Unwritten Histories

The Unwritten Rules of History

Tag: personal history

Best New Articles from February 2019

March 26, 2019 / / 0 Comments

out of focus background, with a close up of the gilded edges of an open book.

Because, let’s face it – who has time to catch up on all the journal articles published in Canadian history?

 

Welcome back to the Best New Articles series where, each month, I post a list of my favourite new articles! Don’t forget to also check out my favourites from previous months, which you can access by clicking here.

Warning: As some of you may already know, Erudit has been down for the last week. Since several of the journal articles I needed were only available through this service, I was not able to include them in this month’s Best New Articles. So this is a partial list, and I will include the missing issues next month.

 

This month I read articles from:

Here are my favourites:

 

Continue reading

Unpacking DNA Ancestry Tests

February 6, 2018 / / 6 Comments

This photograph was taken from the perspective of someone standing on the ground, looking up in the the canopy of a forest. Tall tree trunks climb high in the sky, converging at one point in the centre of the image. You can see some blue sky between the leaves of the tree canopy.

Special thanks to Shannon Stettner for her help with this piece.

If you’ve spent any time either watching television or on social media in the past few months, there is a high likelihood that you’ve run into a commercial, blog post, or Youtube video featuring DNA ancestry tests. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe have been pushing these tests as important ways to find out about your family history. Which sounds pretty cool. However, much like Canada150, many historians find themselves incredibly frustrated by the increasing popularity of these tests. I can neither confirm nor deny that some yell incomprehensibly at the television screen whenever one of the Ancestry.com commercials comes on. Now, there are numerous articles out there explaining the scientific limitations of these tests. For instance, this recent piece on Gizmondo talks about how the results of these tests aren’t always reliable, due to the limited availability of comparative data, which alleles are being used to access ancestry, and just plain error. However, there haven’t really been any detailed discussions about the limitations of these tests from a historical perspective. So, in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about exactly that, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of historical populations, the “science” of race, the role of white privilege, and notions of belonging and community.

 

Continue reading

© 2024 Unwritten Histories

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