This post is part of a series on AI and Collaboration.

Archive boxes by Pexels. Free for use under the Pixabay content license.

Transcribing archival documents is an important part of historical research, but a transcribed archive is still just prose. Before a historian can map trade routes and build databases to trace a merchant across ten thousand pages, they must turn this prose into useful data, identifying and tagging the persons, places, organizations, and other relevant entities within the text. Doing this by hand at a useful scale is impossible. Instead, historians most commonly turn to software called Named Entity Recognition (NER), which powers most of the structured historical data you’ve ever queried, from tagged court records to place-name indexes.

NER has evolved through three generations. The oldest systems were rules-based: using sophisticated, frequently hand-curated, gazetteers that matched text against lists and patterns. The second generation transformer models used the context of the sentence both before and after each word to distinguish that word’s meaning. For example, these systems could separate “Turkey” the place from “turkey” the animal by identifying context clues, like reading “Istanbul” or “feather,” in the sentence around the word. The newest generation uses large language models (LLMs), colloquially known as AI, which bring general linguistic knowledge to the task. This generalized knowledge allows these models to perform at a higher standard, providing more accurate results when identifying historical entities. Each generation improves on the last, but all share a limitation in that each model performs only as well as its training data resembles the documents under analysis, and almost nothing is trained using historical documents, especially ones as old as the early modern period.

The consequences of this lack of historical training are significant. To measure NER performance, I ran one hundred pages of OCR’d early modern text through fifteen systems and compared every tag against a hand-tagged gold standard covering four entity types: people, places, commodities, and organizations. spaCy, the free tool commonly used by humanists, missed most of what matters and scored just 20 percent on the standard accuracy measure. General LLMs like Google’s Gemini 3 Pro performed better, reaching 67 percent, but its failures are telling. Gemini hallucinated over 450 false entities, manufacturing patterns that do not exist in the sources. Other typical errors included entities filed under the wrong type entirely, such as reading the “East-India Company” as the place “East India.” These errors are not random noise that washes out at scale; they’re systemic, mis-tagging the same items the same way every time.

Part of the reason those systems created these kinds of errors was that they were not created for historical research. However, looking at these errors from a historian’s lens allowed me to create a better solution for history. Additionally, I noticed that those systems had a tendency to repress those entities which appear only rarely in the corpus. Sometimes, the most valuable entities, the obscure people and the once-mentioned places, are the very heart of where historical discovery is found. Fixing the systemic problems, and surfacing these obscure entities, were my goals in creating my own solution.

Through testing, the evident solution wasn’t to find a better product. It was building one. Over a few weeks working with an LLM coding assistant, I fine-tuned a small open-source model on training data I curated by hand, producing EarlyModernNER. This model, which was trained on a home computer using consumer grade hardware, scored 82 percent, roughly 10 percent higher than Gemini 3 Pro, while filing zero entities under the wrong type, which no other model could do. It runs on most computers and is free to access via Github. More importantly, it is completely open and retrainable, meaning any historian with their own hand-tagged sample of sources can take the model and teach it their period’s documents.

The exact numbers achieved by EarlyModernNER matter less than the decisions behind them. Every design choice was a historical judgment: privileging precision over recall, because a hallucinated entry is worse than a missed mention; selecting entity categories that reflect what my historical investigation required; curating training data as an act of source criticism. 

For decades, humanists have been consumers of models built by and for other fields, applying them to our studies with little modification. With the emergence of LLM coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude, small but mighty open-weight models, and consumer hardware becoming more powerful, the creation of digital tools for historians—once the function of the all too rare funded lab—is now within reach of a single researcher. Off-the-shelf tools may fail to produce useful data with your sources, but that’s no longer the end of the story. It’s the starting point. Historians now have the power to create our own tools, which can be shared with one another to empower the research of the entire field. Every gold standard, every shared dataset, every time a historian publishes open code to GitHub raises the floor for the next researcher, allowing our computational labour to compound on itself the way our research always has with footnotes. Now is the time to build. But even more, now is the time to collaborate.

Jacob Polay is a PhD student in History at the University of Saskatchewan, studying the roles Large Language Models have in the historical method. His current research involves creating an information retrieval pipeline using artificial intelligence tools to unlock the early modern archive at scale.

Chloë Farr is a researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, archives, and digital humanities. Working out of the Open Science Lab at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, her research focuses on large-scale text recognition and analysis of historical documents, including newspapers, maps, and archival records. Learn more about Farr’s work on GitHub.

Jessica Jack is a PhD student in History at the University of Saskatchewan, developing applications for Large Language Models in historical research. They are doing so through studying settler land use in late 19th century and early 20th century Saskatchewan.

This post is part of a series on AI and Collaboration.

For many people who use archives, the accessibility of archival material is a notable difficulty. Archivists and librarians have long been turning to software to help with that accessibility. One of their main tools is Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This type of software turns images of text into digital characters, which can then be accessed by anyone with an internet connection and can be easily processed and analyzed outside of an archive. But OCR started as a corporate solution to corporate problems, which meant it was not very good at dealing with the differences present in archival materials. Archivists have been trying to address this with bespoke technology, but the last few years have presented a new way to deal with the problem.

OCR enabled by AI vision language models (VLM-OCR) has recently exploded as a research topic in multiple fields including computer science, digital humanities, library information science, linguistics, and beyond. This new movement in OCR began because AI developers hit a wall. They had trained their models on all available data on the web so they tried using AI-generated data instead, but the results were problematic, inconsistent, and risky. To solve this, they turned to physical documents to broaden their training base. However, they needed better OCR to make this possible. The paper by AllenAI that opened the field, “olmOCR: Unlocking Trillions of Tokens in PDFs with Vision Language Models,” says as much in its opening lines: PDFs hold enormous volumes of “novel, high-quality” training data, but their diversity of formats and layouts makes that content hard to extract faithfully.

AllenAI’s statement highlights some of the motivations behind this technology. Many AI companies are now developing OCR models and releasing some of them openly in order to encourage adoption, build user communities, and establish their tools as part of the wider document-processing ecosystem. Open source models—whose source code is publicly available, freely licensed to use, modify, and redistribute—can reduce the cost of access to high-quality OCR. They enable galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) institutions and researchers to run, evaluate, and adapt tools on their own infrastructure. However, this does not eliminate commercial competition: companies can still charge for hosted services, enterprise support, specialised fine-tuning, and licences for larger-scale commercial use. For example, Datalab’s Surya makes its tool available under a semi-open license. The ability to fine-tune the tool’s training is free for research, personal use, and smaller startups but they require broader commercial licensing for other users. While useful in some respects, Surya is not made for GLAM and humanities research and thus represents a limited use case of these semi-open corporate solutions.

This kind of for-profit model system can also be seen in Transkribus, one of the most widely used OCR services for humanities research. This software is not fully open source, instead running on a credits-based system where the first 50 credits are free and then the cost increases. Customers can fine-tune or “train” their own models for improved transcription for their collections. Typically fine-tuning is most helpful on homogenous collections with a high volume of documents. However, the company retains the underlying model for themselves, including the clients’ documents used for that development. This restricts the portability of the model outside of the Transkribus environment. Alternatively, Adobe PDF reader is a widely accessible OCR engine requiring little technical knowledge, but is available with a subscription fee, and performs poorly on historical documents. While these are but two examples, the expansive use of these models demonstrate the demand for OCR, but also the simultaneous need for this OCR to become more accessible and sustainable. It is in GLAM’s interest to find ways to use OCR models without relying on for-profit services as open source models ensure ownership of data while minimizing overhead expenses for consistently underfunded institutions. This independence can be achieved through capacity- and knowledge-sharing, and collaborating on OCR processing to remove redundant work.

The outputs of many OCR technologies were developed for training LLMs, but that are frequently of little use in the humanities. They can be used by people with specific data mining and data science purposes, like researchers doing Named Entity Recognition. But these are still rather niche, and the majority of archival researchers and historians who want to access these OCR outputs would instead benefit from the document processing of OCR resulting in searchable archives. This is another area where AI-driven OCR is helpful, as it has the capacity to easily transform OCR outputs into specific and bespoke formats for the needs of the researchers who are using these outputs.

In my work as a GLAM researcher situated in libraries, I focus on making VLM-OCR accessible and useful for research and archival use. I’m frequently asked “What’s the best VLM-OCR model right now?” Before March 2026, it was usually pretty clear. The models were quite uniform, handling the same type of documents, providing the same output formats but with different levels of transcription accuracy based on the source document’s language, scan quality, and text layout. Now, each model has their own distinct strengths. It is a welcome development that models are no longer competing on accuracy alone. For example, Hunyuan OCR provides coordinates for each word on the page, which in turn enables people to search for the word and see it highlighted right on the page. ChandraOCR-2 also does a great job of transcription, and it can detect images inside a document (photos, art, graphics, etc.) and keep them separate from the surrounding text, along with writing short descriptions of what’s in each one. Surya OCR is a very small model, meaning it can run on lower-quality hardware, and transcribes at a higher speed while occasionally sacrificing accuracy. Differentiating by strengths  eases the burden on users, who no longer have to chase a 0.1% accuracy edge and can instead pick whichever model suits their purposes. Regular users seem to develop an intuition for this. It comes with experience, gained by testing different models across a range of document types and matching them to what the user needs from a transcription. In this sense, collaboration between these experienced researchers in the space is key to helping everyone access the models that best suit their needs.

