. Their website also lists preservation of the building as a concern. But certainly, in a place closely tied to the Holocaust, the emotional experiences of visitors should be considered.

Consider sites such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Continue reading →

Not so Accidental: Farmworkers, Car Crashes, and Capitalist Agriculture

September 13, 2018 No Comments

By Edward Dunsworth

Early last month, near the southern Italian city of Foggia, sixteen migrant farmworkers from various African countries were killed in two separate car accidents. In both cases, vans taking migrants back to camp after work collided with trucks carrying tomatoes from the very fields they had spent the day toiling in. The tragedy brought international media scrutiny to the Puglia region’s agricultural sector, where African migrants are housed in squalid camps and ferried from farm to farm by mob-connected recruiters to work dangerous jobs for minimal pay and with few protections. It also sparked resistance from farmworkers themselves, who on 8 August took the roads of the tomato district, chanting “we are not slaves, no to exploitation.”

Continue reading →

Recovering Contrast in Faded Documents

September 12, 2018 2 Comments

By Olivia Raiche-Tanner, Annika Vetter and Michael Robertson

It sometimes happens that ink used in the preparation of documents will fade resulting in reduced contrast between the ink and substrate (paper, parchment, pottery, etc.), often to the point where the writing is no longer readable. Ink fading can be caused in several ways including exposure to light, chemical reactions between ink and paper and/or atmosphere, and water and fire damage. One method for recovering contrast between the ink and substrate is to use imaging techniques involving a variety of light sources, filters and cameras. Even though the ink may be invisible using normal indoor lighting and our eyes, residual ink may absorb, reflect or luminesce light with colours outside the normal range of human vision. In this post we’ll discuss lighting strategies that allow archivists and historians to recover information from their documents obscured by faded ink. Continue reading →

Queering Social Studies Education in New Brunswick

September 11, 2018 No Comments

By Casey Burkholder

During a late fall afternoon of syllabus writing, and distracted Googling, I came across the activist archival work of Dusty Green, who has developed the New Brunswick Queer Heritage Initiative (NBQHI). The NBQHI emerged after Dusty came across pictures donated to the New Brunswick Provincial Archives of rural New Brunswick boyfriends, Leonard and Cub, photographed between 1905 and 1940. Dusty remembers,

“Len and Cub broke things open for me, and got me really excited about queer history. Most provinces have an organization that actively seeks out queer content, because it’s important. It’s been actively suppressed by institutions and society at large for a really long time, so special archives or community archives have had to really come in and pick up the slack…archives are meant to represent the whole of a place. Queer people have always been here, and trying to fill those gaps is tricky work” (Chong, 2018, p. 25).

The practice of erasing the experiences and contributions of queer people in Canadian Social Studies Curricula is not limited to New Brunswick (For example, see also: Burrows, 2013; Crocco, 2001; Graphic History Collective, 2017; Lee, 2007; Maroney, 2016; Temple, 2005). To address the gaps in New Brunswick Social Studies curricula relating to queer and female-identifying New Brunswickers, I have developed a youth-led research project, Where Are Our Histories? (2018-2020) in an effort to queer the New Brunswick Social Studies curriculum. The study builds from the absence of queer and female-identifying people in the narratives that are presented in Social Studies in New Brunswick, and is inspired by activist historians, including the Graphic History Collective (2017), the Calgary Gay History Project (2018), and Dusty Green’s work developing the New Brunswick Queer Heritage Initiative (2018).

In the project, I am looking to learn: Continue reading →

Trans Mountain and the Trudeau Legacy

September 8, 2018 No Comments

By James Cullingham

In 1973 the Supreme Court of Canada sent a fundamental challenge to Canadian governments in its Calder decision. The case focused on the Aboriginal rights of Frank Calder as a representative of the Nisga’a people. The case was argued by Thomas Berger.

