Earlier this year, over forty people logged in to Zoom to attend a CHA webinar titled “Generative AI and the Practice of History.” Introduced as a “show and tell” for AI tools and strategies, the webinar included a panel of three expert historians who each presented on a distinct topic related to agentic AI, the tech that’s been dominating headlines since the release of Chat GPT to the general public in November 2022.

While I was hoping for a lively conversation about AI and creative thinking, writing, labour, and capitalism, much of the discussion centred around “best practices,” revealing what I felt was a relatively uncritical acceptance of these dynamic platforms. During the Q&A, most discussants sought answers on how to apply AI tech “responsibly” in their pedagogical and scholarly work. I, on the other hand, was left wondering about a much more essential, epistemic question, one that gets to the root of our role as scholars, teachers, and citizens of the world: how will the process of cognitive “offloading” shape, and potentially harm, the creative potential of our scholarship? Will there be any space left in our praxis for curiosity? Wonder? Possibility?

I suddenly felt I had missed something in recent months. How and when had we reached the consensus that offloading and outsourcing our more arduous tasks was decidedly “good,” for history as practice, for the university, and for our engagement with the world more broadly?

Woman with wax tablets and stylus, 55 -79 AD, public domain

Our dynamic encounters with agentic AI are clearly resulting in a bifurcation of our research tasks into those that we can or “should” offload to AI, and those that we should not. Writing, most agree, is a hard no, unless it’s for reviewing structured writing like grant applications. So, too, is locating source material. Transcribing these materials, however, is a task some claim is particularly well-suited to existing AI technologies. In fact, a couple of historians, including one of the webinar panelists, Mark Humphries, have even developed an AI tool to transcribe handwritten historical documents more quickly and more accurately than earlier systems.

Traditionally, this is the kind of paid work that has been reserved for graduate students, or other under- or precariously-employed humans, who rely on this kind of experience and supplementary income to get by and find future work. Even if senior scholars continue to make a concerted effort to hire research assistants to do “human-required” labour, the use of AI will still eliminate paid work in what is already a wildly competitive, precarious job market for new PhDs. This example speaks to how AI systems serve capitalism very effectively. The more we adopt AI technology, the more we fuel the industrialist, capitalist obsessions with productivity, efficiency, and profit.

The bigger, though not unrelated, questions I have relate to our creative processes and potential for political activism as researchers, writers, thinkers, and scholars of the past. As I’ve alluded to, adapting our workdays and workstyles to AI tech means abiding by the logic of capitalism, undermining efforts we might otherwise expend to produce activist or radical history. Besides resisting the constraints of capitalist stricture, tasks like transcribing, reviewing, summarizing, locating sources, compiling citations, and even sorting notes and indexing, help us solve problems and access creative thought. When we work on these purportedly unproductive or simply boring tasks, our minds often wander. This is hardly a bad thing. Stories abound of creative thinkers and artists who spent hours daydreaming as they took long walks and performed tasks unrelated to their “work.”

During my own workdays, I’ve solved many small yet meaningful research quandaries while doing busywork: I’ve stumbled across a great idea jotted down on a forgotten sticky note while revisiting handwritten notes; rediscovered a fantastic article that got lost in my Zotero bibliography; and found the ideal quote to open a book chapter while tracking down page numbers missing from a footnote.

Recent research on mind wandering and daydreaming also touts the wonder of the cognitive processes unlocked by performing busywork. UBC professor and psychologist Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva suggests that it is precisely this kind of unstructured (or less structured) thought that stokes imagination and inspiration. It may also be worth mentioning here that Christoff Hadjiilieva sees modern tech as a significant barrier to this kind of creative thinking.

This reminds me of those rare but exciting eureka moments when, through open association and directionless thought, I discover complex connections between the narratives, sources, and theories I’ve been mulling over. Ezra Klein recently reflected on how often these moments arise for him during plane rides, a place that I, too, have done great writing. Call me a romantic (I am), but these insights, I think, reveal the magic, discovery, and possibility that come with practicing history. During the CHA webinar, panelist Ian Milligan called this “friction,” something he admitted was necessary for some historians. But this is not simply a difference in method, and by treating it as such, we risk offloading creativity itself to AI. Friction, research suggests, is actually essential to the kind of broad, creative thinking that produces innovative scholarship.

