speakinghistorically

[speakinghistorically]

On one hand, success. On the other, terrible, agonizing failure.

This week, I am back on my Rasputin kick. Mostly I want to talk about Rasputin’s two worst enemies, Illiodor and Prince Felix Yusupov, who have two wild stories.

Illiodor, whose real name was Sergei Trufanov, was born a peasant like Rasputin and became an Orthodox monk. He and Rasputin were actually good friends at the start of Rasputin’s rise to power, but they quickly fell apart over Rasputin’s relationship with the royal family. Early on, Rasputin had shown Illiodor letters from the Empress while boasting about how close to the royal family he had become. The letters were quite scandalous if one believed Rasputin and the Empress were having an affair, as Illiodor did. He either stole or copied one of these letters and published it, leading to him being banished from Russia. Illiodor landed in Sweden, where he wrote down his version of events (which heavily implied that Rasputin was connected to the Antichrist and Illiodor was locked in a holy battle against the forces of darkness) and tried for years to have it published. No publisher in Russia would touch it, for fear of angering the Tsar, so Illiodor packed up his family and moved to America. His book was picked up by several publishers and Illiodor settled into making a career off of Rasputin. He even starred in a film about the fall of the Romanovs. Sadly, all the copies of this film are lost, so we have no way of knowing how good of an actor he was. But the Rasputin train could not go on forever. Eventually, Illiodor had to get a day job. The last job Illiodor ever held was working as a janitor for a life insurance company, which is somehow the craziest party of his whole story.

(Illiodor in his monk’s garb)

(Yusupov in his unused officer’s uniform)

Prince Felix Yusupov spent the majority of his adult life being known as the man who murdered Rasputin. He was the only son of one of the wealthiest families in Russia and by all accounts lived a life of upper class idleness. Yusupov, like Illiodor, believed Rasputin’s presence in the Russian court was detrimental to the image of the royal family. So he set out to try to eliminate Rasputin by any means possible.

The plan, which involved about 6 people, was to lure Rasputin to Yusupov’s house with the promise of wine and women, then poison him. To dispose of the body, they planned to tie weights to Rasputin’s corpse and dump him in the Neva River in the hope that the current would be washed out to sea. The only problem was, Yusupov was very bad at murdering people. He tried to poison Rasputin, but the chemist who sold him what was supposed to be arsenic thought that he might use it to kill someone. So instead, Yusupov tried to poison Rasputin with a harmless powder sprinkled on top of a plate of cakes. When that failed, Yusupov tried to shoot him, but failed to kill him. Rasputin staggered out to the courtyard of Yusupov’s mansion, where he was finally killed by a shot to the head. While Yusupov told a policeman an unconvincing story about shooting a rabid dog, his co-conspirators threw the body in the river. Only they forgot to tie on the weights, leading to Rasputin’s corpse being discovered the next day. The conspiracy quickly fell apart under scrutiny and it was common knowledge that Yusupov had killed Rasputin. The only thing that prevented Yusupov from being executed for murdering the royal favorite was the Bolshevik Revolution. Yusupov and his family fled Russia in time, living out the rest of their lives as aristocratic exiles. Yusupov also published a book to capitalize on his connection to the man he blamed for bringing down the Romanov dynasty.

So there you have it. Two people who’s main achievement in life was to be connected to a more interesting person. One tried and failed to ruin his career, while the other very nearly failed at ending his life. Ra Ra Rasputin, I guess.

[speakinghistorically]

Cursed Ground

Something that’s always bothered me is how we act around “burial grounds” compared to how we act towards cemeteries. There’s an old joke in history: “When does grave robbery become archeology?” The answer is “when there are no relatives left”. Everyone has a sensible chuckle and goes on with their day. But there is a lot of truth to this bad joke. No matter how historically valuable a gravesite might be, we simply cannot dig it up if any living relatives of the dead person protest. You can’t just go digging up somebody’s grandmother if they don’t want you to. Except that academics do dig up people’s relatives, more often than you might think. Indigenous gravesites are all too often disinterred with little regard for how the living descendants might feel about this. There might still be living relatives in the community, or the graves might be spiritually important to the community. You know, like a graveyard. Think about how upset you would be if a bunch of people from outside your community came in and started digging up the graveyard behind your local church. Even if you didn’t have relatives buried there, you would still want to have been consulted before they started removing headstones. And while some archeological digs might have an Indigenous cultural consultant on-site to supervise the excavation, but that isn’t required.

