The Stress and Anxiety of Surviving Creativity

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We've recently been discussing the benefit of the Canadian Historical Association for bringing together historians and ideas. Having attended this year's meeting in St. Catherines, Ontario, it's clear that the CHA remains a fruitful space for scholars to debate new directions and the boundaries of our profession. To close out our discussion of the CHA, it's worthwhile to raise the darker side of conferences and grad student life. It is a topic that is often discussed behind closed doors or at least discreet whispers: anxiety. For graduate students anxiety is a fact of life and most, if not all, of us suffer from it.

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Political vs. Social: A Brief Overview of the ‘History Wars’

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Traditional narrative histories of Canada were highly political and economic in focus. Historians writing in the first-half of the twentieth century were generally preoccupied with exploring the role of white, Anglo-Saxon male elites in a grand nation-building context. Men appeared in national histories as universal and almost genderless subjects, whereas women, children, non-white Europeans, and Indigenous peoples were often marginalized or completely overlooked. In the 1960s, many historians in Canada turned away from political and economic narratives to investigate the past using methods of inquiry that were first developed in Europe. The rise of ‘new social history’ provided scholars the tools to revisit the past in an attempt to return a measure of agency and voice to peoples and groups that had gone ignored, but there were those who preferred to maintain the status quo. In today’s post we examine the emergence of social inquiry to the professional historical scene in Canada, and the so-called ‘History Wars’ that broke out as a result.

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What is the Canadian Historical Association?

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Next week, the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) meeting is being held in St. Catherines, Ontario. For historians, it is an opportunity to gather and discuss Canada's history, but also to see colleagues who may normally work on the other side of the country. For young grad students, it's an opportunity to network and participate in the world of professional history and the changing landscape of academic scholarship. For non-historians, most of whom have probably never heard of it, it might sound like a boring conference. Next week we are going to offer some on-the-ground coverage of the CHA, but today let's introduce the origins of the organization and explore why it's so worthwhile to historians.

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Canada's Cold War Part IV

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Over the course of the past few months we have examined Canada’s role in the Cold War. Our examination thus far has situated Canadian interests generally within a North American context, where the United States has featured predominantly as Canada’s primary Cold War ally. Today we shift our focus away from North America and the Canada-United States bilateral relationship to examine a unique episode of the Cold War when Canada acted autonomously from its closest postwar allies.

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The Problems and Wonders of Family Histories

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Academics and ordinary people often disagree on what history should include or exclude. Academics have trained for years to gain the authority to teach and write about history. Given the sacrifices we have make to achieve that position, it is perhaps understandable that we defend our status as gatekeepers to the past. Once, when history books were few and far between, so we could reasonably control what “history” was. That is no longer the case. Today anyone can explore the past, sometimes without even encountering a historian. It is less an academic exercise and more a personal journey into a past that is relevant to the individual. One of the most popular ways for non-academics to delve into history is genealogical research and family histories. Why is this aspect of history so compelling?  What does it mean for historians?

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Heartbleed in Context: A Brief History of “Hacking”

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The recent Heartbleed attacks that exposed vulnerabilities in some of the most well-known Internet moguls resulted in one of the most severe security incidents in the history of online data transfer. The Heartbleed security bug, technically identified as CVE-2014-0160 and called “TLS heartbeat read overrun,” is found within the open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library, which is used to provide Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption capabilities for data in transit on the Web. For those of us a little less tech-savvy, Heartbleed provides “hackers” access to information stored on commonly used servers. Of the more popular websites, Heartbleed revealed vulnerabilities in sites including Yahoo!, Pinterest and Reddit, all of which hold personal user information that may have been lost to data theft. In this post, we place the recent Heartbleed attacks in historical context with a brief overview of “hacking” history.

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Judicial Supremacy and the Right of the Individual in Canada

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 A series of recent Supreme Court cases have ruled against the Canadian government. The rejection of their chosen appointee to the Court, Marc Nadon, on constitutional grounds has angered the government in Ottawa. Rumours and allegations of interference by the Chief Justice, Beverely McLachlin, have swirled over the last week. Ultimately, the Conservatives do not like that an unelected judiciary can supersede the democratically elected Canadian government. The place of the Supreme Court in Canada gives it constitutional authority and stems directly from the 1982 Constitution Act. Its section 52 gave the Supreme Court power to strike down legislation that did not align with the new Canadian constitution. To better understand the position of today's government, today we briefly examine how judiciary authority became supreme in Canada.

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At the Intersection of Security and Discrimination: Canadian Immigration and the Case of Irene Rebrin

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Within academic circles, terms such as “nation” and “Canada” are highly contested. They are loaded with historical, cultural and linguistic meaning, and thus welcome deep investigation which often produces heated debate. The history of Canadian immigration policy is a particularly interesting and contested subject that challenges scholars to investigate the meaning of citizenship and national identity. This is perhaps most evident during a unique period in the immediate postwar years, when the proverbial gates to Canada became “vulnerable” to Cold War Communism.

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