Episode 41: Closing Federal Libraries, 3 February 2014Â [45:45] Download Audio In 2012, the Canadian federal government began closing and consolidating many of its departmental libraries. More than a dozen research libraries have closed at Parks Canada, Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Foreign Affairs, Citizenship and Immigration, Human Resources and Skills […]
Active History
27 posts
Last night, I appeared on TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin. The episode focused on the question, “Does History Matter?” The premise of the program was that Canadians seem to be dissociated from history and that historical context is not adequately incorporated in public discourse and news media. We were […]
By Andrew Watson, Stacy Nation-Knapper, and Sean Kheraj Last year, Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, published a special series called, “Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues”. Each episode focused on a different contemporary environmental issue and featured interviews and discussions with historians whose research explains the context and background. Following up […]
By Stacy Nation-Knapper, Andrew Watson, and Sean Kheraj Last year, Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, published a special series called, “Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues”. Each episode focused on a different contemporary environmental issue and featured interviews and discussions with historians whose research explains the context and background. […]
By Stacy Nation-Knapper, Andrew Watson, and Sean Kheraj Last year, Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, published a special series called, “Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues”. Each episode focused on a different contemporary environmental issue and featured interviews and discussions with historians whose research explains the context and background. […]
[beforeafter][/beforeafter] Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1926 & ca. 2004. Sources: City of Vancouver Archives, Photograph Collection, Van Sc P66; Stanley Park Ecology Society, Aerial Photograph of Stanley Park, ca. 2004 Stanley Park has changed quite significantly since it first opened to the public in 1888. In my […]
If there was a weekly prize for active historians in Canada, Ian Mosby would have been last week’s winner. Canadian national news media (including print, radio, television, and web) prominently featured Dr. Mosby’s recently published Histoire Sociale/Social History article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities […]
[audio: http://seankheraj.com/newhistorywars.mp3] Audio from Montreal History Group May Day Symposium, 26 April, 2013 [16:56] Download Link The new history wars are not battles over the meaning of Canadian history. They are battles over public financing of historical research and historical preservation. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, librarians, and archivists all have a […]
Hot on the heels of last week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, this week marks the start of the National Council for Public History conference. This year the NCPH meets in Ottawa from April 17-20 and I will be there to present on a roundtable panel […]
“Canada’s history is worth emphasizing,” according to a recent pathetically inoffensive editorial headline in the Globe and Mail. Such an argument is so bland and broad as to be almost entirely pointless. What drove the editorial team at the Globe to boldly stick its neck out with such a feeble statement? The […]
[This article was updated on June 8, 2012] Late Thursday evening on June 7, 2012, the Sundre Petroleum Operators Group, a not-for-profit society, notified Plains Midstream Canada of a major oil pipeline failure near Sundre, Alberta that spilled an early estimate of between 1,000 and 3,000 barrels of light sour […]
The conversation has been ongoing among Canadian historians for the past few years, especially since the federal government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, altered the contents of the official citizenship guide for new Canadians to place greater emphasis on military history and the monarchy while ignoring or […]