I’d like you to think about how we talk about “Indian burial grounds” (I use the incorrect term deliberately) compared to how we talk about cemeteries. In movies and books, buildings built on top of burial grounds are universally cursed. The angry ghosts of Indigenous people coming back to get revenge for their bodies being desecrated. It is a very common trope, to the point where I’m sure anyone reading this can think of at least one horror movie that includes it. Even Supernatural has an episode with cursed burial grounds (Season 1, Ep 8) which are a manifestation of Indigenous anger both over being murdered and then having their gravesites destroyed to make way for a housing development. The (one could argue righteous) anger of Indigenous people is made into a destructive force that must be stopped. Disturbing the remains of Indigenous people is a mistake, not because they are spiritually important and should be respected, but because it can unleash a curse.

It’s not just in fiction. Real Indigenous graves are being robbed by people who, among other things, want to collect the bones. If these grave robbers are caught, the remains can often be sent to a museum, rather than giving them back to the families. We need to ask ourselves what separates a “burial ground” from a “cemetery” in our minds. Why is one a solemn place to mourn the dead and the other is an archeological goldmine or, worse, cursed ground?

We need to stop treating Indigenous graves as burial sites that are untethered from our lives today and start to think of them as places where cherished relatives are buried. Living people have connections to these graves and we have to respect that moving forward. I’m not saying we stop doing archeological digs. But perhaps we should start asking around to make sure we aren’t digging up somebody’s grandmother.

Please check out this fantastic article for more information about this issue! (https://www.history.com/news/native-american-burial-site-theft)

[speakinghistorically]

What could possibly go wrong?

This week, I thought I’d blog about the history of unethical practices. For one of my classes, we had to do an interview with a member of the public and the process to get ethical clearance from the university was longer and more involved than I had initially thought. I mean, how badly could we mess this up, given that we were interviewing consenting adults about a relatively innocuous subject? But we went through all the proper procedures and got the official approval because if research is conducted without proper concern over ethics, things can get pretty grim.

Whenever you mention unethical experiments, people generally either think of the Stanford Prison experiment of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. We had to read about both for our ethical clearance test. They are both famously unethical experiments and are often cited as examples of why we have to guarantee certain rights to people participating in an experiment, whether for the sciences or for the humanities. Quite a few people have written about the Stanford Prison experiment, but I believe the Tuskegee study is one of the worst examples of unethical research in modern history

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was conducted between 1932 and 1972. For forty years, the United States Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee University, studied the effects of untreated syphilis in a group of 600 black sharecroppers in Alabama. At the time the study started, syphilis was a lethal disease that would lead to disfigurement and eventually death, months or years after the initial infection. There was no effective cure at the time, but there were treatments to alleviate some of the symptoms. There was a laundry list of ethical violations happening during those forty years, but one major one sticks out right away. By 1948, syphilis was treatable. Penicillin could cure the disease and let people who had been infected lead healthy lives. Despite this, the subjects of the Tuskegee study were never given penicillin and were prevented from seeking other medical care while they participated in the study, which outlived many of its subjects. No matter how you dissect it, that is reprehensible.  

But there were many other ethical violations that aren’t immediately obvious. For one, the subjects were never told they had syphilis. They thought they were being treated for “bad blood”, a catch-all term for various diseases. While some research does require a degree of deception, researchers must brief with the subjects afterward to explain the whole study and ensure there is no lasting trauma. While some sense of betrayal is common, especially if the research takes place over months or years, there are protocols to try and help the researchers and the participants recover. The surviving participants of the Tuskegee study received no such briefing and were left to try and deal with the fallout on their own.

