Review of Na Li's /Kensington Market/.

Click here and scroll down to page 16 for my review of Na Li's Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto's Urban Landscape in the latest issue of The Public Historian (38.2, pp. 113-114).

The Great Chicken Civil War, and Other Fowl Tales from the Farm

 

Last night I gave a public lecture as part of the Ottawa Historical Association's lecture series. You can listen to my talk here:

ORDC Seminar - The Early History of the Central Experimental Farm, 1886-1938.

This morning I gave a talk on the early history of the Central Experimental Farm as part of the Ottawa Research and Development Centre's seminar series. You can listen to it here:

Consultation on Design Only are Not Consultations

The 60 Acres at the Central Experimental Farm

On Thursday, the Ottawa Citizen reported that the Ottawa Hospital will, finally at long last, be holding consultations on the new Civic Campus early in the new year. This comes just less than 13 months after John Baird announced the gift of 60 acres of the Central Experimental Farm, an important scientific research station and a National Historic Site of Canada, to the Hospital to build a new campus.

The Hospital's consultations will be on the design of the new campus, not its location. Given the lack of transparency in selecting the site at the Farm as well as the Farm's important role in Canadian agricultural science and history, there can be no true consultation if the location is off the table.

Records obtained through federal access to information and provincial freedom of information requests reveal that the Ottawa Hospital has consistently fought, delayed, and cancelled attempts by local politicians to hold consultations on the transfer. Indeed, in the year before Baird's gift was announced, the Hospital worked to keep news of the pending transfer under wraps.

The Central Experimental Farm is governed by a long-term management plan that demands its integrity and continued use for agricultural research as the best way of respecting its rich history. The NCC's urban lands master plan supports keeping the Farm intact.

Since the announcement the Hospital has portrayed the gift as the only way to build a new Civic Hospital, which is reported to hold less beds than the current campus and be the hub of a distributed network of clinics despite requiring almost triple the land space, is on the Farm land across the street.

This is a false dichotomy. The question isn't Hospital or Farm. There is more than enough space in Ottawa for both institutions, even on federally owned land.

The 60 acres in question are part of the original 465-acre Farm and today represents approximately 15% of its research land. Field #1 in particular has been the site of important research since the Farm's inception in 1886. Notably, long-term international research underway on Field #1 feeds into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The loss of this land will end this important research and damage Canada's reputation with our global scientific partners.

This cavalier attitude towards science, history, and government transparency is characteristic of the previous Conservative government. The Liberal's promise of "real change" is being sorely tested by their silence.

The Farm-or-Hospital dichotomy relies on silencing stories of the Farm's past, present and future importance to Ottawa, Canada, and our international partners. Rather than seeing the experimental fields as rare and invaluable archives of past use and laboratories for future generations that they are, we're to empty them of meaning and render them worthless.

Parks Canada and the 60 Acres

A wintry view of the 60 Acres

Today I received my first package of documents from a series of access to information requests I submitted in December.

It turns out that Parks Canada learned about the transfer of the 60 acres of the Farm to build a hospital when Leslie Maitland, president of Heritage Ottawa, emailed them a day after John Baird's November 3rd press conference.

Domains of Literature - Introduction and Context

Every university, every department, has its own practices regarding comprehensive and qualifying examinations. Usually these include "fields" or "domains" of literature which are either standardized across the department or completely open. In my department the individual PhD committee has great leeway in deciding what goes into the domains and my committee challenged me to come up with a base list, which they then commented on and added to.

This is harder than it seems. Sure in being given latitude to decide I had the chance to stack the list, so to speak, with works I was already familiar with. But, as my supervisor said, I should pay attention to my committee and the journals they publish in, who they cite in their work and teach in their courses, who they would put on the list if they were creating it.

Beyond the literature I already knew, my committee's publications, and the every increasing fractal search cross referencing common citations brings, I found online syllabi and lists of departments and other individuals who've completed their exams extremely useful. In that spirit, I have reproduced my lists here for those who may be going down the same rabbit hole as me.

Domains of Literature - Public History and the Geography of Storytelling

 This is part of a series of posts related to the domains of literature I covered in my qualifying exam. I am sharing it in hopes that it helps other students creating their lists. Please see the introductory post in the series for more details.

The final domain, public history and the geography of storytelling, looks at both methodological questions in historical geography research and modes of presenting that research. Public historians are a diverse community of practitioners fundamentally interested in the ways historical knowledge is created and presented to broad and multifaceted publics in various locations such as archives and museums. Geographers of storytelling are concerned with the spatial dimensions of stories, how they’re told and how landscapes become inscribed with meaning and discourses. This domain finds natural linkages between these sub-fields, particularly in the recent work of a group of British geographers under the auspices of ‘anticipatory history’ (see: DeSilvey 2012 and DeSilvey, Naylor and Sackett 2011). As such it provides the basis for exploring the contingent nature of the documents, landscapes and material cultures that form the core of the proposed research as well as addressing concerns regarding the narrative form of this thesis project.  

This post has two main parts:
(1) The domain itself; and,
(2) A syllabus created as a thought experience while studying the list.

Crosspost: Vacating Science and Forgetting History at the Central Experimental Farm

This post originally appeared at Active History. As always, please leave comments at the original.

Pete Anderson posing near the threatened experimental plots with the Civic Hospital in the background. Photo credit: Laura Cameron.