While the court was split and the decision did not represent an outright victory, the supremes sent a clear message to Ottawa and Victoria. Aboriginal rights exist in Canada and the crown has a duty to negotiate. Pierre Trudeau is reported to have told a group of chiefs, “perhaps you had more legal rights than we thought you had.” It was an extraordinary reversal for a prime minister who had argued at the outset of his tenure that Aboriginal rights could not be recognized because “no society can be built on historical might-have-beens.”

Last week Pierre Trudeau’s son Justin also experienced a massive set back on Indigenous policy. The Federal Court of Appeal denied approval of construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline. The court declared that the federal government had failed to meet a legal standard of consultation and consent in its dealing with Indigenous groups that will be affected by the project. This is a biting rebuke to a politician who built his brand on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples and recognition of Canadian diversity in a “post national state.” Continue reading →

A monument for the Maroons

September 7, 2018 1 Comment

By Afua Cooper

One walks in vain through the public spaces of Halifax to see a plaque or any other sort of memorialization to the Black presence in the city. Take the waterfront, for example. This was a site to and from which different collectivities of African-descended people—including enslaved Africans, free and enslaved Black Loyalists, self-emancipated Blacks on the Underground Railroad, Caribbean seamen and their families—arrived and departed. Yet there is nothing on that seafront marking the presence of the Black experience. A presence that is at least 300 years old.

The Jamaican Maroons were one such African Diaspora group that arrived in Halifax on the waterfront. Continue reading →

Reconciliation in the Classroom: The #150 Acts as a Pedagogical Tool

September 6, 2018 2 Comments

Les autrices de la liste, Crystal Fraser (droite) et Sara Komarnisky (gauche)

Crystal Gail Fraser and Sara Komarnisky. Photo credit: Sara Komarnisky.

This post originally appeared in French on Histoire Engagée on June 7, 2018. Many thanks to Andrea Eidinger for her work translating this post.

Catherine Larochelle

In the winter of 2018, I had the opportunity to teach HST2444, Autochtones, État et société au Canada at the Université de Montréal. Over the course of the entire semester, I relied extensively on media in both my classes and weekly discussions, including the poster series Remember/Resist/Redraw, and some of the short videos from Wapikoni mobile. Both proved to be extremely useful pedagogical tools that resulted in vigorous, and I would add, necessary, conversations about Canadian historical narratives. Towards the end of the semester, I had my students read the 150 Acts of Reconciliation, by Crystal Gail Fraser and Sara Komarnisky. Originally published on ActiveHistory (and later in French on HistoireEngagée.ca) in summer 2017, #150Acts listed out 150 acts of reconciliation that any Canadians could undertake in the last 150 days of the Canada150 celebrations. As Fraser and Komarnisky noted, the TRC’s Calls to Action were mostly aimed at institutions, and many Canadians did not feel that they applied to them personally. Instead, Fraser and Komarnisky wanted to illustrate that reconciliation can be practiced in different ways and at multiple levels.

Today I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on my experience using this list in a classroom setting, and in doing so explain why I believe that it is such a valuable and useful tool for talking about reconciliation with students, regardless of the subject matter of the course.

Two Exercises for Reflection on Reconciliation

Even though I had required that students read the list prior to coming to class, I began the day’s discussion by distributing hard copies of it, and asking students to reread it and identify which actions:

A – were accomplished within the course

B – had already been completed by reading the list

C – seemed impossible or difficult to complete

D – they did not understand

E – they hoped to complete in the short or medium term.

I had several goals in mind when designing this exercise. Namely, I wanted my students to think critically about the material I covered in class within a larger social and political perspective. My students were able to see how much of the historical knowledge that was covered in HST 244 (for example, in actions #57, #60, #81 or #83[1]) would be required for the decolonization of traditional narratives of Canadian and Quebec history, a decolonization that is essential for true reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island (North America). My students were both shocked, and frustrated, to learn about the many aspects of Canadian history that they had never been exposed to in their previous educational experience. Continue reading →

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