There were many other ethical violations that, even at the time, were grossly illegal. But it is because of studies like the Tuskegee that researchers have such strict ethical guidelines now. Even if it is annoying to have to jump through so many hoops, it does help keep everyone, researcher and subject, safe.

[speakinghistorically]

Ra-Ra Rasputin

It was called the “Royal Disease”. The price of generations of inbreeding. It had a not insignificant part to play in the downfall of the Russian tsars. I am talking about Hemophilia, of course. Hemophilia is a genetic disorder that inhibits the blood’s ability to clot effectively. This means that a cut has the chance to be fatal. Bruises, which are just bleeding under the skin, can be serious and bleeding in the joints or in the brain can be likewise fatal. Before blood transfusions were readily available, acute hemophilia was nearly always a death sentence. 

There are varying degrees of seriousness. Some people only experience symptoms after traumatic injuries or surgery. Others have the condition from birth and must constantly be vigilant or risk dire consequences. 

“But what does this have to do with the fall of the Russian tsars?” you ask. Patience, my followers, patience. You see, hemophilia is most often passed down through a family. My knowledge of science cuts off around 1870, so I don’t understand the intricacies of genetics. But, to my understanding, hemophilia is commonly passed down through the female line. It is a recessive gene linked to the X chromosome. Women are carriers, but rarely exhibit symptoms. If women who are carriers have children with men who are susceptible, there is a good chance their male children will have the disease and their female children will be carriers.  The reason why it was called the “Royal Disease” is that, due to centuries of marriages between cousins or other relatives, most of the monarchs in Europe were related to each other. The English were no exception. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, her first cousin in 1840. They had 9 children together and several of them were known to be either hemophiliacs or carriers. 

(Side note: Both Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are descendants of Queen Victoria. Nice to know they’re keeping up the tradition of marrying relatives!)

I’m getting to Russia, I promise. You see, one of Victoria and Albert’s daughters, Alice married into German royalty and became the Grand Duchess of Hesse. She was certainly a carrier because one of her sons died of hemophilia and her daughters were carriers as well, including daughter Alix, who married Tsar Nicolas II of Russia and became Tsarina Alexandria of Russia. Alex and Nicolas were by all accounts loving parents to their 5 children: Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexander. They were not, however, great at ruling Russia, especially at the turn of the century when tensions between the proletariat and ruling class were rising. When Alexander, the heir apparent, began showing symptoms of hemophilia his parents were devasted. His illness was the highest state secret. Nobody outside the royal family and their personal physician knew. So when Alex devoted all her time and energy to her ailing son it appeared she was neglecting her duties as a head of state. When Nicolas did the same, the situation of Russia rapidly disintegrated as World War One was starting to unfold. 

One of the final nails in the coffin of the Tsar’s rule was the presence of Rasputin in the royal inner circle. Rasputin was a peasant, which made him unpopular with the nobility. He was rumoured to be part of a heretical religious sect, which made him unpopular with the Orthodox Church. He was also the only person who seemed to be able to help Alexander. The wildest thing is, to this day nobody knows for certain why Rasputin was successful in treating Alexander. Theories range from hypnosis to psychic powers. But because nobody knew Alexander was sick in the first place, Rasputin’s presence in the court was never properly explained. He was just this weird, smelly monk who had a rather unsavoury reputation for debauchery that was closer to the royal family than almost anyone else in Russia. Of course, rumours flew that he was having an affair with the Tsarina and the oldest daughters, further eroding their popularity. Eventually, the Tsar and his family became so unpopular that he had to abdicate the throne. The last Tsar and his family were executed not long after. And there you have it. The somewhat tragic story of how hemophilia helped to bring down a 300-year old dynasty. 

[speakinghistorically]

Indigenous Peoples’ Day

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day! Of course, by the time most people will read this, it won’t be Indigenous Peoples’ Day, but that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. Before I start, I want to warn you that this post will be longer than usual and will mention American politics. I’m sorry, but I promise it is important.