What emerges from this shift is an ecosystem of increasingly complementary AI-enabled OCR models, whose real value depends on the researchers who know how to use them. With these models, institutions do not need to bet everything on one company’s roadmap or pricing model. They can now run the software on local hardware that ensures data ownership stays with the institution. And because the tools are open, GLAM professionals can pool their expertise built through hands-on testing, matching models to materials, and sharing their work across institutions. The models themselves are now good enough that further gains will be small and specialized. What needs improving is how we use them together. The people making these documents accessible need a shared and growing toolkit, built with and for each other to use, made easier by the support of LLMs. For chronically underfunded archives and libraries, that collaboration is worth as much as any accuracy gain. Better OCR is worth having. Building the capacity of archives and libraries to serve the people who rely on them is worth more.

Chloë Farr is a researcher working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, archives, and digital humanities. Working out of the Open Science Lab at TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, her research focuses on large-scale text recognition and analysis of historical documents, including newspapers, maps, and archival records. Learn more about Farr’s work on GitHub.

Jessica Jack is a PhD student in History at the University of Saskatchewan, developing applications for Large Language Models in historical research. They are doing so through studying settler land use in late 19th century and early 20th century Saskatchewan.

Jacob Polay is a PhD student in History at the University of Saskatchewan, studying the roles Large Language Models have in the historical method. His current research involves creating an information retrieval pipeline using artificial intelligence tools to unlock the early modern archive at scale.

Karen Dubinsky, Professor Emerita of History and Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, brilliant scholar and generous friend to so many, passed away on 4 September 2026 after a brief illness. Karen was a longtime supporter of—and contributor to—Active History. We mourn her loss, even as we celebrate her life. Below are three reflections from friends and colleagues of Karen. The first, by Susan Lord and Scott Rutherford, is reprinted with light editing from the website of the Department of Global Development Studies at Queen’s.

Susan Lord and Scott Rutherford

Karen was a colleague, a friend, an intellectual co-conspirator, a fellow traveler, a teacher and mentor for many at Queen’s and beyond. After graduating from Carleton University with her BA and MA, Karen completed her PhD in History at Queen’s in 1991. Karen had brief teaching stints at the University of Toronto, Carleton University and McMaster University before taking a tenure-track appointment in 1993 in the History Department at Queen’s University. She was jointly appointed to the Department of Global Development Studies in 2010. Her retirement from Queen’s in July 2025 did nothing to slow down her down, as until her untimely passing she was doing research for a new book, “Cuban Roots on Canadian Soil: A History of Cuban Musicians in Canada.”

She reinvented herself as a historian at every turn—her topics of study ranging from Canadian gender and feminist history to transnational adoption, from queer tourism to Cuba-Canada cultural relations. There were many other collaborations along the way: edited books on the global 1960s, transnational history, Cuban musicians, and global development studies in Canada. As her mentor and friend Dr. Roberta Hamilton said at Karen’s retirement event last year:

“In her research and teaching she has never stood still—and her shifting theoretical perspectives find their way lightly but cleverly to inform her substantive work. Which always makes her work so enlightening, surprising, and interesting. Take the first of her sole-authored books:  Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario 1880-1929.  … Amazingly undated given the huge swings in theoretical approaches, Karen’s study intertwines sex/gender, race, sexuality, patriarchy, morality and the social construction not just of femininity but also of masculinity, until then seen as simply the norm. More than all this she shows what became her signature style in all her work: telling a good story.”

The scope of her imagination was unparalleled, matched only by the most careful eye for detail, whether in the archives or in interviews. She gathered readers from across many borders.  As professor David Austin  (author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex and Security in Sixties Montreal, among numerous other titles) wrote about Karen’s book Cuba Beyond the Beach:  “By cutting away at the debilitating romance, clichés, and dense propaganda that often characterizes narratives about Cuba, this wonderfully rich book provides the reader with a rare glimpse into a Cuba that continues to capture our imaginations, even as we somewhat nervously witness its dramatic history unfold.” American political commentator Ben Rhodes, who as a close Obama aide came to Canada to help steer US talks with Cuba, recently wrote to Karen about her award-winning 2025 book, Strangely Friends: A History of Cuban-Canadian Encounters:

“What really stood out to me was how you told this history through individual, intimate portraits rather than abstract diplomacy. Teachers, artists, and musicians whose personal choices to cross borders quietly built something that outlasted political ideology. It felt intentional, generous, and carefully researched in a way that’s hard to pull off without truly valuing the human stories underneath the larger geopolitical narrative. I especially appreciated the throughline from the classrooms of Havana to the jazz clubs of Toronto. It gives the book a rhythm that mirrors its subject, tracing connection through music and education rather than just tracking state policy. Those are the moments that separate a good history from one that actually lingers in a reader’s mind.”

This intentional and generous research was foundational to the spirit and labour of the course, Cuban Culture and Society, which she co-taught in a fifteen-year collaboration between Queen’s and the University of Havana. The course won two awards, took over 350 students to Cuba, and became a model of reciprocity and experiential learning. The exchange brought over twenty scholars, musicians, filmmakers, artists and curators from Cuba to Queen’s to participate in on-campus and community activities. Several Cubans undertook their MAs and PhDs at Queen’s as a result of the deep relationships cultivated through the research Karen and others developed over decades. Karen also opened the door for Cuban-Canadian artist Harry Tanner’s papers to be held in the Queen’s Archives and spearheaded Honorary Doctorates for Cuban musicians Carlos Varela and Alex Cuba.

Karen’s teaching and supervision demonstrated a lifelong commitment to curiosity and to helping students generate new ideas and ways of expressing critical understandings of the world around them. This reverence for learning was evident in the attention she gave students—from first year undergraduates on up—who showed an interest in learning beyond the boundaries of normative thought and practice. For Karen, asking and answering questions often required going far beyond the “either/or” to find deeper, muddier truths–a lesson she shared with the thousands of students whom she taught over 32 years in the classroom.

During Karen’s retirement event, former students Bay Ryley and Dave Seglins said, “We are the love children of HIST 565. We got married a few years later and had two of our own little ‘love children of HIST 565’.”  Their eldest, Amy, has just started third year at Queen’s. Bay also noted about Karen: “The obvious love of her own work made her outstanding as an advisor and teacher. What is more inspiring than a writer who loves to write, a historian who loves history and their research, and a teacher who loves what and whom they are teaching? One wanted to write to impress.  Not out of fear or obligation. I wrote for Karen and so I desired to do my very best.”

Karen leaves behind her partner Susan Belyea, her son Jordi Belyea-Dubinsky and an international village of family and friends.

A Door She Opened

Freddy Monasterio

There’s a popular way of thinking about the world as divided between two fundamental kinds of people: the “doers” and the “dreamers.” Historians, too, are often imagined in these terms. But what happens when you meet someone like Karen Dubinsky, who was both at once? You begin to see that dreaming and doing are not opposites. Karen moved effortlessly between ideas and action, between critical thinking and human connection, and in doing so opened for me a new door and a new understanding of how to be in the world.

The ways Karen transformed my understanding of scholarship, friendship, and responsibility remain alive in me. When I think about how much of the way I critically engage with the world, the past, and the future comes from working, eating, talking, and listening to music with Karen, I still cannot fully comprehend the influence she had on my life, not only as a scholar, but, more importantly, as a human being.

Karen taught me that scholarship is not only what happens in archives, classrooms, or publications. It also happens in conversations, friendships, shared meals, and acts of solidarity. Today, I work and research in a way that is highly relational, fluid, and messy. I am proudly part of Karen’s legacy, and I will continue moving forward in that spirit: unafraid of making mistakes, speaking back to power, and challenging injustice.

I will always remember the first time we met, on a balcony in Havana on a humid afternoon. The space was packed with Canadian students, old friends, and prominent scholars, yet she somehow made a stranger feel seen. She was curious about my life, my dreams, and my ideas. Everyone who had the privilege of knowing Karen will recognize this as part of her magic: she always made space in her heart and her mind for new relationships and new ways of understanding the world.

She loved a challenge, and Cuba, especially Cubans, gave her a big one. She pushed me to keep asking difficult questions about Cuba, and to remain open to its contradictions and possibilities. Today, I can say that I love and understand Cuba in a different and special way, and a large part of that comes from Karen. When I left Cuba and wanted to move on, she kept it alive in me.

I will miss her, and I certainly do. But the truth is that she does not feel gone. Her voice, her teachings, and her example remain present in my work and in the way I move through the world. The best tribute I can offer is to honour the loyalty, intelligence, and passion she brought into my life, and to carry those gifts forward. Karen showed me that it is possible to be both a dreamer and a doer. I will continue trying to live up to that lesson.

Almanacs, Perogies, and Cassette Tapes: A Short Tribute to Karen Dubinsky

Steven Maynard

Karen Dubinsky introduced me to ‘active history’ forty-one years ago. Of course, we didn’t call it ‘active history’ then, but sitting around the graduate seminar table as Karen’s classmate in 1985, one of my first clues about the connections between activism and history came in the form of an object Karen always kept close at hand: her EveryWoman’s Almanac. Produced by the Women’s Press collective (Toronto) beginning in the mid-1970s, the datebook featured a different theme each year—women and the peace movement, women and the environment—and often highlighted women’s historical contributions. What exactly Karen, in her left-slanted handwriting, recorded in her almanac, I can’t say, but the message in the seminar room was clear: for Karen, studying history was inseparable from her commitment to the feminist movement.

Karen’s immersion in feminist history as active history began before she was a grad student. As Karen wrote to me last year, “In 1978, when I was a baby feminist [she was 21], I had a summer job in Thunder Bay working for the Northern Women’s Centre interviewing old ladies.” (See p. 8 of the Northern Woman Journal, Dec/Jan 1978/79). One of those old ladies was Ksenia Dubinsky, Karen’s immigrant grandmother. As the oral history reveals, Ksenia Dubinsky, along with her husband, ran the International Café in Fort William during the Great Depression. Much of Karen’s conversation with her Ukrainian baba focused on food (attention food historians!). Nearly a decade after the interview, I had the good fortune to get a lesson from Mrs. Dubinsky in perogy-making (I can hear Karen correcting my Anglo ‘perogy’).

