Historian, Meet Archivist: Researching the History of Complex Organizations

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Today’s post is cross-posted in partnership with Aidhistory.ca

Wartime found Government employees working in poorly-lit, crowded offices such as the Records and Files Department of the Experimental Farm. Source: Library and Archives Canada/National Film Board of Canada fonds/a144872

Jill Campbell-Miller, PhD and Ryan Kirkby, PhD, MLIS

In general, historiography and historical methods courses do a good job in teaching students to be skeptical of their sources. As undergraduate and graduate students, we learn to scrutinize what we read, hear, or see. Yet while historians may be familiar with how to critique the sources themselves, rarely do we look up from a given document and examine the place where it is located, or think about how the document arrived in the archives. This is particularly true of written documents that emerge from government. Historians do not always critically engage with the organizational structure of the files, or think about how a certain structure came into being. This might seem somewhat “inside baseball” to historians, who usually leave such concerns in the hands of archivists. Exploring organizational descriptions on archival websites is not for the faint of heart, and rarely make much sense to the untrained observer. But considering these issues is important, because the history of how government departments change over time influences how documents come to be organized, influencing the history that emerges from this research.

The history of Canadian Official Development Assistance (ODA) in Canada provides an excellent example of how this is true. Cranford Pratt, David Morrison, and more recently, Stephen Brown, have all written about the historical and current difficulties in maintaining policy coherence regarding Canadian ODA policies.[1] Political self-interest and/or ideology have often dictated the focus of Canada’s aid programs, and changes in government have naturally affected their policy priorities related to aid. Changing policy priorities have affected government’s organizational approaches as well. When Canada’s first major aid program, the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia, began in 1951, aid was managed by the department of trade and commerce, with significant policy direction from the department of external affairs and the department of finance. There were other departments involved in the technical assistance aspect of aid as well, including the departments of agriculture and national health and welfare. In 1960, the External Aid Office, located in the department of external affairs under a Director General, replaced this loose organizational structure. In 1968, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s government founded the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Of course, most recently, the Harper government did away with CIDA entirely, and integrated international development programming back into the much re-named foreign affairs portfolio, currently called Global Affairs.

Every researcher expects a learning curve when approaching a subject, but complicated organizational histories provide a unique challenge to researchers. Continue reading →

Debating the Holocaust? The Role of Debate in History

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By Andrew Nurse

Should one “debate” the Holocaust? The answer, according to failed PC London West candidate Andrew Lawton, is yes.

In an interview that surfaced shortly before the recent Ontario provincial election, Lawton said that he fully understood why Jewish people would find this idea of debating the Holocaust revolting and he would, too, if he were Jewish. But, he continued, he sure hoped that students would be encouraged to engage in this debate.

Lawton’s perspective is connected to the broader cultural transformation of conservatism — a political movement with which he self-identifies —  and that is important. My goal, however, is not to address that ideological perspective. Instead, I want to focus more narrowly on the historical educational issue Lawton raised: should we debate the Holocaust? What does it even mean to debate the Holocaust? What are the merits or demerits of his position?

The point I want to make is this: whatever Lawton’s political and social views, what is at stake in his comment is an educational matter related to history. What is at stake is how we approach the past, education, teaching and learning. And, on this level, Lawton is 100% wrong. The burden of this post is to explain why. Continue reading →

Thinking about History Curriculum in Canada (while also recognizing the informal curricula we carry)

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By the end of this week, students across Canada will be out of school. During their school year, students in Canada would have learnt from the provincially mandated curricula as well as professional attempts at engaging in work of truth and reconciliation. However, while we can talk about the curriculum in our schools, any formal education young people have gained have been augmented, challenged, reinforced, and/or solidified by the many points of informal curriculum that will have students received outside or adjacent to the formal curricula. In other words, along with the formal curriculum, students in Canadian school would have also learnt from each other, their teachers, their community members, their parents and guardians, the media, and their political leaders. And, without a doubt, the current events, or even just the air around current events, that are leaving so many of us, adults and children, with more questions than answers.