The second Monday of October is Canadian Thanksgiving, as well as Columbus Day. It is a day to be thankful for friends and family, but it also celebrates a man whose legacy is one of genocide and slavery. For decades Indigenous activists have fought to have critical discussions of Columbus and his legacy enter the public sphere. They have been working for decades to educate the public about the atrocities Columbus committed. For much of the last few centuries, Columbus was portrayed as a brilliant explorer who fought the ignorant belief that the world was flat and sailed across the Atlantic to find the New World. And that is where the story ended; “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. But because of the tireless work of activists, we have a much better picture of the real Columbus in our collective minds. The image of the whitewashed explorer is being eroded by a steady stream of actual history. Christopher Columbus, like most educated people in Europe, knew the world was round. He underestimated the size of the globe and thus came to the New World by accident. Once he was here, he began a regime of slavery and genocide that would eventually kill millions, all in the name of finding gold. His actions were seen as atrocities even at the time, as we can see based on the writings of Bartolome de las Casas, who witnessed Columbus’ impact on the New World. De las Casas said of Spain’s impact on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) “What we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind and this trade (being the trade of Indigenous slaves) as one of the most unjust, evil, and cruel among them.” Even at the time, people knew what was happening in the West Indies was wrong. It would be wrong of us as modern historians to dismiss Columbus as “a product of his time”.

But there is hope. As more and more people become educated about the negative effects of colonization, the conversation surrounding Columbus and his contemporaries has changed markedly in the last two decades, moving from educators uncritically teaching children that Columbus discovered America to devoting more time to learning about the millions of people who already lived here and the impact colonization has had on them. Governments changing this day from Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a small step, but it is a step in the right direction. I am not saying the way North Americans are taught about Columbus is perfect, or even really good. We have a very long way to go before we can say that. But because of the work of activists and legislators, there has been progress toward fixing this false narrative of Columbus discovering an untouched paradise, rather than a continent inhabited by millions of people. I feel secure in saying that the next few years are going to chip away further at this myth and the real Columbus will no longer be able to hide behind the white-washed version of his actions. The tide of historical facts is turning.

Which it is so strange to me to see people who should know better defending Columbus. I am talking, of course, about the White House Proclamation that was issued on October 9th, 2020. In addition to being incredibly condescending to Italian-Americans and failing to mention the millions of Indigenous people still living in the United States, it is also an absolutely terrifying document to be issued by a standing government. I know everything that comes out of the White House for the last 4 years has been awful, but this one is particularly awful in terms of public history. There is one section that is particularly bone-chilling:

“Sadly, in recent years, radical activists have sought to undermine Christopher Columbus’s legacy.  These extremists seek to replace discussion of his vast contributions with talk of failings, his discoveries with atrocities, and his achievements with transgressions... We must not give in to these tactics or consent to such a bleak view of our history.  We must teach future generations about our storied heritage, starting with the protection of monuments to our intrepid heroes like Columbus.  This June, I signed an Executive Order to ensure that any person or group destroying or vandalizing a Federal monument, memorial, or statue is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law...I have also taken steps to ensure that we preserve our Nation’s history and promote patriotic education... In September, I announced the creation of the 1776 Commission, which will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history and honor (sic) our founding.  In addition, last month I signed an Executive Order to root out the teaching of racially divisive concepts from the Federal workplace, many of which are grounded in the same type of revisionist history that is trying to erase Christopher Columbus from our national heritage.  Together, we must safeguard our history and stop this new wave of iconoclasm by standing against those who spread hate and division.”

