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Thomas Peace Uncategorized

Letter of Concern to the Police Services Board

I wrote this letter of concern to the London Police Services board because of a long term frustration with these issues in London and, in the immediate, an announcement yesterday that London Police Service would do a safety blitz targeting pedestrians and cyclists (see here for coverage in the Free Press, Global News, CBC, Blackburn). I get that they will be targeting “all road users” – and intersections are certainly the most dangerous part of our city – but the language used by London Police in these reports demonstrates clearly that they see pedestrians and cyclists as the problem, rather than what many of us perceive as a dangerous driving culture in the city. Anyway, I wanted to share because the only way to affect change at both London Police Service and City of London is at the top and from a policy and planning level.

September 13 2019

Dear Mr. Salih, Mayor Holder, Chief Williams and members of the Police Services Board,

I am writing to express my perception that London Police Services inadequately addresses pedestrian and cyclist safety. I have developed this perception over the past five years living in London, interacting with members of the Traffic Management Unit, and using our city’s infrastructure as a driver, cyclist and pedestrian. This week’s announcement that London Police Services would crack down on these road users confirms many of my suspicions.

My concerns are mostly based on experiences as a cyclist who commutes daily from Ryerson Public School to Huron University College. If you think about this commute, you will realize that I only cross one arterial road (Richmond) before arriving at Western’s campus, riding mostly in a residential neighbourhood and on the university campus. And yet, on a near weekly basis I end up in altercations with drivers who either do not give me enough space or roll through stop signs inattentively. Most concerning is that about once a month vehicles cross through intersections while my children (5 and 8) and I are still crossing. To be clear, I am talking about instances where a vehicle moves through the intersection while we are standing in front of it, not when we are almost through crossing.

Because of these frequent incidents in my residential neighbourhood, I have tried to understand London Police Services’ strategies to protect cyclists and pedestrians. I have read through all the material available on the “Reports and Statistics” section of your website. Doing so suggests to me that London Police Services neither takes this aspect of public safety very seriously, nor see it as part of your core mandate. Continue reading “Letter of Concern to the Police Services Board” →

Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

From Early Canada to Early North America: Why We Stopped Teaching History before the 1860s from a National Perspective

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Let’s begin with a question: without help from the internet, can you name the person who founded the city of Chicago?

I suspect that for many of our readers, the answer is ‘no’.

“Founders” are not terribly in vogue these days, anyways.

It was, however, the man who founded Chicago that helped me make a profound shift in how I teach Canadian history. Last month, at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting, I presented about this curricular shift, arguing that people like Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the putative founder of Chicago, help us rethink early North American history, moving us away from national frameworks. The feedback I’ve received since that presentation has been very fruitful and quite diverse, so I’ve decided to post the talk here to continue the conversation.

Bust of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, next to the DuSable bridge in downtown Chicago. (Photo by Groov3, Wikimedia Commons)

The life lived by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable has all the necessary components for the pre-Confederation Canadian History survey course. Though we know little about his early life, du Sable was supposedly born to a French sailor and an enslaved woman in the French colony of Saint Domingue around 1745; there is also an argument suggesting he was born in the St. Lawrence Valley. Regardless, he was well educated and, by the time concrete evidence emerges about his life, he was active in the fur trade. It was in that capacity that, during the 1770s, he met and married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa according to Potawatomi customs and then, years later, in a Catholic ceremony in Kaskaskia in the Illinois Country. By the 1780s Jean Baptiste and Kitihawa moved to the place known as Eschikagu (“the place of the bad smells”), today known as the north bank of the Chicago river, where they established a trading post, a mill, a smokehouse, and a workshop. The businesses they established brought them considerable wealth. In 1800, with the United States now claiming this place, Point du Sable sold his businesses and moved to French Louisiana. There the French governor commissioned him to operate a ferry across the Missouri River.

Continue reading “From Early Canada to Early North America: Why We Stopped Teaching History before the 1860s from a National Perspective” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

What Does Canadian History Look Like? A Peek into University Classrooms before CHA 2018

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca

It’s that time of the year again.

Over the coming weekend, historians will join our colleagues in the social sciences and humanities in Regina for the annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, during which the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) will meet.

This year, the CHA has been organized around the theme of “Gathering Diversities,” reflecting upon how both our understanding of the past and historical methods have been shaped by diverse and divergent perspectives. You can read the program here.

For the past several years I have examined the words most commonly used in the titles presenters have assigned to their papers, transforming the conference program into word clouds, in an effort to provide a cursory overview of the breadth of subjects being presented at the meeting. Occasionally, I have complemented this analysis with some sort of parallel examination of another aspect of the Canadian historian’s craft. One year it was abstracts from journal articles, another year it was past CHA programs, and last year it was a flash-in-the-pan #Canada150 TV special called The Story of Us.