Karen always kept one eye on the past and the other focused clearly on the present. In 1985, the year Karen completed her Carleton MA thesis on women and the Knights of Labor in late 19th-century Ontario, she also authored a report for the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women. Titled “Lament for a Patriarchy Lost? Anti-feminism, Anti-abortion, and R.E.A.L. Women in Canada,” it represented one of the first assessments of the impact of the New Right on feminist politics in Canada. I recall Karen giving a talk a few years later in which she noted how the “New Right” already sounded quaint; in her characteristically droll fashion, she mused, “now we just call it the State.” Always linking analysis and activism, Karen led a group of us in Kingston in March 1987 to protest Gwen Landolt, leader of R.E.A.L. women, under the banner F.A.K.E. – Feminists for All Kinds of Equality.

The cassette tapes and transcripts of the oral histories, after languishing for almost fifty years, were recently deposited in the Lakehead University Archives, which has started a fundraising campaign, “Listening to Women’s History,” to digitize the tapes. I can’t think of a better way to honour Karen’s memory and early work in women’s history than by contributing to this ongoing effort to mobilize the archives of these immigrant and working-class women’s stories.

It is far too soon to be writing about Karen in the archival tense. Yet it’s because of these archives that we have the recording of Karen in conversation with her grandmother. Karen’s is not the resonant voice I associate with her more recent podcast and radio show on Cuban music. On the tapes, Karen sounds, well, younger, maybe a little tentative. And yet I can hear the Karen so many of us came to know: curious, caring, committed.

At one point in the interview, Karen says to her grandmother, “Tell me about Tim Buck.” Mrs. Dubinsky talks about going to hear the leader of the Communist Party of Canada speak in Port Arthur. She also mentions several times another speaker by the name of Smith (presumably Stewart Smith, another CPC leader). Karen admits she’s never heard of him. This lapse prompts Mrs. Dubinsky to gently chide, “Don’t say [to] baba that.” Listen to Karen’s admiring laugh as she acknowledges her grandmother’s lesson in radical immigrant history.

Susan Lord is a Professor in Film and Media at Queen’s University.

Scott Rutherford is an Associate Professor in Global Development Studies at Queen’s University.

Freddy Monasterio is Co-Director of the Feast Centre for Indigenous STBBI Research at McMaster University. Originally from Havana, Cuba, he was co-host with Karen Dubinsky of Cuban Serenade, a podcast about Cuban music in Canada and the experiences of the Cuban diaspora.

Steven Maynard teaches in the Department of History at Queen’s University, where he and Karen were graduate students together in the late 1980s, and friends and colleagues over the past four decades.

On August 27, 2026, President of the United States Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. federal government to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” The order requires the U.S. Board on Geographic Names and federal agencies to use the new name on federal maps, databases, documents, and communications.

Immediately after Trump’s executive order, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney issued a statement explaining where the name Ontario comes from:

“The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means ‘the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.’”

The name, Carney emphasized, is more than four centuries old, predating both Canadian Confederation and the American Declaration of Independence. His conclusion was pointed: Canadians understand that “naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s response was considerably more combative and theatrical. On August 29, wearing a Team Canada soccer jersey, Ford unveiled an enormous 24-by-12-foot sign on the Lake Ontario shoreline near Hamilton:

“Lake Ontario. Now and Always.

Lac Ontario. Aujourd’hui et pour toujours.”

The $25,000 sign, elevated approximately six feet above the ground, makes the entire structure nearly eighteen feet high. “President Trump can call it whatever, but I can tell you the rest of the world will always call it Lake Ontario,” Ford said.

The current controversy is not the first time that a government official has tried to give Lake Ontario a different name. In fact, the lake has carried several names over its long history. During the early and mid-seventeenth century, French writers and mapmakers variously referred to it as lac des Iroquois, lac Saint-Louis, lac Ontario,and Skanadario (“beautiful lake”). Of these competing names, Ontario ultimately endured, becoming the name not only of the lake but, in the late nineteenth century, of the province.[1] There was no single, universally accepted name for the lake during much of the seventeenth century.

For several decades in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, European maps also identified Lake Ontario as Lac Frontenac (“Lake Frontenac”), after Louis de Buade, comte de Frontenac, governor general of New France. Frontenac served two terms as governor, first from 1672 to 1682 and again from 1689 until his death in 1698. Like Donald Trump, Frontenac was extremely self-confident, extravagant and vain, highly quarrelsome, sensitive to challenges to his authority, and deeply concerned with his own status and reputation. No other governor of New France – not even the longer-serving Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil (twenty-two years), or Charles de la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois (twenty-one years) – enjoyed the distinction of having one of the Great Lakes named after him. While I have found no archival document explicitly stating that Frontenac wanted Lake Ontario to bear his name, Lac Frontenac became a widely accepted designation for the lake during his governorship and circulated among his protégés, associates, and admirers, suggesting that the old governor was hardly troubled by the honour.

Frontenac became governor of New France in 1672. He was a more expansionist governor than his immediate predecessors and was determined to promote (and participate in) the fur trade. In 1673 he ordered the construction of a trading post at Cataraqui, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, on the site of present-day Kingston, Ontario. Residents of Montreal were ordered to assist in its construction. The post, initially known as Fort Cataraqui and soon as Fort Frontenac, proved expensive to maintain, and in 1675 it was conceded as a seigneury to René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, one of Frontenac’s close allies, who agreed to rebuild and garrison it at his own expense. Montreal’s merchants and fur traders were incensed. They feared, with some justification, that Fort Frontenac would allow the governor and his associates to monopolize the fur trade by diverting the furs exchanged in the Lake Ontario region away from Montreal. Frontenac himself had financial interests in the trade, and his governorship became entangled in bitter disputes over commerce, patronage, and political authority.

Many of those who promoted the name Lac Frontenac moved within the political and patronage networks surrounding the governor. They were, for the most part, clients or associates of Frontenac and likely substituted “Frontenac” for “Ontario” in their récits de voyage (travel narratives), letters, reports, and maps as a form of flattery, one that might help to secure patronage, promotions, or other favours from the governor. Such gestures were part of the patronage networks that permeated the political culture of New France and, more broadly, Ancien Régime France. Advancement depended heavily upon cultivating powerful protectors who could recommend clients for offices, obtain royal permissions, and commercial privileges, or advance their interests at court. Naming a fort, lake, river, or newly “discovered” territory after a patron was a political gesture and a public expression of loyalty and gratitude that reinforced the relationship between patron and client.[2]

These political gestures of patronage even extended beyond the eastern Great Lakes. In 1673, fur trader Louis Jolliet departed on an expedition commissioned by the government of New France to investigate reports of a great river flowing south: the Mississippi. Accompanied by the Jesuit Jacques Marquette, Jolliet descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River, far enough to determine that the river emptied not into the Pacific but into the Gulf of Mexico, another body of water which the Trump administration has tried to rename. Satisfied with their discoveries, Jolliet and Marquette began their homeward journey. While Marquette remained at the mission of Saint-François-Xavier in present-day Wisconsin, Jolliet hastened back to Quebec to report to Governor Frontenac.

The map (Figure 6) that Jolliet subsequently presented to Frontenac transformed the geography of the continental interior into an extraordinary tribute to the governor and his family. Lake Ontario appeared as Lac Frontenac ou Ontario, while the Mississippi became the Rivière de Buade, taking on Frontenac’s family name. In the letter accompanying the map, Jolliet explicitly drew the governor’s attention to the honour, describing what we now know as the Mississippi as the great river “which bears your name.”[3] Finally, Jolliet labelled a vast territory in the interior Frontenacie, essentially, “Frontenac-land.” The names were hardly accidental. Jolliet was presenting the results of his expedition to Frontenac, and naming so much of the continent after the governor was an obvious form of flattery.

René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle took charge of the newly built fort at Cataraqui in 1673 and secured the official seigneurial grant for the fort in 1675. Initially known as Fort Cataraqui, the establishment soon became known as Fort Frontenac in honour of La Salle’s powerful patron. By May 1675, when King Louis XIV of France formally granted the post to La Salle, the royal concession already referred to it as “the fort called Frontenac,” while continuing to call the body of water on which it stood “Lake Ontario.”[4] With Frontenac’s support, La Salle subsequently received permission to establish trading posts farther into the continental interior, extending French commercial and territorial claims at relatively little cost to the Crown. In 1682, La Salle descended the Mississippi to its mouth and claimed the entire Mississippi basin for Louis XIV under the name of “Louisiana.”

Like Jolliet, La Salle likewise adopted the governor’s name for Lake Ontario. The official narrative of La Salle’s voyages from 1679 to 1681, for example, describes the Niagara River as emptying into “Lake Frontenac” (la rivière de Niagara se jette dans le lac Frontenac).[5] The choice was revealing. La Salle was a close protégé of Frontenac whose western ambitions depended heavily upon the governor’s support, and the name Lac Frontenac circulated through accounts and maps associated with his expeditions. For example, Jean-Baptiste-Louis Franquelin’s 1684 Carte de la Louisiane ou des voyages du Sr de La Salle (Figure 8) identifies Lake Ontario as Lac Frontenac. In 1682, the engineer and cartographer Jean-Baptiste Minet, who later joined La Salle’s expedition to the Gulf of Mexico, produced a detailed plan in his journal of the eastern end of Lake Ontario entitled Lac de Frontenac et Source du Saint-Laurent (Figure 9).

