Unwritten Histories

The Unwritten Rules of History

Category: Historian’s Toolkit (Page 1 of 2)

Wet’suwet’en Pipeline Dispute PowerPoint Presentation

February 21, 2020 / / 1 Comment

Title slide of a presentation on the Wet'suwet'en Pipeline Dispute in Historical Perspective

Hey Folks!

I’m currently teaching a course on Public History at Concordia University. On Thursdays, we do workshops where we learn hands on skills, and I give my students the chance to decide the topics that we cover. This week, they wanted to learn more about the Wet’suwet’en Pipeline Dispute. And as I was writing it, it occurred to me that there might be other people who might want to also cover this topic in class, but don’t know where to start or don’t have the time to do the extra research. So in the spirit of sharing, I have made the full PowerPoint, including notes, available below.

This PowerPoint presentation covers the following subjects:

  • Settler Colonialism
  • Treaties and the Indian Act
  • Background Information
    • Who are the Wet’suwet’en?
    • Delgamuukw vs. BC
    • Hereditary chiefs vs. elected band councils
  • The Conflict
  • The RCMP and Indigenous Resistance
  • Conclusion

And also includes a list of sources and additional resources.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind, however.

 

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New Project: A Crowdsourced List of History Journals

June 25, 2019 / / 0 Comments

If you’ve been reading this blog for quite some time, you may remember that back in September 2016, I put together a guide to peer-reviewed Canadian history scholarly journals.My goal in creating this guide was to respond to frequent student questions about how to determine whether a source they were using for their paper was in fact peer-reviewed. Several students have specifically requested a list of journals that frequently published Canadian history material as a useful tool.

Creating additional guides for other areas has been at the back of my mind ever since. I even got a request for one on medical history that I totally intend to get to one of these days. But as is so often the case, other issues took precedence, and before I knew it, it was June 2019. I had been throwing around the idea of creating a guide for journals covering North American history before 1800-1850. But as anyone who specializes in this area knows, trying to define the parameters of such a list is a potential nightmare. When I was discussing this with Keith Grant, Stephanie Pettigrew, and Daniel Samson, Stephanie raised the idea of a crowdsourced a list. Basically, we would provide the spreadsheet, and would encourage folks to help fill it in however they would like. And so, a new project was born! And don’t worry, we will be coming out with the guide soon, along with a lengthy discussion about why it’s so hard to define.

 

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Cross Posting: From http://www.lhtnb.cato https://archives.gnb.ca/lhtnb/: Please Adjust Your Bookmark

September 26, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Note from Andrea: We are really excited to bring you a very special blog post, which is crossposted over on the Acadiensis blog!

 

Labour History in New Brunswick Logo

By David Frank

In a recent post Andrea Eidinger and Stephanie Pettigrew discussed the problem of maintaining legacies in the age of digital history. The title of their discussion was disconcertingly ominous: “Land of the Lost: Digital Projects and Longevity”. Links fail. Websites disappear. Languages change. Projects run out of money. Programmes go obsolete. Servers leave you behind. There are a surprising number of breakdowns on the information highway.

Spoiler alert here. The warning is that this story has a satisfactory ending.

 

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Hacking History 2.0: Wikipedia As Education And Public Engagement

September 4, 2018 / / 0 Comments

A woman shouting - promotional image for the Canadian History Wikipedia Edit a Thon.

Note from Andrea: And we’re back! If you are a long-time reader of Unwritten Histories, you know that last year I helped Krista and Jessica promote the first Canadian history Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. So of course I’m super excited to do so again! While I am not teaching this semester, last year my students participated in the Edit-a-thon and really loved it. I’ll include some more information about what I did at the end of this post.

In October 2017 Krista McCracken and I hosted the first Canada Wide Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Canadian history. This national event encouraged folks from across Canada to join us in editing Canadian history content on Wikipedia and much to our surprise they did!

The event resulted in 12.9K words being added to Wikipedia, 259 total edits being completed, over 36 editors contributing, and 60 articles being edited. We had numerous classes, community groups, and individuals participate from all over Canada. You can read a full summary of the event on Krista’s website.

I was particularly thrilled to have Grade 9 students from Connect Charter School in Calgary, Alberta participate in this event. Educators Chris Wilding and Jaime Groeller and students Lucas Braun and Benjamin Green wrote about and shared their experiences in an article on CanadasHistory.ca.