In addition to standing by Columbus as a shining paragon of discovery despite the increasing movement to de-canonize him as a saint of American history, which I personally find incomprehensible, this document also presents a deeply troubling vision of historical thought. In the world view this excerpt describes, there can be no criticism of historical figures. It is as simple as that. Any historical scholarship that threatens the vision of America as “miraculous” is not to be accepted by the government as legitimate. Any movements to question the existing narrative or the monuments that reinforce that narrative will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”. Policies like this will not only undo decades, if not centuries, of efforts to create a national history that reflects all of the nation’s past, the good and the ugly. Marginalized voices that have been speaking about injustices for centuries will be silenced. Students will be taught only one version of history. Columbus will remain a hero, his statues will stand over land that was stolen by him and people like him. History that is hard to hear or upsetting will not be told. Worst of all, students will be taught to never question this history. If that doesn’t scare you, I don’t know what will.

[speakinghistorically]

Barrett’s Privateers and Historical Fiction

Let me begin by saying that the song “Barrett’s Privateers” by the Stan Rogers Band absolutely slaps. It has everything you could want from a proper sea shanty; a fun plot, violence,  and an easy to remember chorus that you can definitely sing while being three sheets to the wind. It is the thrilling tale of a young man’s life at sea during the 18th century that starts with his enlistment and ends with his being “a broken man on a Halifax pier”. It is the unofficial drinking song of Atlantic Canadian universities and holds a place of honour in our hearts. It is also entirely made up.

Many a Maritimer has been devastated to learn that Stan Rogers made up the Antelope and Captain Barrett. I was crushed when I was told it was fiction. I think the reason why so many of us believe Barrett really did die after being “smashed like a bowl of eggs” (who wouldn’t want to shout that line in a bar at 1 am?) is that the song sounds authentic. I don’t mean that the musicians used period-accurate instruments, the original is actually written to be sung acapella. It is the level of detail in the song that sells you its authenticity.

The opening two stanzas of the song establish the listener in time and place. It’s 1778 and the narrator wishes to be back in Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia. Already we have the historical context of the American Revolution at our backs and a general setting. The chorus reinforces this sense of place by having the narrator lament his position on a Halifax pier. The description of the Antelope lets the listener feel like they can see her ragged sails and feel the deck under feet as it lists to the port. There is a level of historical research that went into writing the song, more than one might first assume. In writing the song, Stan Rogers would have had to either know specific details about eighteenth-century naval combat, like what size the cannons would be (“with our cracked four pounders we made to fight”), or he would have had to do some research to make it accurate. And while there are some minor inaccuracies, for the most part, the details are spot on.

Despite its inaccuracies, I would argue Barrett’s Privateers does teach us a bit about our history. Even if the story of Barrett’s Privateers is fictional, it gives us a way to connect emotionally to the past and ground it in our present. Outside of the classroom, historical fiction is one of the key ways the public sees history being used. All good historical fiction requires the creator to both researches the historical fact in order to portray the events as accurately as possible and to write a good song on top of that. And if the song is written well enough, it can have a huge impact on how the public perceives history. Creative people have very real power over public perceptions. Just look at how many people fear sharks after watching Jaws. Historical fiction definitely has an impact on how we see history. Done well, it lets us learn a bit about eighteenth-century sailing while singing in a bar. Done poorly, you have people who honestly think the Middle Ages was nothing but mud and rampant sexual violence. It’s difficult to correct these false perceptions once they are embedded in peoples’ minds. Like it or not, historical fiction is part of our history even if it isn’t always historically accurate.

If you would like to listen to Stan Rogers sing Barrett’s Privateers click here.

The lyrics can be found here.

[speakinghistorically]

A lot of public history discourse right now surrounds how historical figures are remembered, especially concerning statues. New discussions are happening every day about how we view statues and ways that we can teach the public about the less savory aspects of some of these historical figures’ lives and provoke a critical understanding of their impact. I find that quite a few colonial politicians have statues of them with no mention of the darker sides of their careers. Some of these statues have been taken down in recent years. There was Cornwallis in Halifax, who had both a large statue and a high school named after him. Edward Cornwallis is credited with founding the city of Halifax. He also was an integral part of the colonial violence against the Mi’kmaq people, issuing a proclamation in 1749 offering a financial reward for any settler who killed a Mi’kmaq person. This is, understandably, not popular with the Mi’kmaq community. So Cornwallis got taken down in 2018.