Récollet missionary Louis Hennepin, who participated in La Salle’s western expeditions and spent considerable time at Fort Frontenac, likewise referred to Lake Ontario as Lac de Frontenac in his Description de la Louisiane published in Paris in 1683. Hennepin’s published firsthand account included an important fold-out engraved map titled Carte de la Nouvelle France et de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte (Figure 10) which also depicted Lac Frontenac.

Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, a French soldier and chronicler of New France’s history, enjoyed a close relationship with Governor Frontenac. Lahontan served under Frontenac during the defence of Quebec against an expeditionary force of New England colonists in 1690 and generally portrayed the governor favourably in his writings, despite declining Frontenac’s proposal that he marry his eighteen-year-old goddaughter. Lahontan also adopted the governor’s name for Lake Ontario in his Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale. His Carte Générale de Canada, published in 1703, identifies the lake prominently as Lac Ontario ou de Frontenac (Figure 11).

Writing from the vantage point of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit historian Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix reflected on this earlier process of naming and renaming Lake Ontario: “This lake bore for some time the name of Saint Louis; it was subsequently given the name Frontenac, as was the fort of Cataracoui, of which the Comte of Frontenac was the founder. But gradually the lake resumed its former name, which is Huron or Iroquois, and the fort took the name of the place where it was built.”[6] As Father Charlevoix noted, the Indigenous name for the lake ultimately reasserted itself in common usage. In the long run, Lake Ontario had profound staying power.

Lac Frontenac enjoyed considerable currency among French explorers, writers, and mapmakers during the late seventeenth century, but it never completely replaced Ontario. During the eighteenth century, Ontario increasingly prevailed over Frontenac. The governor’s name lingered on some maps for decades, sometimes alongside Ontario, but it never succeeded in displacing the older Indigenous-derived name. Something similar happened with the fort. Although Fort Frontenac remained an official and recognizable designation, French writers also continued to call the post Cataracoui or Cataraqui, preserving the Indigenous-derived name of the place where it had been constructed. [7]

By the eighteenth century, leading French cartographers such as Guillaume Delisle, Philippe Buache, Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, and Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville had generally returned to Lac Ontario.

The governor’s name disappeared from the map, while Ontario endured. The term “Lake America” will likely meet the same fate. Then as now, the name of a place is not simply what political authorities decree or put on official maps, but what people actually call it. As Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, “Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.”

Dr. Scott Berthelette is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University whose research focuses on New France, Euro-Indigenous Relations, and the early modern Atlantic World. His first book, Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire: French-Indigenous Relations and the Rise of the Métis in the Hudson Bay Watershed, was published with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. It was awarded the Mary Alice and Philip Boucher Book Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society for the best book in French colonial history. Scott has also published his research findings in the Canadian Historical Review, Ethnohistory, American Indian Quarterly, and Early American Studies.

Bibliography

Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de. Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale. Edited by Pierre Berthiaume. 2 vols. Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994.

Eccles, W. J. Frontenac: The Courtier Governor. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1959.

Eccles, W. J. “Buade, Louis de, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. Accessed September 4, 2026. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/buade_de_frontenac_et_de_palluau_louis_de_1E.html

Havard, Gilles. Empire et métissages: Indiens et Français dans le Pays d’en Haut, 1660–1715. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2003.

Hayes, Derek. Historical Atlas of Canada: Canada’s History Illustrated with Original Maps. Rev. ed. Madeira Park, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 2015.

Hennepin, Louis. Description de la Louisiane, nouvellement découverte au sud-ouest de la Nouvelle France. Paris: Chez la veuve Sébastien Huré, 1683.

La Salle, René-Robert Cavelier de. Relation of the Discoveries and Voyages of Cavelier de La Salle from 1679 to 1681: The Official Narrative. Translated by Melville B. Anderson. Chicago: Caxton Club, 1901.

Litalien, Raymonde, Jean-François Palomino, and Denis Vaugeois. La mesure d’un continent: Atlas historique de l’Amérique du Nord, 1492–1814. Québec: Éditions du Septentrion; Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007.

Macfarlane, Daniel. The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History. Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2024.

Murray, Laura. “Ka’tarohkwi: The Original Swamp Ward?” Swamp Ward and Inner Harbour History Project. Accessed September 8, 2026. https://swampwardhistory.com/katarokwi-the-original-swamp-ward/

Palomino, Jean-François. “Relire les cartes géographiques du Mississippi de l’époque de Louis Jolliet.” Les Cahiers des Dix, no. 77 (2023–2024): 1–29.

Palomino, Jean-François. Cartographier la Nouvelle-France: Le savoir géographique au service de l’État (1534–1744). Montréal: Boréal, 2026.

Preston, Richard A., ed. Royal Fort Frontenac. Translated by Leopold Lamontagne. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1958.

Rayburn, Alan. Place Names of Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Roy, Pierre-Georges. Inventaire des insinuations du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle-France. Beauceville, QC: L’Éclaireur, 1921.

Walczynski, Mark. Jolliet and Marquette: A New History of the 1673 Expedition. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2023.

[1] The word “Ontario” may be derived from Kaniatarí:io or Oniatarí:io, Iroquoian-language terms that can be translated as “lake of shining waters” or “beautiful lake.” Daniel Macfarlane, The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024), 4.

[2] Jean-François Palomino, Cartographier la Nouvelle-France: Le savoir géographique au service de l’État (1534–1744) (Montréal: Boréal, 2026), 97-107.

[3] Louis Jolliet, Nouvelle découverte de plusieurs nations dans la Nouvelle France en l’année 1673 et 1674, 1674. John Carter Brown Library, Map Collection.

[4] “Concession par Sa Majesté à Robert Cavelier de la Salle du fort Frontenac, 13 mai 1675,” in Pierre-Georges Roy, Inventaire des insinuations du Conseil souverain de la Nouvelle-France (Beauceville, QC: L’Éclaireur, 1921), 33.

[5] Robert Cavelier de La Salle, Relation of the Discoveries and Voyages of Cavelier de La Salle from 1679 to 1681: The Official Narrative, trans. Melville B. Anderson (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1901), 20-21.

[6] Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Journal d’un voyage fait par ordre du roi dans l’Amérique septentrionale, ed. Pierre Berthiaume (Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1994), 445.

[7] For a discussion of Cataraqui place name, see Laura Murray, “Ka’tarohkwi: The Original Swamp Ward?” accessed September 8, 2026, https://swampwardhistory.com/katarokwi-the-original-swamp-ward/.

By Jim Clifford

It is never fun to watch friends argue. Generative AI has created multiple fractures across our universities and the community of historians. The stakes are high and we are all dealing with the repercussions. I spent a few weeks in August rebuilding my second-year course for the third time. Two years ago, I swapped the traditional research essay for a StoryMap project, thinking that even if the students used GenAI, they’d still learn something making the map. But now, a student with Claude in Chrome could get the LLM to build the whole map without any real engagement. This year I’m trying a hybrid of contract grading and ownership. It was a lot of work and I still worry about what we’ve lost without a traditional essay.

The frustration and anger with the tech companies make it hard to hold a conversation. I’m worried about the future of higher education at the scale it has operated for the past half century. If machines are starting to displace recent graduates in the employment market, then the basic promise of working hard to earn a fulfilling and remunerative career is under threat. I understand the decision to simply refuse: not to engage with this technology and not to pay Anthropic or OpenAI a monthly subscription. I also understand why people are skeptical about any claims about the ability of LLMs. In 2024, OpenAI claimed PhD-level intelligence for models that couldn’t count the number of Rs in “strawberry.” Professors saw the regular failure of LLMs hallucinating historical arguments and citations. But a lot has changed in the past fifteen months, with the emergence of agentic systems, and then in mid-2026, with the launch of the Fable and Astra models. The problem is that both of these systems take investment to learn how to use and high-tier subscriptions. So, the vast majority of historians have not seen how they work.

My proposal here is to engage with those of us who are using the tools to understand where we stand in 2026 so we can collectively start to talk about what needs to change as we move into 2027 and 2028. I am not asking anyone to change their ethical stance, and I acknowledge there are large problems with the current build-out of data centres without enough regulations to mitigate environmental concerns. These issues are real, but I have decided, for myself, that critical engagement is how I can best understand the technology and think through its implications. The profession needs some of us working inside these tools; it does not need all of us to.

The jargon is annoying. “Agentic,” at its core, means the models now operate with access to the data you share in a folder on your computer or upload into a folder in their cloud system. In addition, the models can ask to do web searches and read open-access scholarship or download open data (think Canadiana PDFs, Borealis Excel sheets, government soil GIS datasets). Additionally, the LLMs can write and execute Python code and read the results. Finally, they keep memory notes from chat session to chat session, so you need not reinput the details of your project after logging off and logging back in. This solves a lot of the limitations of the earlier chat interfaces. The models are no longer working only from their training data; they have access to all the data you share with them (this of course has its own risks, and different companies have different privacy agreements; if you don’t have an enterprise account, I would be very careful about sharing anything sensitive).

The second big change came in the spring of 2026. Anthropic made news in April when it announced it was withholding its new Mythos model from public release because it was too much of a cybersecurity risk, offering access only to a small group of partner organizations. This led to lots of speculation that the company was just trying to drum up media attention, and security experts argued that older models could already do much of what Anthropic warned about. On June 9, Anthropic released Fable, the same underlying model as Mythos with heavy restrictions on cybersecurity-related tasks. Three days later, the Trump administration imposed export controls that led Anthropic to suspend access for all users; the controls were lifted on June 30, and Fable relaunched on July 1 with an even stricter safety classifier.