Figure 1. Common words used in Canadian-history course descriptions.

This year, as I was preparing for my own CHA presentation, which is based on our decision at Huron University College to stop teaching the pre-Confederation Canadian History survey course, I decided to look at academic calendar descriptions of first- and second-year introductory courses to Canadian history in order to get a better sense about how Canadian history is being taught across the country. Here’s what I discovered:

Continue reading “What Does Canadian History Look Like? A Peek into University Classrooms before CHA 2018” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

Open Pedagogy: The Time is Now

By Thomas Peace

I’ve been a rather slow convert to the open-access movement. Though ActiveHistory.ca operates under a Creative Commons Attribution, non-commercial ShareALike copyright license whereby you’re free to repost this (or any other essay you find here) so long as you provide us with attribution and do not profit, this was my sole venture into the world of open access.

OER Global Logo by Jonathas Mello is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0 License

Then in 2015, Thompson Rivers University historian John Belshaw approached us about promoting his new two-volume open Canadian history textbook (click here for pre-Confederation and here for post-Confederation) published as part of the BC Open Textbook Project (we ran two posts about it here and here). Belshaw’s books were the first open access textbooks I encountered. I was excited and – having gradually moved away from textbooks in my teaching – integrated them as support material for my Canadian history courses.

Until recently, these were the only open projects with which I have been involved. Though I was never fully resistant to the idea, I also never pursued it with much interest. I have been fortunate enough to move from academic contract to academic contract in such a way that only for a few months have I ever been without full access to a university’s library subscription services. From my vantage point, as a student then professor, all of the on-campus resources I used were free.

This, of course, is not true. Both institutionally and personally, the costs to purchase educational resources are significant. At Ryerson University, a school with about 50,000 students, the library’s annual acquisition budget for serials, databases and e-journals is over $4.7 million, about $94 per student. Add to that the books, computer software and other course-related materials faculty demand of their students, and the total nears $800/year.

Continue reading “Open Pedagogy: The Time is Now” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

What’s really killing Canadian History?

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of Jack Granatstein’s provocative polemic Who Killed Canadian History, a book that laments the perceived steep decline in Canadians’ knowledge of our past.

It is rare for any book to have such staying power. Earlier this month, for example, the book was drawn upon extensively in an op-ed column for my local paper, The London Free Press. In the column, history teacher Michael Zwaagstra warns about the dangers of historical thinking and how the growing influence of this inquiry-based pedagogy has eroded the teaching of historical content.

Granatstein’s book and Zwaagstra’s op-ed column are polarizing. They force people to take sides in a debate that has mostly been unproductive. Either you are in favour of a strong chronological narrative about Canada or you focus on so-called marginal topics and – according to Zwaagstra – the development of historical thinking skills.

The binary is false.

Continue reading “What’s really killing Canadian History?” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

19th Century Legacies in 21st Century Historical Research Practice

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

By Colleen Burgess and Thomas Peace

In 1898, T. Watson Smith delivered a detailed lecture on the history of slavery in Canada to the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. In it he lamented:

Our historians have almost wholly ignored the existence of slavery in Canada. A few references to it are all that can be found in Kingsford’s ten volumes; Haliburton devotes a little more than a half-page to it; Murdoch contents himself with the reproduction of a few slave advertisements; Clement, the author of the school history accepted by nearly all the provinces, dismisses it with a single sentence; and in the long manuscript catalogue of Canadian books, pamphlets and papers gathered during a long life-time by the late Dr. T. B. Akins – a large and very valuable collection – the word “slavery” nowhere appears, even as a sub-heading.

The end of this quotation is perhaps most direct. In 1898, Watson Smith is saying: most historians do not see slavery as a subject requiring independent study.

The work of historians like Afua Cooper, Karolyn Smardz-Frost, Marcel Trudel, James W. St. G. Walker, and Amani Whitfield (among many others) demonstrates that nearly 120 years later this is no longer the case.

Last month, though, following the publishing here of a piece about treaties and public memory in Ontario that drew on Drew Lopenzina’s concept of Unwitnessing, and a presentation about the Library of Congress classification system run by Colleen in Tom’s North American history course, we began to think that perhaps things haven’t changed as much as we thought they had.

The Library of Congress Classification system (LCC) and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) continue to reflect the world Watson Smith so severely critiqued. Scholarship has changed, but the frames within which it has been placed have not. If we are going to witness the way past assumptions about the world continue to structure our present, we feel a need to make these biases even more transparent.