As Ed Dunsworth put it in his wonderful piece in AH last June, “We are not widget producers. Or at least, we should not be. We are producers of knowledge, of analysis, of ways of understanding the world.” To this, I would add, we are storytellers, and builders of hope and radical possibility for our present and future worlds.

Further Reading

Christoff Hadjiilieva, Kalina. “Mindfulness as a Way of Reducing Automatic Constraints on Thought.” Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging 10, no. 4 (2024): 393-401. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpsc.2024.11.001.

Echeverri Álvarez, Mariana. “Beyond Tech: What Does Responsible AI Mean in Higher Education?” UM Today, Apr 21, 2026. https://umtoday.ca/stories/beyond-tech-what-does-responsible-ai-mean-higher-education.

Gross, Terry. “Michael Pollan Says AI May ‘Think’ –But It Will Never Be Conscious.” Feb 19, 2026. Fresh Air. Produced by Anna Bauman and Susan Nyakundi. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/19/nx-s1-5713514/michael-pollan-ai-consciousness-a-world-appears.

Wong, May. “Stanford Study Finds Walking Improves Creativity.” Stanford Report, Apr 24, 2014. https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/04/walking-vs-sitting-042414.

Nastasha Sartore is a historian of gender, labour, and everyday life in modern Britain. She is currently working on her first book project, which reimagines the intimate lives of women living on the margins of society in late-Victorian and Edwardian London. Nastasha earned her PhD from the University of Toronto in 2024 and is the Elizabeth and Cecil Kent Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan for 2025-7.

This week, I talk with Cody Groat, author of Always Part of the Land: The Federal Commemoration of Indigenous Histories. We discuss the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada‘s approach to Indigenous history, the role of federal commemorations in colonialism, and the power of commemorations. We also chat about Board members’ influence on commemorations, how public servants have shaped the process, and the Board’s efforts towards Reconciliation.

Historical Headline of the Week

Chadd Cawson, “Plaque unveiled to honour Coast Salish knitters and the Cowichan sweater,” Nanaimo Bulletin, April 2, 2026.

Sean Graham is a cultural historian, an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and a contributing editor with Activehistory.ca

The expression, “May you live in interesting times,” seems on its face, pleasant enough. Resembling a well-wish, its sunny exterior deftly cloaks the dark, cavernous depths within. To live in interesting times, is quite simply, to be cursed.

To teach American History in interesting times, is, well… akin to having a staring contest with the evilest of evil eyes. I should know. I teach American History at McGill University. The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2024, heartbroken and numb, there was still a lecture to give, emails to answer, coffee to drink. Teaching American History in America’s 51^st state is hard work after all!

“All Men Are Created Equal?” April 2026 (Shared with student permission)

Due to its location and comparatively lower tuition, McGill attracts a substantial number of American undergraduates, many of whom enroll in my history classes.   

I’ve lost count of the times American students have told me they learned more of their own history in my classes than back home. Sadly, living in interesting times means living concurrently with the sanitization of historical truths; wholescale erasure of history and other subjects deemed too “woke”; and the unmistakable death-rattle of academic freedom. While Canada is certainly not perfect, at least professors are not compelled by law to teach blatant untruths such as slavery “benefitted” Black Americans.

With that in mind, I introduced a new assignment in my Early America survey: the America @ 250 Project. I asked students to reflect on the following questions:

• What do the key ideas, values, and promises represented in the Declaration of Independence mean to you? What do you think they meant to Americans in 1776? To Americans in 2026?
• How are you thinking and feeling about this occasion? How would you begin to express or articulate what America @ 250 means to you?
• How would you begin to evaluate and assess the state of America @ 250?
• What do you hope for America’s future? Think about what you hope America can achieve and how collectively we (the people) can help make it a reality.

To answer these questions, I gave students two options:

Option #1: Write an Op-Ed to make an argument about America @ 250 by connecting a present-day issue to a historical topic, theme, or event related to our class.

Option #2: Make a Creative Project in the form of an analog or computer-generated PowerPoint presentation, poster, collage, scrapbook, photo album, video montage, etc. that shows how you are envisioning America 250 years in. With your creation, submit a short reflection piece explaining your artistic vision.