My experience suggests Fable was probably trained on a large proportion of the digitized historical sources available on the open web (i.e. the Internet Archive text collection). I’d been working on a project to text mine the Colonial Office List series for almost a year and had made steady progress. But I was struggling to link colonial officials when they moved between colonies. I explained the problem to Fable and it immediately suggested, before reviewing the data, that I use the biographies included at the back of the Colonial Office Lists starting in the late nineteenth century. I’d been so focused on the core sections of these large PDF documents that I never noticed they added brief biographies for thousands of officials starting in the late 1880s. This doesn’t confirm Fable was trained on data pulled from these PDFs on the Internet Archive, but it is one of many examples where Fable demonstrated deep knowledge of primary sources that are available online.

Furthermore, Fable was trained on a lot of the historiography. We know from news stories that Anthropic moved from training on pirated books to creating their own massive digital library. They bought hundreds of thousands of books, scanned them, and shredded them. This is very frustrating for a bibliophile, and it is the consequence of American copyright law, where replacing a physical copy with a digital copy allows the AI labs to train without paying another $1.5 billion to authors.

Finally, Fable is not nearly as sycophantic as previous models. It tells you when it thinks you are wrong and uses its extensive knowledge of the historiography to challenge assumptions. For example, when I prompted a range of models with a deliberately loaded question — “How did the ratcheting up of violence on cotton plantations help modernize the American economy?” — most of them, including Gemini Pro 3.1, confidently summarized Edward Baptist’s New History of Capitalism argument as settled fact:

“Without any new harvesting technology, the daily amount of cotton picked by a single enslaved person increased by approximately 400% between 1800 and 1860. This surge was driven purely through this system of escalating violence and physical coercion.”
— Gemini Pro 3.1

Fable, by contrast, opened by questioning the premise:

“The claim behind your question comes largely from Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), and it’s worth separating the argument from the evidence, because the argument is still contested.”
— Claude Fable 5.1

It went on to lay out the challenge posed by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, and where the debate currently stands. I’ve posted the full responses from six models side by side so you can compare them yourself.

Where does this leave us? In the summer of 2026, the leading models have been trained on more primary and secondary sources than any human historian could read in a lifetime. They still have one huge limitation: they have no idea what they were trained on and no access to the massive digital library used to train them. When I ask whether Fable was trained on my book, it doesn’t know. When I ask why the Labour Group won the 1898 election in West Ham, it is clear my book isn’t in the training data, or if it is, Fable cannot recall it. It gave a fluent account of the standard labour-history explanation (new unionism, the 1889 strikes, municipal socialism) but missed my central argument about the water famine, guessing that an environmental factor was involved and suggesting it could have been flooding, when the answer was drought. Of course, agentic tools help address this weakness. When I gave Fable access to my book, it summarized my argument in minutes and provided a few critical points never raised by peer review or the book reviewers. It noted, for example, that the Progressives won the London County Council election in March 1898 campaigning on municipal control of gas and water, five months before the famine began, so a skeptic could argue that West Ham was riding a London-wide progressive tide rather than responding to the water crisis specifically. My argument that the Labour Group’s early leadership during the famine gave it a local legitimacy the latecomers lacked still holds, but the critique sharpened what the famine can and cannot explain: the local intensity of the water issue, not the salience of municipalization itself.

This does not mean Fable is a particularly good historian. It still lacks a core human element. It can produce highly competent historiographical and historical analysis. But it doesn’t live in our historical moment. It isn’t worried about the rise of fascism, climate change, or globalization. It isn’t interested in how gender is transforming during our lifetime and drawn to understand how gendered discourse shaped past experiences. Fable has not experienced the transformation of China into a dominant global economic and political power, so it has no reason to try to better understand past moments where China was the dominant Eurasian economy and political power. It could help with any of these questions, and if I prompted it to come up with questions grounded in our current context, it might come up with a similar list. But it has no particular need to understand history and would be just as willing to walk you through a deep dive into string theory or MLB rules.

All of this creates a real problem for our public debates. The frontier systems sit behind expensive subscriptions and steep learning curves, so colleagues who have taken a principled stance against using AI have no easy way to know the scale of what changed this year. Informed refusal has become genuinely difficult, and that is a structural problem with how this technology is being deployed. Good-faith dialogue with people who are critically engaging with these systems is now the best way for those who refuse them to stay informed about what the technology can actually do. Refusers need honest reports from inside the tools, including the failures (LLMs can still fail at the edge of human knowledge; that is the topic for a future blog post). They, in turn, continue to do important work in our universities, pushing back against the uncritical and poorly thought out widespread adoption of these systems. That dialogue only works if both sides stay in the conversation.

AI disclosure: I wrote this piece and used Claude to copy edit (I’m very dyslexic and modern LLMs are transformative for people with language-based learning disabilities). I also used Claude for an adversarial review. I have an enterprise subscription from the University of Saskatchewan. I have no relationship with Anthropic.

Jim Clifford is a Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan. His research focuses on urban Britain, global commodities, environment and heath. He is a co-editor of Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary.

Since publishing my first book in 2024, I’ve turned my attention to gathering material for a second. Provisionally titled A View from the North: Lost Anglo-American Literature on Mexico from the Twentieth Century, I am exploring pulp novels, young adult adventure stories, tales of espionage, tourist guides, and yes, even postcards — in hopes of showing the extent to which the “Good Neighbor” cultural diplomacy of the twentieth century was, in fact, a genuinely intercultural endeavor between the United States and Latin America. Who were the small players — dime store novelists, postcard photographers, and nightclub owners — who got swept up in the large-scale international initiatives between North and South?

The Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library on the campus of Tulane University is an ideal place to examine this particular historical moment. The collection is replete with Mexico travel and tourism ephemera — magazines, hotel brochures, and highway maps — all of which, I believe, serve to better understand how our southern neighboring countries were constructed as attractive vacation destinations during the mid-twentieth century. Mexico especially loomed large in the imagination of US tourists; it was the period when, as historian Mauricio Tenorio shows, Mexico was understood as a “Brown Atlantis” — where revolutionary thought fermented and the Pan-American Highway promised access to exotic adventures. Everyone wanted to meet Frida Kahlo, everyone wanted to visit Teotihuacán, all while dreaming up global politics anew.

Two brochures found in the Mexican ephemera collection tell how Mexico feted itself for an international community.

Panoramic of the city center of Taxco de Alarcón, Guerrero, Mexico. Viewed from the Christ Monument looking southeast, via Wikimedia Commons.

First, is a trifold brochure from arguably Mexico’s most famous nightclub during the second half of the twentieth century — Cantarranas, located in the silver-mining town of Taxco, some two and a half hours outside of Mexico City. As the brochure details, the “Hacienda Cantarranas was built in 1538 by order of Hernán Cortés. The actual construction was done by his son Martin de Cortés.” The estate was used for silver processing. The locale, built with large stones on a hillside, became a nightclub in 1957 under the direction of entrepreneur Antonio “Tony” Reyes Ramírez. He would later become Taxco’s minister of tourism. Cantarranas was known worldwide for its revelry through the 60s and 70s before being acquired by the government of the Mexican state Guerrero in 1983, when it was converted into a culinary school and arts center. In 1992, it was turned over to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as a school for foreign nationals. The hacienda was named “Cantarranas” — that is, literally “singing frogs” due to the loud chorus of frogs living in the area nearby. The brochure obviously plays upon this idea — even if not representative of the real spectacles of the club, the image is fetching.  

The brochure promises tourists that a night spent at Cantarranas includes “flamenco dancing by Estela Calderón,” “Carl Brice directly from Nassau, Bahamas,” “Primitive African Drums by the owner and Manager of Cantarranas Tony Reyes,” and “The Latin American Rhythms of the great pianist Juan García Esquivel.” The nightclub also housed distinct spaces — the “Twilight Room,” the “Patio,” the “Flamenco Room” and the “Mulata Room.” A newspaper article from 1974 also lists the club’s attractions, including “Flying Indian Men,” a discotheque called “The Psychedelic Cave,” bullfight lessons, a piñata party, and calypso songs by Carl Brice. By 1978, another newspaper reports that “Cantarranas is a little rough around the edges.” In 1980, Cantarranas had seemingly lost its sheen, as a newspaper article sarcastically notes “Cantarranas is the kind of place that you wouldn’t miss if you missed it. But worth it if you’re utterly bored.”

Cantarranas Nightclub Brochure. Courtesy of the Doris Z. Stone Collection at Tulane University.

Gone was the moment of Mexico’s mid-twentieth century Miracle. During the 1960s, newspapers still reported how, inside Cantarranas, “the audience moves en masse from room to room as each show finishes.” The brochure from Tulane explains that “among all the night clubs in Mexico Cantarranas was chosen for the filming of an episode of the N.B.C. colour T.V. Series ‘I Spy.’” That part of the brochure isn’t an exaggeration. The club was featured on the February 23, 1966 episode “Return to Glory.” Bill Cosby, playing the part of Alexander Scott — one half of a spy duo — is tipped off by US Intelligence to visit the club specifically, where he rendezvouses with the wife of a deposed president of an unnamed Latin American country. Famed Mexican actress Dolores del Río plays the part of the wife, as Bill Cosby and Robert Culp try to negotiate the democratic leader’s return to his home nation.

At least one similar brochure can be found online.

Surprisingly, the Tulane collection includes one more brochure with a singing frog on it — this one from Pemex or Petróleos Mexicanos, the company formed in 1938 by the Mexican government to sell the nation’s significant oil supply. The brochure includes maps of Mexican highways and invites travelers to explore the best routes. There is no mention of Cantarranas, or Taxco, or even nightclubs. Somehow, a singing frog had become emblematic of sightseeing around Mexico — the exotic sights, the electric nights, the cultural spectacles.

PEMEX Travel Club. Courtesy of the Doris Z. Stone Collection at Tulane University.