“Turban, Eh? Edmonton,” from the Sikh National Archives of Canada (July 17, 2017)

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The Critically Uncritical Remaking of Churchill

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Erin Isaac

Filmmakers make bad historians. While it is well understood that historically-based movies should not be taken for fact, film continues to play a major role in forming public perceptions of the past. Historians, realizing this phenomenon, often get caught up in the details of where film goes wrong, without fully understanding why these flaws matter. The mistakes made in movies are especially significant in films about politicians, like 2017’s Darkest Hour and Churchill, because they suggest that “Big Men” make history while the rest of the world watches and supports them. This fictional structure influences dangerously how we engage with today’s political leaders.

According to Winston Churchill’s critics, Britain’s 61st Prime Minister was “aristocratic, high-handed, self-centred, energetic, impatient, inconsistent, prone to rhetoric… [and] most stubborn.”[1] Alternatively, Churchill’s champions have called him “a true case of genius” with “shattering” personality. [2] To this day, Winston Churchill remains one of the most written about historical figures of the twentieth century. In addition, the Prime Minister has appeared in over eighty films in the past eighty years.  Two new films, Darkest Hour and Churchill, hit the big screen in 2017 and focused on Churchill’s actions during the Second World War. In the wake of a year that saw the rise of the far right in countries including France, Australia, and the United States, it is unsurprising that audiences would respond to films about one of history’s most famous antifascists. However, Churchill’s re-creation on film misrepresents his actions and popularity, and diminishes the public’s place in the narrative—putting power solely in the hands of an old, rich, white, stubborn man. Sound familiar? Continue reading →

The Treaty of Cession: Historical Origins of a Very British Instrument of Dispossession

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By Allan Greer

The crucial passage in the written texts of each of the “numbered treaties” passed in the Prairie West states that the Indigenous signatories “cede, release, surrender, and yield up to the Government of Canada for Her Majesty the Queen” a designated region.  (Carter, 121).

If the language sounds a little like a real estate transaction, earlier treaties concluded in southern Ontario are even more frankly commercial.  The 1806 “Head of the Lake” treaty was signed by ten “principal chiefs,” each of whom received five shillings, acknowledging that they, “have bargained, and sold, and by these presents do, and each of them doth bargain and sell unto His said Majesty” a tract of 85,000 acres.  Now, apart from the fact that misrepresentation was common and government rarely lived up to its treaty obligations, there is something fundamentally wrong with this picture.  As numerous Indigenous commentators have pointed out, Indigenous peoples did not see land as a saleable commodity; their languages did not even have words to convey the sense of “ceding” or “selling” territory: thus the treaty text cannot have faithfully reproduced the oral agreements that were negotiated.  Citing their oral traditions, Plains Cree and other First Nations insist that the land was never surrendered. (Venne, 192-93)  This doesn’t look like a minor misunderstanding, but rather a fundamental disconnect: government negotiators were acquiring territory that their Indigenous counterparts were not giving up. Continue reading →

On Safety

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Valerie Everett/Wikimedia commons

Laura Madokoro

There are three things going on in my world at the moment. The first is that I am slowly but surely reading Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City about the lives and deaths of Jethro Anderson, Curran Strang, Robyn Harper, Paul Panacheese, Reggie Bush, Kyle Morrisseau and Jordan Wabasse in Thunder Bay from 2000 to 2011. It is a book that is so devastating that I can only bear to read little bits of it at a time, which is a privilege given that the families, friends and communities of these children have no choice but to carry their grief and anger with them always.

At the same time, I am following news of migrant crossings away from official border posts into Canada from the United States because it is the only way that people who want or need to make claims to protection under the 1951 Convention Related to the Status of Refugees can do so under the restrictive terms of the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA) developed by the governments of Canada and the United States in 2002 and put into operation two years later.

The final thing I am doing is watching the emerging news coverage of how refugees are being treated in the United States, which as a reminder is a signatory to the STCA that assumes both Canada and the United States are safe places and that if a refugee claimant is refused in one country, they should also be refused in the other. In the United States, as I write, children are being separated from their parents and put into privately-run detention centres about which the American Civil Liberties Union has expressed serious concerns in a clear effort by federal authorities to discourage people from making claims to protection. And in a startling reversal of decades of work globally on the particular needs of women for safe refuge, the Attorney General of the United States has declared that domestic violence and gang violence are not grounds for asylum in that country.

