Guest blogging...

Hi Everyone,

For the upcoming school year I've been accepted as a guest blogger at Christopher Moore's History News. I'll try to keep posting regularly at his blog and my own.

Enjoy!

Jordan Kerr

Ontario History Textbooks

Came across this historical survey of Ontario history textbooks in the 20th century at ActiveHistory.ca by Larry A. Glassford of the University of Windsor:

Citizenship Literacy and National Self-identity: The Historical Impact of Curriculum and Textbooks in Shaping the Character of Ontario 

A quick search revealed that Glassford has written several items on Ontario education history.

It's a fairly compact article and draws conclusions about the power of schools for political socialization. I enjoyed it but couldn't help but thinking, 'my god, it was boring enough reading these textbooks in public school and high school, how did this man survive reading through them all and writing about them without reverting to some sort of bored and resentful adolescent state?'

For those of you who went to Ontario elementary or high school I'm sure the narratives for the mid and late 20th century texts will sound painfully familiar and dredge up memories of awful boredom as you force-read passages from these texts whilst sitting in blandly painted classrooms...enjoy!

random uni student

Ash cloud and dry conditions reveals ancient crop marks in the UK....neat

Neat, the recent ash could that grounded planes across the globe and dry summer conditions in Britain coincided and have revealed unknown ancient archaeological sites in the UK via aerial reconnaissance...see the links below...

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/news/cropmarks2010/

http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2010/08/31/a-glorious-year-for-crop-circles-and-crop-rectangles/#more-451


enjoy!

random uni student

Great blog post from Andrew Smith..."How the Iraq War Weakened the USA: Lessons for Canada"

Check out this recent article in Andrew Smith's blog. Though it seems a but shallow in places, which I believe is just due to the nature of blogs, it's an excellent article that makes some very poignant connections. Something to muse on.

random uni student

Technology killed the history star? cont.

In connection to an earlier post, here's a blog post from a British rail way historian I found that provides more anecdotal info on the subject of the affects of technology on historical research.



enjoy!

random uni student

Googling the Future

There is a plethora of debate and writing on Google but here's a few sources that deal with Google in its modern and possible future impacts and contexts...

An interesting article on Google and its future impacts from the NY Times by William Gibson, the author of the forthcoming novel “Zero History.”. Too much info and quotations there for me to not write a 3 page blog post so I'll just post the article and welcome any discussion via the Comments on specific points.

Here's another good article on Google in relation to the above by Daniel J. Solove in The Chronicle of Higher Education.


The later article is from a larger collection of articles from various experts and disciplines from the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled,

"What's the Big Idea? For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?"

 Enjoy!

random uni student

Stonewall Uprising movie at the Mayfair

For those of you in Ottawa this weekend, and of course if interested, I just heard that a movie Stonewall Uprising about the, you guessed it, the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 will be playing at the Mayfair Theatre on Bank St. this weekend. The Stonewall riots are widely thought to have been the catalyst to the gay liberation movement.

enjoy,

random uni student

Where for art thou census debate?

Now, I know this is getting to be old news and all the points have been masticated quite thoroughly in the media and blogs but it's still on my mind. To be honest, I wish it was still national news. Unfortunately, the mainstream seems to have thrown in the towel in the face of the Conservative bulwark on the census.

I came across this and thought it was worth sharing. Paul Wells in Macleans makes a point about the Tories scrapping the mandatory long form census that I hadn't considered, one based in government accountability:

"Unmooring the census from its basis in statistical reliability is a wicked thing to do because it takes away one of the few tools we have for measuring the effectiveness of the things governments do...If you want the evaluation of government action to be a public good, available to us all, you need publicly available data of a high order, so that anyone with a decent grasp of statistics can measure results against goals...citizens will have fewer independent benchmarks against which to judge any of this."

I won't make any comments on it, as I am in no way an expert on the subject or even consider myself informed on it, and really, the quotation speaks for itself.

enjoy,

random uni student

PS. So, I posted this and then immediately saw this...I guess it's not quite as dead as I thought it was....may bad! And then I found this, also from Macleans - a list of for and against the scrapping of the long form census.

JKF in Canada - 1961

For no particular reason other than that I find them neat, here's some clips of the arrival and speech of Pres. John Kennedy to Parliament in 1961.

Speech to Parliament - May 18, 1961

Arrival on Parliament Hill (reminds one of Obama's reception on the Hill?)

For some reason the Arrival on the Hill link goes to the Obama reception link, but if you click either link just below the Obama clip you'll find JKF's visit clip - it's #17 in the sideways scrolling list.

enjoy!

random uni student

In search of Canadian cuisine...

What food can be connected to a Canadian identity as authentically Canadian? What is the Canadian national dish? What can be considered specifically and uniquely Canadian cuisine?

Recently in a lecture we discussed how Chinese restaurant menus were the first in Canada to specifically differentiate between Canadian food and 'other' food. Think about it, what general Chinese food restaurant sign or menu doesn't say Chinese AND Canadian food. Of course, even the food labeled as Chinese food can really be considered Canadian food but such restaurants during the 20th century were the first to define what constituted Canadian cuisine in contrast to the food of a foreign, 'other', culture.

A recent CBC program, The Main Ingredient, discusses Chinese restaurants in Canadian cuisine history as well as engaging in a debate of what is truly Canadian national cuisine.

To top it off,  ever want to know about when pizza become popular in Canada? Check out the CBC Archives clip and choose Who's The Happiest Homemaker?

Enjoy!

random uni student