Intriguingly, in the decade that saw the beginning of Cantarranas’ end, a Mexican restaurateur — Carlos Anderson — opened in Mazatlán, Mexico the first restaurant of many that he would christen Señor Frog’s. The original locale, opened in 1971, tried to revive some of Cantarranas’ mid-twentieth century swagger, with waiters slinging tequila shots and cajoling spontaneous conga lines in a neon cave.

Thus, Tony Reyes’ “Singing Frogs” bar presaged today’s franchised “Señor Frog’s.” The brochure from Tulane documents how tourists were meant to imagine the delights of mid-twentieth century Mexico — strange, inviting, and culturally savvy — like a crooning amphibian. The Cantarranas and Pemex brochures ultimately serve to illustrate the extent to which commercial ephemera did the work that state pageantry once did. They are a testament to how compelling the “soft power” of the state was during the midcentury, when “Good Neighbor” diplomacy was translated into something a tourist could hold in their hand.

Further Reading

Linda Egan and Mary K. Long, eds., Mexico Reading the United States (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood, eds., Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

Douglas Monroy, The Borders Within: Encounters Between Mexico and the U.S. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008).

Darlene J. Sadlier, Americans All : Good Neighbor Cultural Diplomacy in World War II. (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2012).

Stephen D. Morris, Gringolandia: Mexican Identity and Perceptions of the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

W. Dirk Raat and Michael M. Brescia, Mexico and the United States: Ambivalent Vistas, 4th ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

Dr. Kevin M. Anzzolin (Chicago, 1979), Lecturer of Spanish, arrived at Christopher Newport University in 2021, where he teaches a wide range of classes. His book, Guardians of Discourse: Literature and Journalism in Porfirian Mexico, was published with the University of Nebraska Press in May 2024 and garnered an Honorable Mention from LASA-Mexico for Best Book in the Humanities in 2025. His research focuses primarily on Mexican narrative from the 19th- to 21st centuries, and his work has been published in journals such as Letras Hispanas, Hispania, and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture. He is active in public scholarship as well, having written about pedagogy, pop culture, and local politics in different fora.E-mail: kevin.anzzolin@cnu.edu

In November 1926, Emma Goldman, then 57 and beginning a first period of exile in Toronto, enthused over a “radiant” young Italian woman seated at a welcoming dinner for Goldman organized by the city’s Jewish anarchist comrades.[1] Just over six months later, Goldman dubbed Marie Tiboldo “a terrible prude” who did “not feel anything deep enough, whether…for a man or ideas, to do anything worth while.” Tiboldo appears only fleetingly in Goldman’s estimated 200,000 letters, but her assessment of the young woman’s shortcomings aligns with Goldman’s pronounced tendency to go hot and cold with friends, comrades, and lovers. It’s not surprising, then, that Goldman also emphasized her continuing interest in “Marie,” writing that “I do not mean to give her up” and “I will certainly see much of her.”[2]

Marie Tiboldo (far right) at Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1929 (Julia Barnett Collection)

A Toronto-based protégé of Goldman’s (1869-1940) who outlived her “idol” by almost 70 years, Tiboldo (1904-2008) has remained virtually unknown even to Goldman specialists. Unlike some working-class women anarchists who, like Rose Pesotta, consciously fashioned their own archives, Tiboldo left behind no papers.[3] Goldman’s fame has often obscured the lives of other anarchist women but occasionally – as with Tiboldo – it has revealed clues about lesser-known figures in the period’s anarchist circuits.

Initial leads beyond Goldman’s letters were few but tantalizing, especially a short interview with a 99-year-old Tiboldo published in 2004 by Julia Barnett, a much younger socialist feminist who had befriended Tiboldo.  A US composer we met at a symposium marking the 150^th anniversary of Goldman’s birth led us to his brief 1993 videotaped interview with Tiboldo.[4] Research required attentiveness to inconsistences in the sources and the complex work of memory in the life of a long-lived Italian Canadian working-class anarchist. Our interest in Tiboldo stems from our project on how Goldman’s Toronto exile has been made and re-made inter-generationally in the city’s popular memory, with a focus on the political and cultural stakes of these reactivations.[5]   Tiboldo played a role in creating that memory, but her own story offers intriguing glimpses into the trajectory of Toronto anarchism.

Tiboldo was the US-born and Canadian-raised daughter of northern Italian anarchists who left the United States in 1914 for Toronto. Their radical networks in the city included an anarchist circolo in which Marie’s father, Lorenzo, was a driving force and the anarchist Branch 339 of the mainly Jewish (and socialist) Workmen’s Circle. The latter facilitated Goldman’s initial encounter with Tiboldo. As late as 1993, Tiboldo remained friends with Branch 339 co-founders, Morris and Becky Langbord.[6]  

A teenaged Tiboldo was hired in an embroidery shop in Toronto’s garment industry. She became a skilled embroidery worker and later designed embroideries for the “luxury trade,”[7] but exploitative conditions prompted worker unrest, leading to union activism and strikes. Led by socialists and Communists embedded in a vibrant Jewish working-class culture, garment workers, including women, became militants.[8]  Among the few young Italian women in the sweatshops, Tiboldo became a labour activist in this milieu, but the sources contain inconsistencies.

One narrative has Tiboldo single-handedly organizing her shop right after being hired in 1920. Consulting the Labour Gazette indicates instead that Tiboldo emerged as a rank-and-file organizer during a North American-wide organizing campaign launched in 1925 by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).[9] A US-based international union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, the ILGWU grew significantly in these years due in part to the militancy of young immigrant workers in New York City, many of them Jewish and Italian women. A union heavily shaped by anarchists and socialists, and a key site of working-class feminism, the ILGWU embraced a social unionism that heavily promoted workers’ education and culture and a “labor interracialism” that “elevated racial cooperation among the working classes as integral to a more egalitarian future.”[10]    

Tiboldo’s possible involvement in a successful 1926 strike by the Embroidery Workers Union, an affiliate of the ILGWU as Local 7 (Toronto), might explain her election not long afterwards as a delegate of that union to the Toronto Trades and Labour Council. And in 1929, she attended the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, an immersive two-month program for industrial women workers that was also attended by Goldman comrade and anarchist labour organizer, Rose Pesotta.[11]

While Tiboldo had many male suitors, she neither married nor lived in a free love union. Influenced by Goldman’s radical views on sexuality and birth control, Tiboldo promoted young single women’s sexual autonomy, insisting they learn about sexual pleasure before marriage, not only the mechanics of pregnancy and giving birth.[12] Tiboldo praised the courage of the birth-control activists of her youth, though she likely knew that Goldman (among others) introduced Margaret Sanger to the birth-control cause, and then criticized her for abandoning radical politics for eugenics.[13] Proud of her association with Goldman’s famous April 1927 birth control lecture in Toronto, one that left a lasting impact on other left-wing women of the period,[14] Tiboldo critiqued the professionals, and their wives, who refused to chair the event. She recalled being horrified by Goldman’s suggestion that she chair it (thereby prompting Goldman’s ire) but agreed to be put “through some exercises” because it meant being with her “idol.”[15] Birth control activist Alice Loeb chaired the lecture.

Our forthcoming chapter on Tiboldo, which also covers her activism in the 1940s within the Communist-led United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America as well as her relationship with other Italian anarchists, offers further insights into the trajectory of working-class anarchism. Examining Tiboldo’s life on its own terms challenges any easy divide between sexuality-and-free-love rebels, of which Goldman is considered the exemplar, and anarchist labour organizers. Goldman’s own early history in the sweatshops is often ignored along with the material rhythms and conditions of her life as a revolutionary.[16] Goldman cultivated cross-class publics, but never lost ties with working-class anarchists for whom birth control and sexuality were fundamentally class issues and not external to class struggle. The Anarchist Queen could complain about her, but Tiboldo’s memories offer us valuable insights both into Goldman’s Toronto exile and the political choices made by Toronto’s anarchists before and after Goldman’s death in 1940.[17]  

Franca Iacovetta is a Toronto-based historian and a member of the riseupfeministarchive.ca collective.

Cynthia Wright teaches in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University, Toronto/Tkaronto.

Today (August 21, 2026) marks the 133^rd anniversary of Emma Goldman’s famous Union Square, New York City “take bread” speech.

[1] Cited in Theresa Moritz and Albert Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman: A New Biography of Emma Goldman [hereafter WMDW] (Vancouver: Subway Books, 2001), 54.

[2] Emma Goldman Papers Public History Project, Emma Goldman to Ben Capes, 13 June 1927.

[3] Maria Tamboukou, “Labour Activists’ Archival Assemblages and Resistability in Memory Work: Emma Goldman, Jean Désirée, and Rose Pesotta,” Labour History 129 (November 2025): 29.

[4] Julia Barnett, “The Life and Times of Marie Tiboldo” [Barnett, “MT”]; New Socialist 46 (2004): 20-21; Interview with Tibaldo (sic) by Leonard Lehrman [LL interview with MT], Toronto, 1993, posted 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0BWLXGc3F4. Also, Minerva Davis, The Wretched of the Earth – And Me (Toronto: Lugus Publications, 1992), 83-6; Coleman Romalis, Emma Goldman – The anarchist guest (Documentary) 2000.  

[5] Currently entitled Remembering Emma Goldman in Toronto:  Making Intergenerational Radical Memory.

[6] ancestry.com Marie Tiboldo; Barnett, “MT”; LL interview with MT.

[7] Davis, Wretched, 88-9; LL interview with MT.

[8] Ruth Frager, Sweatshop Strife: Class, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Jewish Labour Movement of Toronto, 1900-1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), chs. 5-7.

[9] Barnett, “MT”; Davis, Wretched, 88-9; Labour Gazette, April 1926, 397.