While impossible to share each project, I include here some truly extraordinary America @ 250 projects.   

When Art Imitates Life

 Separated by centuries, and various miracles including indoor plumbing, the invention of penicillin, commercial air travel, The Real Housewives, and Katy Perry’s ascension to outer space, 1700s America and 2020s America could not be further apart. But as historians, we know better. Then, like now, America is as polarized and divided as ever before. This comes as no surprise to Ken Burns, prolific documentarian of the American experience. In a conversation on NPR’s Fresh Air, while promoting his 2025 documentary, The American Revolution, he notes, “We’ve always been divided. I don’t know if you can take comfort from it, given the current state of affairs. But I do believe that the historian’s perspective is one that permits you to understand, as Ecclesiastes says, there’s nothing new under the sun.” This is something my students absolutely picked up on, with the astounding clarity and storytelling chops that Burns himself could only marvel at.

One student in particular, deliberately used the medium of painting to draw parallels between the historical then and ever-unfolding now.

Left: Paul Revere Jr., after Henry Pelham, The Boston Massacre, 1770, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Right: Paul Revere II, The Boston Massacre, 1770, engraving, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

For her creative project, aptly titled America 250: History Repeats, it was important for this student- artist’s work to be in conversation with arguably the most viral engraving of the 18^th century, Paul Revere’s The Bloody Massacre. One that, in her words, operates as a “nationalistic symbol,” ubiquitous in both the American cultural imagination and “in modern American textbooks as a primary reference of the oppression the colonists faced and a major reason for why the revolution was necessary to safeguard freedom.”

America 250: History Repeats, April 2026 (Shared with student permission)

Revere’s original engraving captures the grim reality of life during a military occupation. “Stationing armed forces in a location has never been a neutral decision,” writes the student-artist in her accompanying written reflection. She correctly notes that occupying forces “are not subject to the same laws everyone else must follow. Wherever an army goes fear and violence arises and the freedom of everyone is at risk.” This is exactly what happened in Boston that terrible day in March of 1770 and is exactly what we are seeing today in majority Democrat cities across the US.

“Instead of colonists and British soldiers, my scene depicts a modern crowd facing armed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers,” the student-artist writes. Unlike the British soldiers, the ICE agents are cloaked in unconstitutional anonymity.

Note the stylistic similarities between the two scenes. In the latter, look closely to where the pink arrows point to the “ICE” lettering emblazoned on the backs of the agents’ green vests.

Revere’s engraving features primarily white figures, except Crispus Attucks (left). In contrast, by placing the Black man in the forefront of the scene, the student-artist gestures to the long history of lethal police violence towards Black and POC Americans.

Using language of “self-defense” the British army tried to spin the events of the Boston Massacre. “This is remarkably similar to how the Republican party has framed the murders ICE have committed as having been provoked, and therefore justified,” notes our student-artist. Responding to the murder of Renee Good, Vice President JD Vance blamed Good for her own death, calling her a “domestic terrorist” . Senior Trump officials defended the ICE officer for “acting in self-defense.” Not long after, ICE murdered Alex Pretti, and the same officials spewed the same hateful narrative, declaring Pretti a “domestic terrorist” and branding him an “assassin” whose sole aim was to “murder federal agents.”

Students overwhelmingly responded to the ICE occupations and immigration raids happening in real time. We all watched in horror as ICE officers gleefully and shamelessly ramped up their deportation tactics, showcasing the shocking depths of cruelty and inhumanity they seemed more than happy to plumb. Students pointed to the explicit racial profiling, abductions, mass arrests, the targeting of parents and young children, and the seemingly never-ending warehousing of bodies deemed too “alien”, “illegal”, “dangerous”.  

All Men Are Created Equal?

One student happened to be in Minneapolis while completing her assignment. Her op-ed, “America at 250 Years: Equality Was Always Conditional, and Still Is” captures the moment, with all the searing intensity  you’d expect. At the heart of her op-ed is the issue of racial profiling and belonging: “In effect, people of colour must constantly prove their right to exist freely in public, while others who share resemblance to the founding fathers, are never questioned at all.” Her op-ed was one of many assignments where students questioned, challenged, and systematically picked apart the threads of what should supposedly be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And they did so in such creative ways!

