Scandal of the Archives at Active History

 

Story of the week, for serious archives rats, at least, has to be Allan Greer's essay for Active History.

Recently I had occasion to visit Library and Archives Canada. Marching up Wellington Street, I noticed my heart beating a little faster as the historical juices began flowing through my researcher’s veins. Even at the time, I recognized this pulse of excitement as a throw-back, a residual thrill from a time long ago when I was an eager graduate student discovering the wonders of dusty manuscripts; more recent visits to the federal archives had been anything but thrilling.

Okay, you know that feeling or you don't, but I guess a fair few of the readers here know exactly what Allan Greer is talking about: "Thrilling" and archival research together in a paragraph, know what I mean? Yes.

But...  As Greer's last sentence signals, it's not a story about the warm fuzzy side of historical research. The story is called "The Scandal of the Archives." 

Archives don’t simply store and conserve documents, they structure and organize them, carefully recording the provenance of government records, collections of private papers, films, recordings, images, etc. LAC has always been very good at this and generations of archivists built up an infrastructure of guides and finding aids, but instead of using these resources to curate their online collections, the archives seem determined to hide the results of their past efforts from the eyes of researchers.

The last time or two I was at Library and Archives Canada, I thought it must be my fault. I just didn't seem to know how the system worked anymore. But Allan's account is authoritative and persuasive: it's not you. It's not even digitization. It's that the whole archiving system there doesn't work well any more. Read it and weep. 

Thanks, Active History. I hope LAC will respond and that this investigation will continue.  

Update, April 3 I must follow "historians' Twitter" because I saw quite a bit of commentary about this essay: Thomas Peace, Shirley Tillotson, JDM Stewart Stephanie Pettigrew....

Shirley Tillotson thought it was about failed digitizing, and Pettigrew argues it's just underfunding. But I thought Greer's point was larger than either of those. Big problems with digitization, yes, and money, too, no doubt. But I thought he was telling us those are mostly symptoms of an archives increasingly run by managers driven by the pursuit of popular attention and numbers counts and ever-rising statistics to report. 

An archives is about storing documents and making them available (sure, to genealogists and journalists and civil servants and lots of others besides historians).  But still making sure the documents are preserved and made available. If an archives cannot provide the record of, say, microfilm numbers that makes the document findable, that's not making available -- whether the searcher is in the building or in British Columbia, whether they are a tenured prof or someone searching their grandmother.

Active History makes news, gets results

The CBC reports that Western University in London, Ont., is seeking a court order authorizing it to rename a set of scholarships endowed by former history professor Kenneth Hilborn and named in his honour. Most of the story is driven by arguments made two years ago in the historians' website Active History.

Professor Hilborn taught in the History department at Western from 1961 to 1997.  At his death in 2013, aged 79, his estate bequeathed a million dollars to Western, including $750,000 to the history department for scholarships to history students.

In 2019 and again in 2020, when Western was supposed to host the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (turned virtual by the pandemic), Active History ran stories, first by Asa McKercher, the second by Will Langford, about Hilborn's white supremacist and fringe-right views and whether Western University should be honouring his name with the scholarships he funded for undergraduate and graduate students.

A third Active History essay in response to Langford's, by Francine McKenzie of the Western History department, made the case that the department was justified in continuing the Hilborn awards despite Hilborn's views and actions, acting on the model of the Rhodes Scholarships, which endure despite general repudiation of their founder's racist and imperialist career.

The arguments aired in Active History by McKercher and Langford seem now to have borne fruit, with Western's decision to seek a name change. Active History describes itself as "a website that connects the work of historians with the wider public and the importance of the past to current events."  It has surely  fulfilled those aims in this case..

Who's afraid of taxation history?

David Tough wraps up Active History's "Income Tax History" week with an essay about "boring history." He explores the virtues of working through boredom, boredom as tool of the market economy, and David Foster Wallace on boredom. He's too polite to say so, but one suspects the "someones" who mock his field as boring --

People who suggest that my work must be boring intend to insult my taste, but they really insult my craft.

 -- may include a lot of his fellow scholars. After all, he declares himself a "political historian" (All the income tax essays this week have been highly political). And political history has been unfashionable in the academy for quite a while. As I think I was trying to grasp a week or so ago, "Boring!" is a way to celebrating one's one ignorance.

The boredom that people evince when they sense they’re in danger of encountering tax history is the boredom of disgust, not surfeit.... [T]hey want you to never start talking about it.

Confederation at Active History

Active History, in collaboration with York University's Canada Watch publication, launches a series of essays on confederation by a group of Canadianists who find themselves teaching the subject from time to time.

Last winter, the Canada Watch editors asked me to read the essays in draft and add a commentary.  I found myself having to say I was, ah, disappointed, to the point that Canada Watch decided it did not want my commentary at all.  But Active History promises to run it on July 11, one of a couple of responses.