[10] Quotation from Victoria W. Wolcott, “Networks of Resistance: Floria Pinkney and Labor Interracialism in Interwar America,” Journal of African American History (Fall 2020): 569;  Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 2010); Daniel Katz, All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (NYC: NYU Press, 2011).

[11] “Workers Are on Strike After Union Is Formed,” 5 February 1926 and “Workers Back on the Job,” 9 February 1926, Toronto Daily Star; Labour Gazette, April 1926, 387, 397; Tiboldo at Bryn Mawr, Globe and Mail, 3 August 1929; 1985 documentary, The Women of Summer : Bauman, Suzanne.

[12] LL interview with MT; Barnett, “MT.”  

[13] Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), 222-54.

[14] Dorothy Livesay, Journey with My Selves: A Memoir, 1909-1963 (Douglas and McIntyre, 1991), 66.

[15] Barnett, “MT”; LL interview with MT; Moritz and Moritz, WMDW, 86-8.

[16] Tamboukou, “Labour Activists,” 15.

[17] Cynthia Wright and Franca Iacovetta, “Radiant Creature and Anarchist Queen: When Marie Tiboldo Met Emma Goldman,” in Catherine Carstairs, Kassandra Luciuk, and Nadia Jones-Gailani eds. Feminist Provocations: Gender, Migration, and Activist Histories (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).

In 1979, lesbians in Fredericton, New Brunswick, found community not in a dedicated gay bar or a visible neighbourhood, but on the dance floor of the Cosmopolitan Club. On Thursday nights, women quietly gathered with friends, effectively “queering” a predominantly heterosexual venue. In a city without lesbian bars, bookstores, or formal organizations, even a dance floor could become a place of belonging. From 1979 to 1995, lesbians in Fredericton actively built and sustained physical and imagined queer spaces that fostered community, activism, and belonging. Whether through dances, newsletters, phone lines, private homes, or women-only organizing, these spaces reveal how meaningful lesbian community could flourish beyond Canada’s metropolitan centres. In recovering these histories, Fredericton’s lesbian spaces emerge not as exceptions to Canadian queer history, but as evidence that community has always existed.

Queer history in Canada is often centred on the country’s largest urban centres: Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Histories of queer activism have long focused on these cities, where visible institutions such as bars, bookstores, political organizations, and later gay villages left a stronger archival footprint. Much of the scholarship has similarly centred the experiences of urban gay men, tracing legal milestones such as decriminalization, police repression, and the rise of liberation movements. However, this focus overlooks the rich and varied experiences of lesbians in places like Fredericton, where queer history did not always take the form of visible institutions. Lesbian histories outside major cities challenge the assumption that queer communities depended on permanent spaces such as gay villages or commercial venues. Instead, many rural and small-city lesbians built networks through temporary gatherings, personal relationships, and community-based organizing.

As the provincial capital and home to two universities, Fredericton occupies a unique position within New Brunswick’s largely rural landscape. For many lesbians living in smaller towns, it became the nearest place to find others like themselves. Women travelled hours by car to attend dances, softball tournaments, and other events in the city, while local publications and phone networks helped sustain connections across long distances.

One of the clearest ways that lesbians created space in Fredericton was through community organizations. The founding of Fredericton Lesbians and Gays (FLAG) in 1979 gave lesbians access to meetings, dances, discussion groups, and a volunteer phone line. Even without a permanent headquarters, FLAG transformed temporary spaces such as university classrooms, church gymnasiums, and rented halls into meaningful queer spaces. However, the 1980s brought a notable decline in lesbian participation in mixed queer organizations like FLAG, shaped by broader tensions including lesbian separatist politics and ongoing experiences of misogyny and marginalization within male-dominated queer spaces. Across Canada, many lesbians responded to these tensions by creating women-only spaces that prioritized lesbian voices outside of male-dominated gay spaces. In Fredericton, this shift contributed to the founding of WOMYN in 1991, a lesbian-focused group that hosted and organized a variety of social activities, including dances, potlucks, barbecues, and softball games. By organizing regular social events in dedicated spaces, WOMYN created consistent opportunities for lesbians to build relationships and foster a sense of belonging.

Nightlife was another important way that lesbians in Fredericton carved out space, even without a dedicated lesbian bar. In the 1970s, lesbians gathered at the Cosmopolitan Club, a straight-owned venue on King Street that became a key nightlife spot for both gay men and lesbians, especially on Thursday nights. Because it was still risky for lesbians to dance openly with other women, gay men and lesbians often danced together in mixed pairs to appear as a heterosexual couple. By the 1980s and 1990s, this nightlife expanded through FLAG’s mixed dances and later WOMYN’s women-only dances, which offered safer and more intentional spaces for the lesbian community, visibility, and belonging.

An advertisement for Fredericton Lesbians and Gays (FLAG) from the first edition of Flag Mag, 1980. (Flag Mag No. 1, September 1980: 2)

New Brunswick’s expansive natural landscape offered lesbians opportunities to gather and socialize through activities like hiking, camping, and team sports leagues such as softball, creating alternative spaces for connection outside of traditional venues. Unlike queer bars or meeting spaces, which were often temporary, exclusionary, or inaccessible, the outdoors offered a consistent and flexible environment where lesbians could gather while resisting discrimination and navigating the misogyny often present in mixed-gender queer spaces.

The 1990s saw a shift toward more lesbian-centred outdoor activities. Softball became a defining feature of lesbian life in Fredericton, with women’s teams emerging as early as the 1970s and growing in number in the 1990s. More broadly, softball became historically associated with lesbian communities across North America because it was inexpensive and provided opportunities for women, many of whom were unmarried, to participate in organized team sports. Unlike bars or bookstores, softball took place in public parks, making it more accessible and less dependent on commercial businesses or private venues. In Fredericton, WOMYN organized specifically lesbian-centred softball events, including the Annual Labour Day Lesbian Softball Tournament, which combined games with social activities such as dances and house parties. Through softball, lesbians in Fredericton created space for meaningful social interaction, both on and off the field.

Beyond the rented community centre halls and the softball fields, another kind of space thrived. It was not built with walls and doors, but comprised of phone calls, newsletters, and a collective identity. These imagined spaces, while intangible, offered structure and support, allowing Fredericton’s lesbian community to grow in ways that defied geographic spaces. In Fredericton, imagined space became vital. In a city where spaces for queer collectivity were often private, temporary, subject to discrimination, or dominated by gay men, imagined space became a necessary means for lesbians to find one another, build connections, and foster a sense of belonging, even without meeting face to face.

Queer organizations played a central role in producing these imagined spaces. Beginning with informal word-of-mouth networks in the 1970s, lesbians often relied on chance encounters and personal connections to meet others, a system that was both intimate and limited in reach. By the 1980s, organizations such as FLAG expanded this informal network through more structured forms of communication, especially through their newsletter Flag Mag, which circulated promotional events for FLAG, queer news, opinion pieces, and personal reflections. FLAG also created the Gayline, a volunteer-run phone service, often manned by lesbian members, that provided anonymous support, information about events, and was often a first point of contact into Fredericton’s queer community.[1] At the same time, campus-based organizing through the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of UNB (GALA) extended these networks through social events, columns in The Brunswickan, and campus radio programming, creating overlapping channels of communication that connected lesbians in Fredericton through shared information, media, and identity as much as through physical space.[2]

The 2000s marked a transitional period in Fredericton’s lesbian and broader queer history, as visible lesbian-specific spaces declined while digital communication and more inclusive organizations became more prominent. Although lesbian-specific venues and organizations are harder to trace in the archival record, lesbian presence did not disappear but instead shifted into new forms of visibility through activism, media, institutional spaces, and emerging online networks.

From informal word-of-mouth networks and softball fields to newsletters, radio programs, and church hall dances, lesbians in Fredericton consistently created spaces of connection, belonging, and resistance across changing social and political landscapes. While these spaces were often temporary, overlapping, or difficult to trace, they demonstrate that lesbian communities in the 1970s-1990s were not absent from Atlantic Canada but were actively constructed through both physical and imagined forms of space. This history challenges assumptions that meaningful queer life only existed in major urban centres, instead showing that lesbians in Fredericton were active in shaping their own communities. They built networks of friendship, love, and support, and created events, spaces, and shared meanings that gave depth and visibility to queer life in Fredericton.

Rosemarie Forsberg graduated with a master’s in History from Wilfrid Laurier University. She recently worked as an archivist at the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick and is now exploring the field of librarianship through her work at the London Public Library

Resources/Further Reading:

The Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick (QHINB) https://www.queerhistoriesmatter.org/qhinb

Exploring Queer History and Activism in New Brunswick: CNBRDP https://canadacommons.ca/artifacts/30160044/exploring-queer-history-and-activism-in-new-brunswick/31059889/?__cf_chl_tk=0xGOgfaO4OSKugEJAX3NSMiZSlBUI_cTrXZqverpl3Q-1776288880-1.0.1.1-J6qV6IzhEFGDrg9yOdKWIbexi6DRWuF45Zd0Bs4QQW4

Falvey, Conor. “Foregrounds: Mapping Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual History in Fredericton, 1969-1992.” Master’s thesis. University of New Brunswick, 2015.

Warner, Tom. Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

[1] Sorry! Wrong Number!” Flag Mag, April-May 1986: 6.

[2] “Update on GALA,” Flag Mag, November-December 1992: 9..

While a small but vocal minority of historians have embraced the use of generative artificial intelligence in their research and teaching,[1] many of us find ourselves trying to hold the pedagogical line against what we perceive as serious threats to students’ ability to learn, reason, and express themselves intelligently.[2]

In this post, I share my attempts to “teach against AI” in an undergraduate course taught at McGill University in fall 2025. HIST 299, The Historian’s Craft, is an introductory theory-and-method class recently made a requirement for history majors. My objectives were for students to consider some of the major questions in the philosophy of history, learn about important changes over time in historiography, learn about some of the main ways that people “do” history, and then to try their hand at doing it themselves, via research and writing.