Take, for instance, the collage above which poses the question, “All Men Are Created Equal”? “The one thing that has really stuck in my brain from both what we learned in this class and the news is the bloodshed, violence, and inequality our country is built upon,” this student-artist writes in her accompanying written reflection.  

She purposefully populates the ‘2’ and ‘5’ with images of slavery, colonialism, and the violent destruction of Indigenous people to show that the “all men” category has always been, and perhaps always will be, exclusionary to its very core.  

The final ‘0’ is meant to show that we in 2026 are not inherently superior to those in 1776. In the words of the student who wrote her op-ed in Minneapolis, “If the United States is to move forward, it must do more than celebrate its founding words; it must redefine them. Equality cannot remain conditional if it is to have meaning in the next 250 years.”

Another project that contended with the conditional “all men are created equal” came in the form of a short film showcasing the resilience and richness of Black history and culture. Here’s how the student-auteur describes his vision, “this project frames Black history not as a linear or marginal narrative, but as one of the most revealing vantage points from which to understand both the failures of the American “experiment” and its most profound capacities for resistance, creativity, and civic transformation, capacities that echo the nation’s founding rhetoric even where its institutions have persistently betrayed it.”

Using a rich array of “carefully curated, expressionistic collage of images and footage” and set to Tupac’s “Do For Love,” this film aims “to illuminate major developments in the evolution of Black America and its place within the larger American narrative.”

I was blown away by the artistry of this film. The student-auteur’s rationale for the song selection was especially moving: “[it] felt tremendously fitting because its longing and vulnerability echo the film’s concentration on the pursuit of recognition, belonging, and dignity within a nation that has so often withheld all three.” Like any important anniversary or milestone, we perform the celebratory glass-clinking merriment the occasion calls for, but deep down, we know better. We continue to live in the shadows of what once was, what could have been, lives cut short, dreams deferred, unspeakable grief, infinite longing. America’s semiquincentennial is no different.  

Freedom Motherfucker, April 2026 (Shared with student permission)

While many students grappled with lofty words and ideals, others explored the nakedly self-interested, grasping, genocidal impulse of American expansionism. For example, the student-artist’s work above satirizes the (literal) weaponization of American “freedom.” He notes in his reflection piece, “Every instance of projecting American power over history has been done with false intentions, not to bring freedom and liberty like the Declaration of Independence says, but to claim resources, whether it be land, gold, oil, or rare earth metals.”

By connecting the destructive belief in “Manifest Destiny” to the American obsession with westward expansion and the Frontier mythos, this student-artist points to the violence and greed at the foundation of the so-called “Land of the Free.” The poster features portraits of presidents with imperialist agendas, James K. Polk, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Donald Trump. In the bottom right corner, we see Greenland, strategically placed beside the central figure in John Gast’s 1872 painting “American Progress”. Incredibly clear-eyed, the student-artist states the obvious, “America will not bring “freedom” to Greenland; instead, they will extract rare earth metals from rich deposits.” In this depiction of America @ 250, the nation’s founding ideals act as mere window-dressing for the main event: resource extraction. 

You’re Cordially Invited

Speaking of the main event…

2026 Invitation (All invitations shared with student permission)

One student even conceptualized her America @ 250 project as a series of invitations. “The phrase that inspired this project is “Who’s Invited to the Party?” This idea led me to design a series of invitations: one for Independence Day and others for each semi-centennial anniversary, ending in 2026,” she wrote in her reflection piece.

1976 Invitation                                                                              1926 Invitation

This student-graphic designer modelled her invitation designs on a variety of primary sources from each era, capturing the historical mood, tone, and aesthetic of each. Crucially, she notes, “Each invitation identifies who was “welcome” and “unwelcome,” thus highlighting how American liberty has always been unevenly distributed, granting freedom to some while excluding or oppressing others.”

1876 Invitation                                                                   1826 Invitation

Themes of conditional belonging and who “counts” as American take centre-stage . Or as our student-graphic designer points out, “Through examining each semi-centennial anniversary, this project shows that American liberty has never been fixed or guaranteed, despite it making up the core motif of national rhetoric.”

Echoing the previous words of her student colleagues, she writes, “While the nation has consistently celebrated ideals of freedom since 1776, access to those ideals has been uneven and exclusionary.”  