Around July 11 I expect to be sitting by the marge of Lake Lebarge in the light of the midnight sun -- or maybe in some other Yukon landscape.  Blogging will be slim to none for a good chunk of July. Hence the heads up.  You can follow the Canada Watch contributions at Active History from today, and form your own opinion.  

Academic history, public history, private history... active history?

Active History has posted here my talk (ten minutes video) at the keynote session of the Active History conference at Huron College last fall.  It starts with some thoughts about all the category boxes we historians put ourselves in and whether "active' history might be a way any of us can get out of them.

The presentations of the other speakers in our session are already up: Wendy Rowney on active history at historic sites and Keith Carlson on doing historical work with communities and organizations. 

The Active History turn

After the turn to social history, the turn to critical theory, and various other observed or claimed "turns" in historical practice, is the turn to Active History upon us?

Mostly known as the name of a website and a couple of conferences, "Active History" also makes a useful label for serious historical work that goes beyond the classroom and the scholarly publication to engage with wider audiences, serve other communities, and explore other media. The term also nicely gets away from academic/non-academic, academic/public, scholarly/popular and other tired oppositions. And judging by the attendees at the Active History conference this past weekend at Huron College, London, Ont, the idea is working for a remarkably diverse group of historians.

It may be time. A half century of so of remarkable growth in numbers of professional, fulltime academic historians meant they could explore the wonders of being numerous enough (and securely enough established) to spend most of their careers, if they chose, talking with and writing for each other almost exclusively.  Now that's got old, and it seems a caucus within the academy is intrigued by the potential for working with wider communities or reaching additional audiences. Even more, the reality for vast numbers of students -- that there will be no secure academic jobs or that the campaign for them ceases to appeal -- is redefining how historically-trained young people see their career aspirations. And the success of public history programs in attracting excellent students and placing them in interesting jobs also continues to redefine the sense of what or who a historian can be.

May there always be a place for pure scholarship. And of course there have always been activist historians with wide interests and wide audiences, with political or cultural engagements. But I wonder if the young scholars who came up with the idea of Active History a few years ago will come to be seen as harbingers of a new ecology of historical practice.

Anyway, good conferences produce big thoughts, no?

History of Syrian Canadians

Son of the West

At Active History, Sarah Carter reflects on some old stock Canadians, the early Syrian settlers of Saskatchewan:

Arab settlers from Syria/Lebanon arrived in Western Canada starting well over one hundred years ago. They settled throughout the West but there was a significant cluster of Arabs in southern Saskatchewan on arid marginal land in the heart of Captain John Palliser’s infamous triangle that he identified as an extension of the Great American Desert. Most were from eastern Lebanon and they included Muslims and Christians.

Chickpea production in Saskatchewan, introduced by Syrians in the 1930s dustbowl, promises to make Regina the next hummus capital of the world, she says.

There are hummus capitals? As they used to say in the north end of Sydney, Cape Breton (another hotbed of old stock Middle Eastern Canadianism), "Are you serious?"  "No, I'm Lebanese."

Old jokes aside, terrific article. We could cope with some more Syrian-Canadians, no?

Image: from Active History.

Active History - History Matters Fall 2011 Lecture Series, Toronto Public Library

History lectures series at the Toroto Public Library.

"This year these lectures focus on two themes—labour and environmental history in the Toronto area and beyond."

http://activehistory.ca/2011/08/history-matters-fall-2011-lecture-series-toronto-public-library-2/

Active History:"Looking Back on Pride"

Fitting with the ongoing LGBT history theme, here's another great article from Activehistory.ca by Mathieu Brûlé, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at York University.

Just for fun here's a CBC clip from the 1985 Pride parade in Toronto (honestly, what WOULD I do without CBC Archives clips?)

I attended the Pride parade this year in Toronto and in the light of the controversy over Mayor Rob Ford was surprised to see former mayors of Toronto marching. I only recognized David Miller but read later that there were 3 former mayors in the parade. I found it interesting, though perhaps it means little.

Active History - "Renaming Schools: What Does Sanitizing History Teach Students?"

Another great article from activehistory.ca by Paul W. Bennett. If you haven't started following the sites blog, I strongly suggest you do so. It's, well, active and engaging. Chris Moore has previously linked and referred to it.

Below is a quotation I liked from an article on renaming public schools to rid them of names of historical figures with, questional, ethics and actions (my guess is this would lead to all schools eventually being called "blank district school".) Don't make me invoke the slippery slope argument people!

"Critics of name changing initiatives are right to raise objections.  History is a “contested terrain” and in removing names we are denying today’s students an opportunity to engage in such discussions. Exposing students to the conflict of ideas and interpretation lies at the very core of civic education."

ActiveHistory.ca - Sir John A. Uses Twitter?

http://activehistory.ca/2011/05/sir-john-a-uses-twitter/

I love this alternate historical personality trend (see that...I made a Twitter pun) I blogged briefly on this during the election.Some of the tweets are actually pretty funny.