All of this has me thinking about the nature of safety, in the past and present. Where have people felt safe? When have they felt safe? And from whom or what? Continue reading →

From Early Canada to Early North America: Why We Stopped Teaching History before the 1860s from a National Perspective

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By Thomas Peace

Let’s begin with a question: without help from the internet, can you name the person who founded the city of Chicago?

I suspect that for many of our readers, the answer is ‘no’.

“Founders” are not terribly in vogue these days, anyways.

It was, however, the man who founded Chicago that helped me make a profound shift in how I teach Canadian history. Last month, at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting, I presented about this curricular shift, arguing that people like Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the putative founder of Chicago, help us rethink early North American history, moving us away from national frameworks. The feedback I’ve received since that presentation has been very fruitful and quite diverse, so I’ve decided to post the talk here to continue the conversation.

Bust of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, next to the DuSable bridge in downtown Chicago. (Photo by Groov3, Wikimedia Commons)

The life lived by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable has all the necessary components for the pre-Confederation Canadian History survey course. Continue reading →

Podcast: We Get a Piece and We Get a Say: Approaching Confederation from the Perspective of the Métis Nation of the North-West

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On April 22, 2017, Jean Teillet delivered her talk “We Get a Piece and We Get a Say: Approaching Confederation from the Perspective of the Métis Nation of the North-West.” The talk was part of “The Other 60s: A Decade that Shaped Canada and the World,” a symposium hosted by the Department of History at the University of Toronto as part of its Canada 150 events.

This talk is part of our History Chats podcast series. You can subscribe to the History Chats feed wherever you get your podcasts.

Remember/Resist/Redraw #15: Class Conflict in 1920s Cape Breton

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This spring, the Graphic History Collective re-launched Remember / Resist / Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project as an ongoing series.

Earlier this week, on William Davis Miners’ Memorial Day (June 11), we released RRR poster #15  by Karen Jeane Mills and David Frank that looks at class conflict, including the killing of coal miner William Davis, in 1920s Cape Breton.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for radical change. Learn more about how you can support the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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Curious about Learning: Teaching Postcolonial Theory to First-Year History Students

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Curious George sitting on a chair and trying on clothing.

Curious George illustrations.

Susan Joudrey

I like theory, but I know not everyone feels this way. Undergraduate students, in particular, expect theory to be dry or difficult even if they’ve never actually encountered it. In order to ease students into theoretical practice, I’ve relied on active learning strategies to teach postcolonial theory in a first-year Canadian History course.

Through a number of iterations of teaching Canada: Confederation to Present, I completely reorganized the course to focus on colonialism as a central theme. One of my course outcomes is for students to be able to identify the effects of colonialism in Canada and recognize how colonial assumptions impact society. I assess this outcome at various points during the course through primary source analysis and with the inclusion of an essay question on the final exam that requires them to describe aspects of the colonial “civilizing” process using examples from the course. I provide them with four different possible essay questions and ask them to respond to two. The last time I taught this course almost every student elected to write an essay about Canadian colonial legacy in the mid-19th and 20th centuries.

For most of the students, this course is the first time they’re required to consider the long-lasting effects of colonialism or engage with postcolonial theory. I also found that many of them really didn’t understand the mechanisms of racism and weren’t able to identify why something might be racist. I decided to devote a class early in the semester to focus on critical race theory and postcolonial theory, and then I reinforced these concepts throughout the course.

There’s a general misconception that in the first year we need to teach students in a way that relies on the first two levels of Benjamin Bloom’s cognitive learning domains, remember and understand, both of which depend on an ability to recall information rather than apply knowledge.[1] Typically this approach to using Bloom’s theory perpetuates the idea that foundational learning in introductory survey courses is primarily achieved through passive reception of information and assessed using methods that rely on memorization. Sometimes our classes provide many opportunities for students to remember or understand but ignore the possibility for application or creation. When you consider how theory is learned or understood, the need to use it becomes even more apparent. The ability to recall or provide a definition of a theory is very different than attempting to apply it.

So, how do you teach postcolonial theory to first-year undergraduate students? By making it accessible. Continue reading →