The OG, 1776 invitation

“By reframing these anniversaries through the question of “who is invited to the party,” I attempt to describe the history in which American freedom has often been the exception as opposed to the rule,” the student-graphic designer writes.

As with prior examples, I remain in awe of the creativity, imagination, and great effort that went into this project! One final line from our student-designer: “I hope that bringing attention to this will continue to highlight that the struggle for, and discussion around, freedom and liberty are just as relevant today as they were 250 years ago.” 

*

In our interesting times of compliance in advance and bending the knee to authoritarian agendas, my pedagogical practice is rooted in transgression. The classroom, bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress, is “the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” I could not agree more.

What felt especially radical was how many students opted to make something. Perhaps in the age of AI, our role as educators is to equip our students with the courage necessary to create weird, messy, and flawed works in an increasingly frictionless, surface-obsessed world. We may indeed live in interesting times, but we must not lose sight of how truly interesting, brave, and brilliant our students can be. 

Felicia Gabriele is a historian, writer, and educator based in Montreal. Her public scholarship has appeared in Maisonneuve, Electric Literature, The Rambling, and elsewhere. You can find her on Bluesky @feliciagabriele.bsky.social

On the corner of Sixth and Market streets in Philadelphia sits a contested site at the heart of the origin story Americans tell one another. Nearly two decades ago, this particular National Park Service (NPS) site was the focal point for heated debates about the purpose of history and national identity. Today, these debates have resurfaced with dire consequences.

This corner in Philadelphia is home to the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, and the buried foundation of the first presidential mansion. Together, these sites make up Independence National Historical Park. 

In 2002, an activist group called the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC) organized for nearly a decade to demand that Independence NHP tell the full story of the nine individuals George Washington enslaved at our nation’s first “White House”. As a result of this years’ long advocacy and public engagement, in 2010, the National Park Service opened an exhibit called The President’s House: Freedom and Slavery and the Making of a New Nation. 

The President’s House Site is the first federally owned property to feature a slave memorial. It was hailed as a hard fought victory for activists seeking public acknowledgement of the history of slavery and a way to honor the people held in bondage. 

The exhibit invited visitors to grapple with the prevalence and violence of slavery and a central paradox: the role slavery played in a nation founded on the ideals of liberty and freedom. Each wall included interpretive panels that told of the intertwined lives of the 9 individuals enslaved at that site by the nation’s first president. 

Today, visitors to the President’s House will instead find ghostly outlines of exhibit panels and empty mounting hardware on brick walls. These spectral traces sit alongside screens playing historical re-enactments with no context. Chain-linked fences and caution tape barricade portions of the site, with signs stating: “Preservation work in process.”

This National Park Service site is one among 12 that have fallen victim to the Trump administration’s effort to restore “truth and sanity” to American history.

“Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” is the title of an effort announced on March 27th 2025 via Executive Order 14253. It instructs the Secretary of the Interior, who oversees the National Park Service, to “ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

This order, and the subsequent Secretarial Order 3431 of the same name, sent park employees and the general public on a hunt through 433 NPS sites for educational materials that “inappropriately disparage” Americans. This quest to root out “corrosive ideology” has flagged films, brochures, and exhibit texts, signs and wayfinders for review. Some, like the signs at the President’s House Site, have been outright removed or altered.

The National Park Service is charged with not only stewarding and protecting our country’s most historically, culturally, and scientifically important or vulnerable sites, but also with providing accurate interpretation of these sites to the public. To fulfill this mandate, historians and sign designers meticulously research and craft interpretive materials for the Park Service. These materials are place-based repositories of knowledge, used to educate people of all ages about history and the natural world found in our parks. With over 300 million visitors a year, NPS is the nation’s largest outdoor classroom. The National Park Service, and the materials housed there, make up the people’s school. 

The Trump administration is on a campaign of knowledge destruction. By targeting NPS and its interpretive materials, this administration is gutting a critical government agency devoted to stewarding our national memory. 

Americans have launched multi-faceted and decentralized efforts to combat this censorship. While some organizations have filed lawsuits and lobbied Congress, we have pulled on the resources of the library world to tap into the deep public affection for the National Parks and preserve these targeted materials. We brought together librarians and public historians with data and geospatial experts to create Save Our Signs (SOS), which invites members of the public to visit NPS sites and take photos of interpretive signs. 