On October 24, 2018 we will be hosting the second annual Canada Wide Canadian History edit-a-thon. We’re inviting folks from throughout Canada to join us in editing Canadian history content on Wikipedia. Keep reading to learn about what an edit-a-thon is and find out how you too can participate

 

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The Hidden Narratives of Clandestine Communities: Digital History and the Religious Minorities of New France

August 21, 2018 / / 1 Comment
Painting by Henri Motte, Siege of La Rochelle

Cardinal Richelieu in Henri Motte’s “Siege of La Rochelle,” 1881

Note from Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome to the third and last of our 3-part series, based on a panel presentation given this past spring at the Canadian Historical Association annual conference in Regina, SK! You can read the first paper of the series here, and the second part here. Today’s essay is mine! It feels strange introducing my own essay, so without further ado, please enjoy this short analysis of how the digital humanities helps break away from traditional historiographies and shed light on clandestine communities of New France.

Note from Andrea: Stephanie is too modest! I’m super pleased to have the chance to share some of her great work with you! Enjoy!

 

French Canadian history has always been locked in a struggle to define its history and separate it from its nationalism. Even when discussing the origins of French settlers in New France, Leslie Choquette had to contend with a nationalist mythology which contradicted her own work:

“Yet for right-wing Frenchmen writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, French Canadians (or those who resisted the gathering exodus to New England, at any rate) embodied the classical values of a less decadent age: travail, famille, patrie, and, last but not least, the Catholic Church. Such writers, in their zeal to reclaim Québec’s virtuous habitants for la France profonde, insisted on the rural and Catholic provenance of the French-Canadian ancestors.[1]”

The history of Huguenots[2] is long and complicated – too complicated to discuss here in any depth. For a long time, many people believed that there were no Huguenots in New France, a viewpoint that is still held by some. This attitude in due in large part to the French government’s active hostility against Huguenots as well as their refusal to allow anyone not of the Catholic faith to settle in New France. While Huguenots were guaranteed certain rights by the Edict of Nantes (1598), by the 1620s, religious civil war broke out again, creating not only bad feeling but also a wave of war refugees. However, research by scholars such as, Marc André Bédard, J.F. Bosher, and Leslie Choquette, has shown that there were small communities of Huguenots scattered across the French colonies of the New World. [3]

 

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Forgotten Carers: How digital methodology illuminates female nursing in 18th century British Naval Hospitals

August 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments
Image of the Naval Hospital in Portsmouth

‘Naval Hospital, Haslar, near Portsmouth: view from right. Coloured aquatint with etching by J. Wells, 1799, after J. Hall.’ by J. Revd. Hall. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

Note from Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome to the second of our 3-part series, based on a panel presentation given this past spring at the Canadian Historical Association annual conference in Regina, SK! You can read the first paper of the series here. Today’s essay comes to us from Erin Spinney, who will be discussing how the Digital Humanities help tell the stories of nurses who served in eigtheenth-century British naval hospitals. This year’s CHA was the first time I really had an opportunity to learn about Erin’s work, and it is truly fascinating and immersing research. Enjoy!

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Plymouth Naval Hospital employed over a thousand different women as nurses. Some like Honor Palmer, spent more than fifteen years of their lives, nursing in the service of the state. These women were part of the everyday fabric of the naval institutions and provided crucial medical care, ensured the cleanliness of hospital wards, and helped to enable a healthy healing environment through ventilation. Unfortunately, these women have been largely forgotten in nursing and medical history, or when they do enter into historical narratives, it is often to contrast the ‘superior’ practices of post-Nightingale nursing in the late-nineteenth century. For instance, American nursing leaders Lavinia Dock and Adelaide Nutting described the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century nursing as “the darkest known period in the history of nursing,” when nursing had “sank to an indescribable level of degredation.” (1) This description, intended to bolster the professionalization efforts of the new Nightingale nurses, would continue to frame the historiographical depictions of pre-Nightingale nurses throughout the twentieth century until the present day. (2)

 

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National Unity Through History: The Canadian Archives and the Development of a Unifying National Narrative

August 7, 2018 / / 0 Comments
Extract of letter from Lanctot to Doughty

Extract of letter from Lanctot to Doughty describing an air raid in London, while on a mission to collect Canadian War artifacts. January 2018.

Note from Stephanie: Hello everyone and welcome to the first of our 3-part series, based on a panel presentation given this past spring at the Canadian Historical Association annual conference in Regina, SK! I was really pleased to present on a fantastic panel with four amazing colleagues, Michelle Desveaux of the University of Saskatchewan, Erin Spinney of Oxford University, and Katherine MacDonald of the University of New Brunswick (and moderated by our own Andrea Eidinger!) The panel focused on how archives and archival methods influenced the history we write, and covered a number of different topics and eras, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting three of the four papers from our panel on the blog; unfortunately Katherine couldn’t join us this time, but maybe we’ll see something from her in this space sometime soon. We’re starting the series with Michelle Desveaux’s paper on the development of the National Archives. Next week Erin Spinney will be here with her paper on eighteenth century nurses in the British marine forces, and I’ll be ending the series with my work on finding Huguenots in the PRDH. Enjoy!