More recently, the conversation has turned to Canada’s first Prime Minister. John A. Macdonald was indeed an important “father of Confederation”. Many Canadians remember him as the drunk, cantankerous Canadian version of George Washington. He was the politician who showed up to a speech drunk and vomited on the podium. But he was also one of the key architects of the Residential school system. This is just as much a part of his legacy as the creation of Canada as a nation. And there is a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in the middle of downtown Charlottetown, the capital of Prince Edward Island.

As you can see, the statue is sitting on a bench, perched in a pose that suggests he is in the middle of an interesting conversation. What isn’t immediately clear in the picture is that the statue is on the main thoroughfare in Charlottetown, close to the harbour where the cruise ships dock. There are several similar statues of other “fathers of Confederation” dotted all along the waterfront, all in similar relaxed poses. The unique poses and the central position make these statues very popular with tourists. The statue pictured has a small plaque explaining that this is John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada. It has Macdonald’s years of birth and death and confers him the title of “Father of Confederation”. There is no mention of his involvement in the residential school system. Before the recent controversy about Macdonald, many Canadians who didn’t study history did not know about that part of his legacy. One of my coworkers, a very intelligent woman who is an expert at her job, asked me why people were so upset about Macdonald because she didn’t know anything about him other than that he was the first Prime Minister. She isn’t uneducated, or unwilling to learn Canada’s history (as evidenced by the fact that she asked me, knowing it could set off a twenty-minute long rant about the minutia of Canadian history). She just wasn’t aware of there being any controversy about Macdonald. There was a gap in her knowledge that popular depictions of “the Father of Confederation” had not addressed. That is indicative that there is an issue with how we remember figures of Canada’s past. And because statues are large, visible symbols of that history, they become the targets of a lot of disapproval.

So how do we deal with that disapproval? Some have made their distaste for Macdonald public by vandalizing the statue, which has happened more than once. These vandalisms cost the city thousands of dollars to repair, straining an already tight budget. Yet the city of Charlottetown stands by Macdonald (https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/local/charlottetown-council-stands-firm-on-controversial-statue-of-sir-john-a-macdonald-497387/) and refuses to permanently remove the statue. For now. This stance might change as more people become informed about the parts of John A. Macdonald’s career that wouldn’t be so nice to take a photo with.

[speakinghistorically]

Suffragette Suffering

Last week Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice on the American Supreme Court, died at age 87. While this news is tragic, her death is a major political event in a year that already feels full of major political events. During the last few days, I have seen an outpouring of praise for Ruth Bader Ginsburg on social media. She was seen as one of the last lines of defense against the far-right gaining more political power in the States. And though the American supreme court system is different from the Canadian one (what do you mean they are appointed for life?), it did get me thinking about the role of women in Canadian legal history.

Campaigns for female suffrage in Canada often included demands for the right to hold political office, so using suffrage movements as a concrete history of women’s legal rights in Canada seemed a good place to start. This seemed like a simple enough question, one that should have had a straightforward answer. And then it got complicated. As many people familiar with Canada’s history know, all provinces in Canada (except for Quebec and Newfoundland, which was a part of Britain at the time) had granted women the right to vote in federal elections in 1919, following World War One. This is earlier than our neighbors to the south, so many Canadians retroactively pat themselves on the back for being so progressive. What is less well known to most Canadians is that Asian Canadians were not granted universal suffrage until 1948, incidentally the same year Canada took part in creating the UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. It wasn’t until 1960 that Indigenous people were granted the right to vote. For context, Pierre Trudeau officially announced the Canadian Multiculturalism policy in 1971, a little more than a decade later. Suddenly we Canadians seem a little less progressive. 