Continue reading “19th Century Legacies in 21st Century Historical Research Practice” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Witnessing and Unwitnessing Ontario’s Treaties

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Last week was the second annual Treaty Recognition Week in Ontario. Organized by the provincial government, this is a time for Ontarians to acknowledge and learn about the treaties upon which the province was developed. This year, Ontario’s Ministry of Education announced that Indigenous history and culture would become part of the K-12 curriculum by fall 2018.

A Wampum Belt Marking the 1764 Treaty of Niagara

In southern Ontario, treaty recognition is sorely needed. Here, the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century treaties that enabled settlement on Indigenous lands remain poorly understood. Though individual First Nations, the Union of Ontario Indians, and the provincial and federal government all provide basic information about these treaties on their websites, most of these initiatives are relatively recent. From a comparative perspective, there are no parallel in-depth studies to the relatively vast literature on treaties elsewhere in Canada.[1] The most comprehensive resource that I have found remains Robert Surtees’s 1984 Land Surrenders in Ontario in addition to a handful of academic journal articles, doctoral dissertations and more local studies.[2]

Continue reading “Witnessing and Unwitnessing Ontario’s Treaties” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

What Does Canadian History Look Like? The Story of Us

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

It is that time of the year again when historians from across the country are preparing to gather together at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting to talk about our work. The theme of meetings, being held in two weeks time, is “From Far and Wide: The Next 150.” As Canada enters the sesquicentennial’s summer season, hallway conversations will no doubt address subjects related to Confederation and its commemoration (or lack thereof, if the first half of the year is any indicator). Perhaps at top of mind will be CBC’s The Story of Us, a ten-part dramatization of the moments some of Canada’s best-known entertainers, politicians, business people and even a few historians wanted to celebrate with high production-value television. The series, as the tone of the previous sentence sought to instil, was widely critiqued by historians (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Looking at this year’s program, however, suggests we may want to be careful in just how loudly we critique the television series. Some of the problems outlined about The Story of Us seem to apply equally to the CHA’s annual meeting. There are two widespread critiques of the television program that might also be applied to the content of this year’s annual meeting. First, The Story of Us was critiqued because it was a unilingual production with little attention to francophone perspectives, their history and culture. Second, the series takes a narrow view on the country’s early history, completely ignoring Indigenous histories before 1600, the importance of the sixteenth and seventeenth century fisheries, and the role of Mi’kmaq, Wabanaki, Innu and Acadian peoples in cultivating early (and foundational) relationships.

Continue reading “What Does Canadian History Look Like? The Story of Us” →
Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Does the Crowd Matter? The Moral Economy in the Twenty-First Century

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca in February 2017.

Women’s Marches Then and Now

Over the past couple of weeks people around the world have taken to the streets in order to call politicians, business leaders, and civil servants to account. Though similar, no one event was the same. The Women’s March was carefully planned over two months between the US election and Inauguration Day; its purpose was to give voice to the open misogyny expressed by Republicans during the campaign. A week later tens of thousands flooded US airports to support travelers detained due to the idiosyncratic and illegal presidential travel ban targeting Muslims.[1] Two days after that, here in Canada, we mourned the killing of Azzedine Soufiane, Mamaou Tanou Barry, Khaled Belkacemi, Aboubaker Thabti, Ibrahima Barry and Abdelkrim Hassane as they left a Quebec City mosque following prayers. Again, thousands took to the streets across the country voicing concerns over the rise of hate speech and its enablers.

As I participated in, and continue to think about the meaning of, these movements, my attention often turns to the historiography of the crowd. Continue reading “Does the Crowd Matter? The Moral Economy in the Twenty-First Century” →

Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Fake News, Global History Wars, and the Importance of Historical Thinking

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca in November 2016.

In the last week we’ve seen a strong desire to put an end to “Fake News”. With the rise of social media and increasingly savvy revenue generating fake news sites, this is an important intervention (the dangers of which Alan MacEachern addressed here last week). It is, however, misleading to assign blame for Donald Trump’s rise to the U.S. presidency solely on this blatant deception. Focus on the “fake news” distracts us from the very real way that some producers of the “real news” (editors, producers and pundits) and legitimately elected politicians (and especially governments) use the media to distort and distract in an effort to cultivate public opinion.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the deliberate (mis)use of history to construct a specific polarized vision of the nation. Globally, politicians and opinion makers (some of whom are admittedly professional historians) have recently turned to un-contextualized facts about their nation’s past for their own political ends, often directly targeting university-based historians and their increasing emphasis on historical thinking over the reinforcement of a national narrative.  Though I am not in a position to argue cause and effect, in this post I would like to suggest that declining enrollments in history programs and classes are perhaps related to the fact that politicians deploying this tactic have recently found electoral success. “Fake news” may be part of the problem, but the problem’s roots go much deeper and relate more directly to established power structures. Continue reading “Fake News, Global History Wars, and the Importance of Historical Thinking” →