On November 3^rd, John Baird announced that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada transferred approximately 24 hectares (60 acres) of the Central Experimental Farm, in Ottawa, to the National Capital Commission. The NCC in turn offered to lease the land to the Ottawa Hospital to build a new Civic Campus. The Hospital then mused about the using this new land as a parking lot.

Op-ed: Protect the Central Experimental Farm

Central Experimental Farm looking towards the Windfield Towers, Personal Photograph.

My op-ed arguing against the development of the Central Experimental Farm, even for a hospital, can be found at the Ottawa Citizen. Please leave any comments on the original post.

Crosspost: Graduate School and the Consulting Historian

This was originally posted at History@Work, the blog of the National Council for Public History. Please leave comments at the original.

Academic careers are hard to come by these days. Public historians will not be surprised by the posts on the active #altac hashtag on Twitter or the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s (SSHRC) recent “White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities” that observed that only between 10 and 15 percent of those who enter PhD programs will be employed at a post-secondary institution [1]. A declining number of tenured and tenure-track positions, coupled with an increased reliance on precarious labor in the form of adjunct and temporary appointments, has destabilized the academic job market for graduates. Deep budget cuts to museums, archives, and other research-oriented institutions–not just in history and the humanities, but also in the social, physical, and life sciences–make finding “traditional” public history jobs increasingly difficult as well.

Rambling at the Farm: Walking Tours, History, Digital Humanities

I recently took my friend Kendall, a PhD candidate in history at Queen's University, on a rambling tour through the Central Experimental Farm. Over the course of an hour and a half and covering 6.5km, we jumped through the Euro-Canadian history of the site. While I didn't have a firm plan about where we'd go and what stories I'd tell, the route wound through some of my favourite spots and included an interweaving of apocryphal local legends, histories of the Farm system and of the city, descriptions of archival collections I've already worked with, and a discussion of the various methodologies I hope to apply as I get into my dissertation research.

Resources for the Consulting Historian

I've been working as a consulting historian in one capacity or another for three years, and as a public history professional for the last five. In this time I've come across a number of podcasts and posts that I've found especially useful in answering the questions that any humanities and/or social science graduate would reasonably have when striking out into the business world.

After discussions at the 2013 National Council on Public History conference, held from April 17-20 here in Ottawa, I've decided to aggregate those resources into a list so that others with similar questions have a 'jumping off' point as they start explore the private sector for themselves. If you have other resources that may be of use, please leave a note in the comments!

What is the role of public historians in the "history wars?"

The Canadian history community is currently in the midst of a 'history war,' pitting various research interests and narratives against one another. As with most other 'history wars' throughout the English-speaking world ( see Enola Gay or The Valour and the Horror, for example), one aspect of the current situation involves competing narratives embodied in the federal government's promotion of a certain memory of the War of 1812, the rebranding of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, and a re-emphasis on the role of the monarchy in Canadian society.

While this side--the battle between different interpretations of our shared past--is familiar to many working public and academic historians, there is another trend also at work in the wider Canadian community: a perceived epistemological shift away from governance based on facts and reasoned argument to governance based on belief. John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail discusses this towards the end of his lecture regarding the collapse of the 'Laurentian Consensus' (do a find for "belief" and go to the third hit for this section).

This can be seen in a number of areas: the removal of the CAIRS database that tracked all Access to Information requests received by the federal government from the internet; the cancellation of the long form census; the challenge faced by arms length watch dogs and regulators such as the Parliamentary Budget Officer or the former head of Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, among others; the closure of the Experimental Lakes Area; the silencing of federal scientists; and, most recently and most worrisomely for public historians, the new Code of Conduct at Library and Archives Canada which limits the ability of employees of LAC to volunteer or speak on topics related to LAC (broadly defined) on their own time.

These two fronts, the interpretation of Canadian history and the shift to governance based on belief, are at the same time separate and innately related. For example, the arguably most important threshold concept of all history professions is that the narrative of past events is up for debate, that different sources tell different stories about the same event and that everyone experiences life differently. The debates regarding the use of nuclear bombs or the aerial bombardment of cities during the Second World War are perfect examples of the kind of tension produced by the existence of conflicting narratives of the past. 

By taking the role as mediators between past events and present publics, public history professionals have to navigate a minefield full of hard political and ethical questions in order to present an accurate picture of what happened within the confines of their institution's mandate and position, which may be defined based on a pre-existing belief in what happened that is not based on a critical reading of all the sources.

What, then, is the public historian's role in the history wars? In particular, what is the role of public historians as employees, contractors, and consultants at government funded institutions and also as private citizens who are deeply interested in the past? Where is the line between professional institutional behaviour and free speech? What are the risks involved in presenting critical histories to the broader public or speaking out on topics about which one is passionate? Do government funding priorities and codes of conducts create 'chilling effects' that limit critical interpretations or even professional outreach and personal volunteerism?

I am not going to propose any answers to these questions, but I do invite comments. Also, during the Nation Council on Public History's upcoming conference in Ottawa, I'll be facilitating a "Dine Around" session on precisely these questions. I'm also working on a list of links related to Canada's current history war that should be interesting for those who care about public history.

Canadian History Wars: Some Links

Please note that this is a work in progress. While it is impossible to present a comprehensive listing, I do hope that it will (eventually) be representative. Also, to try and avoid any undue bias (beyond that embodied in my browsing habits), I've put the links in chronological order as opposed to try to tease out individual themes.