The point of all this is less to draw attention to the story of Canadian women’s legal rights, especially the right to vote, and more about how easy it is to not get the full story. Canada’s national identity hinges on our reputation internationally as a beacon of human rights. From the Underground Railroad to Justin Trudeau declaring that his Cabinet would be half comprised of women, quote “Because it’s 2015.”, Canada has had a long history of casting themselves as the good guy in our national history. We can see that women were granted the vote in 1919 and applaud ourselves for our forward thinking, all while ignoring the injustices we were still committing in our own country to those we decided didn’t deserve a political voice. It is great for us as a nation to be proud of the things we did right, we cannot lose sight of what we did wrong.

My final point is this; it can be tempting for historians (myself included) to look for simple, clean-cut narratives in history. It makes for easy research and uncomplicated timelines. Sometimes you really just want a one sentence answer to a question. But even simple questions like “when did women get the vote in Canada?” often have long, complex answers. Suddenly, you are looking at the history of race in Canada and the uneven application of rights the were supposed to be granted to all humans, according to the document we helped to create. And looking for those annoying, messy answers lets us move past the boring lists of facts and dates into a deeper understanding of our own history. I know I am by far not the first person to say this and I hope I won’t be the last, but our history as Canadians is complicated and often unpleasant. Reducing it to names and dates in a classroom removes so much of that complexity and therefore makes our national history into something flat in a textbook. Teaching the real history of Canada, warts and all gives students something to sink their teeth into and lets them engage with their own national history. The waters of our national history are muddy and it is benefitting none of us to pretend they are clear. 

Links to relevant sources:

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/suffrage

https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/canadian-multiculturalism-policy-1971

http://womensuffrage.org/

[speakinghistorically]

First Post

Having survived my first week of classes at Western, I now set out to record my experiences in ephemeral digital form. For one of my other classes, we had to listen to a interview in which Terry Cook, a historian of some renown, discussed the realities of storing all of our information online. While his interview covered more than just the pitfalls of the digital era, he did mention something that concerned me. Essentially, all the information we are creating that exists only in digital form (such as this blog entry) are hard to preserve long-term. Compared to artifacts like stone tablets, which can last for thousands of years, or papyrus records that can last for centuries, it is difficult to create and store digital artifacts in a way that ensures they will last for centuries. If for instance, my laptop got thrown in a river, all the photos and files I keep on it would be lost forever. More troublingly, if I left my laptop in a basement for 50 years, my files would be just as lost. The most advanced computer technology is never more than 20 years away from being obsolete. The technology that is current this decade will be outdated to the point of uselessness in less than half a century. Could any of us in the public history class draw any meaningful data from the punch cards used to compute the first space flights?

This issue raises a rather troubling existential question. Are we in the middle of the Digital Dark Age? The question may seem odd. After all, we are living in a time of technological innovations that have changed our daily lives to something that would have been unrecognizable a century ago. But if we all our the records of that innovation are stored digitally it can all be lost easily. My smartphone might have more computational power than the computers that launched the first spacecraft, but that does not prevent it from becoming a useless glass brick in less than a decade. If future historians have no access to our digital lives, what will they know about us? What marks are we making on history? Will our lives be as mysterious to future historians as the lives of those millions of people who lived centuries ago but left no written records of their lives are to us? Are the things we think of as vital now going to be lost within the next few centuries? The plastic waste we create will last millennia, but what about our art?

But I am excited to be back in school! It’s nice to have more direction and purpose in my daily life after the chaos of these last few months. I am a little nervous about my workload and how much reading I will have to do. But I’m sure I can get a handle on it quickly. My classes seem very interesting so far. I’m very excited to learn more practical skills to complement the academic knowledge I have from my undergrad. The idea that I am twelve short months away from starting my actual career is slightly more nerve-wracking, but nothing ever got done by staying in your comfort zone! 

The interview with Terry Cook I referenced can be found at: 

https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/6/a/6/6a6137bed15676b2/Terry_Cook_LAC_ZOOM0001_3.mp3?c_id=4751513&cs_id=4751513&expiration=1600031946&hwt=9b2ff12d1a995967d54ba11d1c979c2e