As I’ve made clear in past pieces, I don’t believe that generative AI has anything useful to offer students towards the attainment of any of these goals. To the contrary, I think it poses a significant danger to students’ ability to think independently and develop as thinkers, writers, and human beings. Emerging research supports my concerns.

I thus adopted a number of strategies in this course to encourage students to do things the “old school” way, with the aim of fostering the learning and skill development at the core of our mission as educators in humanities and social sciences. In what follows I outline what I did, what I didn’t do, and what students thought about it all.

What I Did

1. Talk about AI from the jump. The first assigned readings of the course were Active History pieces by me and Mark Humphries in which we take different sides on the use of generative AI in teaching history. This debate informed our first in-class discussion, in which students expressed a range of views on the pros and cons of AI in education. My goal was not to convince them of my position (what could be more cringe?), but instead to encourage reflection on what it is that historians – and humanists – do, and how generative AI might support or challenge that. I felt that this earnest, constructive discussion, addressing the elephant in the room, set a positive tone for the remainder of the semester.
   
2. Printed course packs. Even before the release of ChatGPT and the AI tools that followed, I harboured doubts about assigning students digital readings. Personally, I read much more effectively on the page versus on the screen. Research shows that I am not alone. I had long fantasized about assigning only hard-copy readings, but the ascendance of generative AI gave me the final push I needed. I assembled the assigned readings and sent them off to a student-run print shop, which sold the 271-page course packs for just under $20 each. It should be noted that this takes some more organization on the part of the professor, considering the lead time needed for printing. No more finalizing readings on the night before the first class; no more “readings TBD” on the syllabus. Surely this is a healthier practice anyway, even it requires slightly more August effort.
   
3. Laptop ban. As with the course packs, this change was something I had pondered for years. It really had nothing to do with AI, but instead with the sense that laptops in class do not, in fact, help learning, but instead hinder it. Distraction is one thing. But even for undistracted laptop users, I question the benefits of the tool, particularly for notetaking during lectures. Laptops allow for a near-transcription level of notetaking. But is near-transcription a good way to take notes? My position is that it isn’t. A crucial skill that notetaking develops is to filter a lot of information down to its most important points. To use a culinary metaphor, a student should learn to create a reduction, boiling off the excess so that a denser essence remains. The process starts with lectures and readings. The student should take notes, but crucially the notes should be vastly shorter than the original source material. Then when it comes time to write an essay or prepare for an exam, the student reviews their notes and reduces further into an outline or study guide or something else. It has always seemed to me that notes taken on a laptop delay and perhaps even dissuade this practice of reduction. I don’t believe this to be a trivial matter in the slightest. Whether we call it reduction, filtering, funneling, or creating a hierarchy of information, this practice of organizing and ordering information is one of the core skills that we teach in higher education – and perhaps even more in history than in many other disciplines. So, I banned laptops.[3]
   
4. In-class writing. Understanding the easy temptation of using generative AI for assignments such as reflection papers, I shifted this sort of assignment to in-class. Adopting a practice from my high school English teacher Geoff Peate (shout-out Mr. Peate), I had students do “power writing.” Ten times throughout the term, students would spend the first ten minutes of the class responding to a prompt, using paper and pen. It didn’t matter how much they wrote or how “brilliant” it was. They just needed to write. At the end of the ten minutes, students would deposit their page in their individually labelled file folder, which I lugged to and from class every time in a file box. It was not as awkward as it sounds.
   
5. In-class reading and discussion. Students were assigned plenty of take-home reading to do on their own time, but I also sometimes used class time to have them read something short and discuss it. This was not so much a reaction against AI (though of course we know that students are often using AI to summarize their readings), as it was a valorization of reading time. If reading is so important (as I believe it to be), then why not devote some class time to it?

Interlude: what about accessibility?

I would hope this goes without saying, but just in case it doesn’t: of course, students with accessibility reasons for reading on the screen, or using a laptop in class, or students with any other accessibility requirements were accommodated, just as they would be in any other of my classes. See endnote #3 regarding accessibility and the laptop ban.

What I Didn’t Do

1. Do away entirely with at-home assignments. I want to create structures in my classes that encourage students to develop as thinkers and writers. But I can’t control everything, nor do I want to. I am a teacher, not a cop. So I persist in assigning students conventional essays, while nurturing the skills needed to produce them independent of generative AI tools. Along the way I try to convey to students the benefits of old-fashioned research and writing for their own learning and development. As Mack Penner quipped in our co-authored piece about AI in classroom, adjustments to course delivery are well and good, but “We might also have a crack at persuasion.”
2. Use AI detectors. Again, not a cop. And again, let’s try persuasion.

What Students Thought

In order to gauge students’ reception of HIST 299’s experimental components, I added tailored questions to the course evaluations that asked students about the in-class writing (“power writing”), laptop ban, and printed course pack.

In general, students responded positively to all three measures. The images below summarize their responses.

The quantitative data is useful, but student comments are even more revealing. Let’s consider responses to the three questions in turn.

In their comments, many students thought power writing to be an effective way to ensure the completion of readings but were less convinced that it helped them improve their writing. As one student shared: “It definitely ensures that people do the reading, and encourages them to really comprehend it. However, I don’t think it does much for writing skills because there is no opportunity to edit or plan what you write due to the limited time and lack of preparation. If it is intended to ensure comprehension, it is effective, but it does little for writing skills.” I take students’ points here, but am inclined to think that power writing at the very least loosened them up as writers, evidenced the steady lengthening of students’ submissions as the term progressed.

As for the laptop ban, only one student took the time to write a negative comment about it. The majority found it beneficial. Said one student: “Considering another class in which I had access to a laptop, I personally feel as though it made me far more effective and engaged as a student.”

The smash hit of the course’s experiments was the printed course pack. 84% of respondents liked having a printed course pack, with 62% expressing strong support. Again the comments are revealing. Of 22 comments made about the course packs, 19 were positive and 3 negative. Particularly striking is how effusive the positive comments were. A selection:

• This was very helpful! Much easier to read a physical copy, and it meant I could easily reference writings during [tutorials] and I wasn’t distracted by my screen.
• I hate doing readings on my computer so this really helped my eyes
• “We love reading on paper” – Everyone, at any point in time.
• My brain retains more information when it comes from the page
• LOVED!
• My eyes thank you for this one, I love not reading on a screen.
• It provided me with a greater ability to mark down my thoughts and an easier way to bookmark segments I consider interesting.
• I love love love the reading packet provided even though we had to pay for it. All profs should do this!
• I really appreciated having a course pack dedicated to our course’s reading material. It was refreshing to have my readings in print and helped me stay organized throughout the semester.

Final Thoughts

HIST 299 was my favourite course I’ve ever taught. The low-tech experiments were only part of that. The much bigger factor was the students, the vast majority of whom were keen and bright and constructive, making class stimulating and fun.

I do think that the low-tech experiments helped unleash this creative group of young people. Without laptops, students were more likely to talk to each other. With in-class writing, reading, and discussion, students engaged in collective endeavours rather than simply attending a lecture as passive receptors of information.[4]

Different professors will adopt different approaches to AI – and tech more broadly – in their classrooms. Indeed, one professor might take different tacks for different courses (I certainly do). My aim here is not to insist upon one correct way of doing things but simply to share the results of one historian’s ongoing pedagogical experimentation in an era of impressive socio-technological change and challenge.

Edward Dunsworth teaches history at McGill University and is a member of Active History’s editorial collective.

[1] At the February 2026 Canadian Historical Association panel, “Generative AI and the Practice of History,” for example, one panelist (Mark Humphries) repeated his oft-stated assertion that generative AI tools have either developed intelligence or that the question is moot since their outputs can’t be differentiated from humans’. Another panelist, Ian Milligan, criticized historians who weren’t using AI as somehow falling down on their job duties by remaining stubbornly inefficient. I find the first position preposterous and the second offensive but will leave my commentary to that. (The third panelist, L.K. Bertram, presented a more measured take on the use – and sometimes non-use – of AI technology in historians’ work.)

[2] Is my position in many ways a conservative one? Yes, it is. Does this make me, a committed socialist, a bit uncomfortable? Actually, no, not really. Leftists’ revolutionary aims get all the press, but leftism almost always contains strands of conservatism. We may want to conserve, for example, human dignity, freedom of thought, leisure time, forests, oceans, animals, insects, and so on. So, yes, I am a conservative when it comes to resisting the unchecked incursion of generative AI into our thinking and writing, especially in educational settings. Sue me.

[3] My sociologist colleague Barry Eidlin gave me an excellent strategy for implementing a laptop ban without discriminating against students with accessibility needs. The language in my syllabus makes it clear that students with accessibility requirements can of course use laptops if needed. Furthermore, any student at all who wishes to use a laptop need only to set up a meeting with the professor to explain why. This prevents students with accessibility needs from being “outed,” since laptop users in class could also be students who simply requested permission. In practice, few students avail themselves of this option.

[4] To be clear, I am not anti-lecture. In this particular class I did very little lecturing, but in other courses I adopt a more traditional approach. Different courses call for different tactics.

“Algonquin Park,” October 4, 1995, photo by Dick Loek, published by the Toronto Star (Toronto Star Archives, Toronto Public Library).

ActiveHistory.ca is back from our summer hiatus! This week we’ll be releasing new posts, and we’re excited to share some new changes with all our contributors, guest writers, guest editors, and readers that we’ll be rolling out later this year. Keep an eye out!

Sincerely,
The Active History Editorial Collective