Since we launched our project in July 2025, we have received over 15,000 photos from 422 national park sites. We have used these submissions to create a people’s archive which contains photos of regular NPS signs, alongside documentation of censorship (such as photos of blank spaces where signs used to be), and of creative resistance (such as photos of handwritten signs community members posted at the President’s House site saying “History is real” and “Learn ALL history.”)

We also maintain a list of signs removed or altered to track what materials have actually been censored. This SOS Removal Tracker has been used by journalists, lawyers, and community advocates as the definitive source for a comprehensive list of censored signs in the National Parks.

In March 2026, an internal Department of Interior dataset listing NPS materials flagged for removal was leaked to the public. To help people understand this data, we created a Storymap. We hope that people can use this visualization along with our SOS Archive to identify still-unphotographed signs especially at risk for removal.

This project builds on a lineage of place-based public history and crowdsourcing projects that bring the public into the research process. More specifically, SOS is rooted in the methodologies of Mapping Prejudice, a crowdsourced research project based at the University of Minnesota Libraries that mobilizes community members to identify and map racial covenants, which were clauses inserted into property records during the early to mid twentieth century that barred people who were not white from owning or occupying the land. Mapping Prejudice works with community members to unearth the willfully hidden history of how structural racism shaped the built environment in the United States. 

Such previously obscured histories, like the practice of racial covenants or the lives of the nine individuals enslaved by George Washington, are being categorically labeled as “disparaging” or “corrosive” by an administration that would prefer to keep some facts hidden from public view. Save Our Signs is trying to keep these unearthed histories visible–preventing them from being buried again. 

As the United States begins to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the Trump administration has sought to turn back the clock on such historical recovery work. In fact, Independence National Historic Park is called out specifically in both the Executive Order and Secretarial Order for “renovations” in time for the America250 celebrations. 

In April, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on such proposed “renovations” when NPS published to the President’s House Site website the new proposed interpretive signs intended to replace the original signs at this site.  

Compared to the original exhibits, which mention the nine enslaved individuals in almost every panel, the proposed panels rarely mention them. The Trump administration’s proposed replacement panels further minimize the horrors of slavery, omitting much of the information from the original exhibit. 

This blatant omission of factual history is disturbing to witness. Perhaps most disturbing, was the subtlety of the content changes. So when two of our team members had the opportunity to attend the Organization of American Historians’ conference in Philadelphia in mid April, we created a visualization tool to help people see the gravity of these proposed changes. We printed pamphlets to advertise the side-by-side visualization tool and handed them out to people we met while we visited the President’s House site.

We spoke to community members who kept vigil at the site. One concerned citizen shared how he has been going to the President’s House every weekend, posting blank paper on the walls where the interpretive panels once hung. While we watched, he affixed markers to the walls with painters tape, inviting park visitors to share their thoughts. 

He noted that the rangers mostly turn a blind eye towards the community responses, only removing the signs after a few days. But he and other community members have been wondering if that attitude will change as the 250th anniversary nears. 

A court ruling at the end of last week directed the federal government to re-install all censored signs before the 250th celebrations this July 4th, providing what we hope to be a major victory in the fight against this censorship. Yet the Department of Interior has already filed an appeal, and we have not seen reports of the original signs reinstalled at the President’s House Site. 

As this fight continues, the Save Our Signs team hopes that these public conversations about historiography and what is worthy of remembrance are only just beginning.

What we choose to remember shapes who we are and who we believe we can be–individually and as a nation. With each photo submitted to the people’s archive of National Park signs, and with each printed out panel taped to blank walls, Americans are asserting what national narratives they want to memorialize and enter into the national consciousness. And they want accurate history that is rich, nuanced and full of the failures, the glories and everything in between.

Save our signs is a project based out of the University of Minnesota Library. You can learn more about it here.

Canada and Mexico approach an historic juncture in their relations with the United States. Both countries face a July 1 deadline over the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2020 under the auspices of Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador. CUSMA is due to be formally extended for 16 years or to be continued under annual reviews. The Trump administration has already run roughshod over some aspects of the agreement and the unpredictable Donald Trump sometimes even seems prepared to walk away.  

