Reading None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, Pelee Island. Photo by author. Krenare Recaj In the third year of my undergrad, I was sitting beside my friend Jeremy in a lecture for the class America: Slavery to Civil War. The professor was going into explicit detail – showing photos and drawings – of the torture enslaved people in America were subjected to. The logic was that these details were necessary to properly appreciate the gravity of the suffering. Sitting in the same place I sat no matter the class – last row, closest to the exit – I could see the laptop screens in front ..read more

Active History and Know History are partnering to publish Active History: Indigenous Voices. Know History is generously sponsoring a series and providing honoraria for an editor and up to four contributors. The editor will receive $500 and each contributor will receive $125. We invite proposals from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis editors and authors from all educational and occupational backgrounds. Proposals should include a series title, a one-paragraph statement explaining the theme and format of the series (essays, artwork with commentary, etc.), and short biographies of the editor and e ..read more

Paul McGuire This is the sixth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. Photo by author. At least twice a year, we take a trip to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. One of the most beautiful parts of the valley is Grand Pré and Hortonville. From here, you can see Blomidon and the vast expanse of the Midas Basin. Hortonville is also one of the ports used during the British expulsion of Acadians in 1755. Just down the road, you can see a Parks Canada plaque commemorating a vicious massacre of New England troops by French and Mi’kmaq fighters in the dead ..read more

By Allan Greer Libraries might be considered repositories of information, but archives are something else.  They collect and preserve documents – unpublished, one-of-a-kind texts such as letters, court records and business accounts – as well as images, maps and sound recordings.  It is all very raw material, and it tends to be biased, partial and incomplete; somewhat like archaeological artifacts, these sources provide scholars with clues about past events, which is not exactly the same as information. Historians need to know what they are looking at, where it comes from and how it i ..read more

Museums Victoria via Unspash Sara Wilmshurst First off, I’d like to bless the Internet Archive for preserving human folly. The paper under review today has been scrubbed from its original home but lives on in infamy through the Wayback Machine. I am speaking of “On the Challenges of Dating and Marriage in the New Generations,” published under the name of Benyamin Gohjogh. It made the news recently because Gohjogh lost his sessional teaching positions at Waterloo and University of Guelph after students raised concerns about the paper, which argued professors should be welcome to date their st ..read more

By Andrew Nurse Sackville, New Brunswick’s, George F.G. Stanley Canada 150 commemorative sculpting would be an odd candidate to be part of Canada’s statue wars. And it isn’t. To the best of my knowledge, no one has asked that the statue be removed. It has not been sprayed with graffiti or knocked it over. Photo by author Precisely the opposite. Rather than becoming the subject of criticism, local culture seems to express care and concern for the statue by dressing it up, adding a hat on cold days, masks during COVID-19, and scarves, among other articles of clothing. This shows an odd but int ..read more

By Allan Greer Recently I had occasion to visit Library and Archives Canada.  Marching up Wellington Street, I noticed my heart beating a little faster as the historical juices began flowing through my researcher’s veins.  Even at the time, I recognized this pulse of excitement as a throw-back, a residual thrill from a time long ago when I was an eager graduate student discovering the wonders of dusty manuscripts; more recent visits to the federal archives had been anything but thrilling. Indeed, as I checked in at the desk and surveyed the vast marble lobby, I realized that I had be ..read more

Street crowd reflecting in the polyhedral mirrors of Tokyu Plaza Omotesando, Harajuku station, Tokyo, Japan, Wikimedia Commons. Daniel R. Meister In a recent op-ed, Stephen Marche claims “the foundation of Canadian multiculturalism rests on a basic piece of common sense: Leave your shoes at the door.” Picking up on this thread, Jack Granatstein countered that multiculturalism as a policy actually consists of encouraging immigrants to leave those shoes on—and march right into a polling booth. Multiculturalism is about buying votes, he suggests, and there is little effort being made to “turn i ..read more

Julia Stanski I discovered Lillian Rose Adkins on September 27, 2023. Although I hadn’t known her name, I’d been searching for this woman for at least five years. Others had been looking for much longer. She’s been dead for more than half a century, but Lillian might be the key to a representational puzzle that has obscured her—and women like her—for far too long. I’m a Master’s student in Canadian women’s history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, as well as a living history interpreter at Fort Edmonton Park (FEP). This site represents Edmonton in four different eras. In the 1905 secti ..read more

Cecilia Butler, working as a reamer in the Small Arms Ltd. section of the John Inglis Company munitions plant in Canada in 1943. Photo credit: National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque / Library and Archives Canada / e000761869. Tifanie Valade This is the fifth entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here. While history classes are often viewed as a neutral, apolitical venue for the transmission of “facts” about the past, history education is in fact a value-laden enterprise that seeks to construct and communicate overarching national narratives and national ..read more