 

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Guest Post: Lost Stories Project

April 3, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Screenshot of the Lost Stories project

Note from Andrea: I’m super excited to bring you a special guest post this week, written by Ronald Rudin, on his fantastic initiative, the Lost Stories Project! Enjoy!

All photos provided courtesy of their respected owners. Please do not reproduce.

Ron RudinRonald Rudin is a Professor of History at Concordia University. Author of seven books and producer of seven documentary films, he carries out research that touches upon Canadian cultural and environmental history, with a particular focus on Atlantic Canada and its Acadian population. He is most recently the author of the prize-winning: Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park (University of Toronto Press, 2016), and its connected website Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park.

Since 2012, I have been the director of the Lost Stories Project, which collects little-known stories about the Canadian past, transforms them into pieces of public art on appropriate sites, and documents the process through short films that are available from the project’s bilingual website. I have long had an interest in the tools that are used to tell stories about the past  — monuments, sculptures, murals, and the like –and I have pursued this interest through both publications (Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie,) and documentary films (Life After Ile Ste-Croix). I often find myself wondering about the choices behind such markers, particularly what story should be told and how best to tell it? These may seem like trivial concerns, but if last summer’s Monument Wars and the American debate over Confederate monuments is anything to go by, the choices made have long term repercussions. What’s more, they often tell us more about the people who built them than the history itself.

 

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Paleography à la Française

January 16, 2018 / / 8 Comments
excerpt of seventeenth century trial of Anne Lamarque, June 1682. Taken by author at the archives of BANQ Vieux-Montréal

Signatures from the first deposition in the Anne Lamarque case. Fonds Judiciaire BANQ Vieux-Montréal, June 1682. Photo taken by author.

Note From Andrea: Today we have another special post by Stephanie Pettigrew! Enjoy!

When I first started doing my research, the biggest problem I encountered was simply deciphering my texts. As many of you already know, I work on documents from sixteenth and seventeenth New France. In North America, there are far more resources available specifically for English etymology and paleography, the study of historic handwriting and handwritten texts. Christopher Moore contends in a recent blog post that paleography is dying a slow and painful death, and I don’t completely disagree with him; the growing dependence on crowd-sourcing transcription projects is a huge concern. But even when sources are transcribed for you, as a historian you are still expected to consult the original source. Several universities offer undergraduate courses in medieval English and middle English. One school that I attended even had a course on reading medieval Scottish handwriting (complete with its own textbook!). Leah Grandy also has already done some fantastic blog posts introducing the issue of paleography, which I highly recommend (“What Does That Say?!”: Getting Started with Paleography is particularly helpful!) While all of these are valuable resources, they aren’t really helpful when it comes to dealing with my documents. So in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about some of the main challenges of working with early modern French written texts and provide you with some tips and tricks that will hopefully make this work a little bit easier!

 

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Film Favourites: Recommended Films on Canadian History

September 12, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Film posters for The War of 1812, Been There Won that; Forbidden Love; Action.

Let’s face it, our favourite classes are the ones with movies. If you’re around my age, you remember being excited by the sound of squeaky wheels and rattling, since it usually meant you were watching a movie in class. The same is still true in university, whether you are a student, a TA, or a professor. However, it can be hard to find good films to show in classrooms that are engaging for students, but also historically accurate. A couple of months ago, there was a fascinating discussion on Eryk Martin’s Facebook timeline about recommended films for teaching pre-Confederation Canadian history. So, inspired by that discussion, and with his permission, I have put together a list of recommended films for teaching Canadian history.

This list is broken down into two parts: my personal recommendations, and recommendations from fellow history professors. I would especially like to thank Stephanie Pettigrew, Donica Belisle, Carmen Nielson, Matthew Hayday, Ian Mosby, Adele Perry, Jenny Ellison, Janis Thiessen, Kesia Kvill, Sarah Dowling, and Liz Huntingford for their fantastic suggestions. Also, I have roughly organized the films and videos chronologically. In my recommendations, I have further divided the films and videos from each other, and included some additional ones I would like to show in class, but haven’t yet.

A couple of important notes or warnings: please make sure that when you are showing a feature film in a classroom that you have the appropriate license to do so. In other words, make sure the copy of the film you are screening has been approved for classroom or public screenings. If you are using the film through your institution’s library, you should be fine, but it’s always good to check. Second, as a recent discussion on Twitter initiated by Tina Adcock has shown, content/trigger warnings are important. I have listed the ones that I think are relevant below, but always use caution when screening films to avoid doing harm to your students.

Also, my husband wanted to name this blog post “Class-y” films, but my better sense vetoed. 😉

 

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