It’s not the first time both Canada and Mexico have simultaneously confronted a moment of such significance with a wallop from the United States.

On June 19, 1867, the French appointed Emperor of Mexico, Maximiliano de Habsburgo, was executed in Querétaro some 220 kilometres north of Mexico City. On July 1, 1867, many citizens of the Dominion of Canada celebrated the creation of a new nation state. 

Consequently, each country can date the dawning of its independence within two weeks in the early summer of 1867. This independence is unofficially recognized in Mexico because while 1821 saw the overthrow of Spanish imperial rule, the official date of Mexican independence is September 16 with celebrations starting in the evening of the 15th to commemorate the beginnings of revolt against Spanish rule in 1810. The year 1821 marked the beginning of a highly conflicted independence that featured almost half a century of war between Mexican conservatives and liberals. Also in that period, war with the United States led to the loss of just over half of Mexico’s territory by 1848. Then in 1862, the French under Napoleon III invaded Mexico at the urging of some Mexican conservatives.

Both the French invasion of Mexico and Canadian confederation were motivated to a significant extent by events in the United States – specifically the bloody American Civil War 1861 – 1865. Napoleon III miscalculated that the south would win, become his ally, and renounce the Monroe Doctrine.  After the North prevailed on April 9, 1865, Napoleon III withdrew his troops and abandoned Maximiliano and the Mexican conservatives who supported him. Meanwhile in what would become Canada, British North American politicians like Macdonald, Brown and Cartier worried about an expansionary United States after the war, and having seen the internecine chaos to the south, wanted a form of union that would preserve the British political connection rather than emulating American style republican government.  In sum, the American Civil War served as political accelerant on both sides of the United States border.

Photo of Parliament Hill courtesy of Chris DeSort on Unsplash

Maximiliano and those loyal to him were defeated by the forces of President Benito Juárez, an Indigenous person from Oaxaca, in that spring of 1867 in Querétaro.  To many observers of Mexican history, including this writer, that deadly moment for the complicated, doomed and fascinating Maximiliano, who like Juárez was a classic 19^th century liberal, marks the beginning of true Mexican independence. It meant the termination of more than three centuries of Spanish rule and waves of interference from the Americans, British and French. Juárez’s insistence on the execution of Maximiliano, which was opposed by many outside Mexico, including international champions of human rights such as Victor Hugo, affirmed Mexico’s stature as a nation within its present borders.

British North America morphed into The Dominion of Canada after years of fraught negotiations. Ultimately, Canada West (Ontario), Canada East (Québec), New Brunswick and Nova Scotia entered confederation under the British North America Act, enacted in March 1867 and taking effect on July 1, 1867.  It was a limited independence and perhaps thankfully so for the new Canadian leaders because it was British regulars who helped defeat the forces of Louis Riel’s Métis during the Red River Resistance in the years immediately following confederation. The Red River Expedition of 1870 under the command of British General Garnet Wolseley allowed for westward expansion. It launched Canadian style manifest destiny featuring rapid settler colonialism and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples from the prairies to the Pacific Ocean. The execution of Louis Riel in 1885 was among the capstones of that process. Canada would gradually further its independence following its outsized performance in World War I and with the Statute of Westminster in 1931. Until at least that point ties with Great Britain had much more than symbolic meaning.

Since the late 19^th century until the present day, both Canada and Mexico have had spats with the United States over migration, tariffs and various trade matters. In 1994, neoliberal champions of free trade in the three countries hoped many of these issues would be resolved for good with NAFTA.  Inequities in Mexico between an industrialized north benefiting from a maquiladora industrial boom and an impoverished south where small-scale agriculture has suffered from NAFTA, raise questions about what’s best for Mexico in looking again at CUSMA.  In some parts of Canada, including Peterborough (Nogojiwanong), long existing industries were hollowed out following NAFTA. Ironically, resentment over cultural and economic damage to American rust belt states, which was attributed to NAFTA, contributed to the rise of Republican politicians such as JD Vance and even Donald Trump. These days Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government wants to preserve CUSMA while maintaining aspects of Canadian protectionism in matters like culture and the dairy industry.

Mr. Carney owes a great debt of political gratitude to Mr. Trump. In the election campaign of 2025, his Liberals successfully employed an “elbows up” posture vis à vis the Americans by highlighting Mr. Trump’s insults directed Canada’s way and clinging to the Canadian flag while simultaneously demonizing the Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre as ‘Trump lite.’ Once in power, Mr. Carney has charted a progressive conservative course which is sometimes not far removed from Mr. Poilievre’s campaign planks and even some of Mr. Trump’s policy priorities.  It’s been a 21^st century master class in the well-honed shape shifting Liberal playbook which has kept the party in power for most of Canada’s history as a nation state.

In Mexico, Presidenta Claudia Sheinbaum has projected the appearance of maintaining a more calm, dignified and steady attitude with the Americans. This has earned her some credit with the White House, but contradiction and peril lurk. The ongoing crisis provoked by organized crime in the country compromises Ms. Sheinbaum and bedevils relations with Washington. Sadly, the Sheinbaum administration is the latest Mexican government proving itself incapable of protecting journalists who continue to be prey to organized crime. Drug trafficking is a plague in all three countries. Chaos is not the best posture in the lead up to renewing CUSMA which is Ms. Sheinbaum’s stated aim.

Photo of Angel of Independence in Mexico City courtesy of author

In 2026, 159 years following the decisive summer of 1867, this moment for CUSMA arrives with Donald Trump casting his ponderous shadow over the proceedings. His offensive musings about turning Canada into a 51^st state and his threats about taking the fight directly to drug cartels inside Mexican territory are among the provocations that Mr. Trump has sent Ottawa and Mexico City’s way. The ambitions of both Canada and Mexico regarding CUSMA will face a severe test up against the unpredictable and sometimes contradictory policies of the Trump administration.  It’s a test unlike any other that Canada or Mexico have faced in their histories of relations with the United States.

The next days and weeks will tell us much about the future of CUSMA.  It will be the latest twist and a significant turning point in the long effort of both Canada and Mexico to maintain friendly, but cautiously sovereign relations with the behemoth between them.

James Cullingham is a filmmaker, historian and journalist based in Nogojiwanong – Peterborough ON. He is an adjunct graduate faculty member at Trent University. Dr. Cullingham is currently writing a book entitled In The Shadow of The Eagle: Canada, Mexico and the United States.

This week I talk with Meghan Crnic, author of The Beach Cure: A History of Healing on Northeastern Shores. We discuss the origins of the beach as a place to get healthy, the conditions in 19th century American cities that led doctors to prescribe the beach, and the logistics of getting to the cost. We also chat about how beach areas were built up, the transformation of space from health to recreation, and the legacy of the 19th century on beach towns.

Historical Headline of the Week

Emma Loewe, “Going to the beach is good for your brain, according to science,” National Geographic, May 22, 2025.

Sean Graham is a cultural historian, an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and a contribution editor with Activehistory.ca

Today’s visitors to Venice are hard-pressed to ignore the locals’ frustration with their presence. In 2025, CNN lamented the impact of overtourism on this popular destination “hollowed out by vacation rentals.”[1] In 2024, the BBC noted that the city had introduced a daily entry fee, a ban on loudspeakers, and a limit on tour group size – all in an effort to counteract tourism’s negative impact on the local community.[2] When I visited the city that same year, the Ponte di Rialto, the Canal Grande, and Piazza San Marco competed for my attention alongside train-station graffiti urging “Tourists” to “Go Home” and strategically placed stickers featuring smiling cartoon excrement proclaiming that “Tourists Are Killing Venice.” Over the past decade, Venice has been at the forefront of a backlash against overtourism in Europe.[3] But the roots of Venice’s love-hate relationship with tourists go back at least as far as the middle of the twentieth century.

Anti-tourist graffiti outside Venice’s Santa Lucia train station. June 2024. Author’s photo

In the 1940s, Italian officials viewed Venice’s tourism allure as a key component of their postwar economic reconstruction plans. But in 1949, a visiting Australian correspondent struggled to grasp how this might be the case as he came face to face with the city’s poverty. “[M]ost of the Venetians,” Douglas Wilkie observed, “live in hovels.” Venice resembled other Italian cities, he noted, “where antique beauty, irresponsible wealth, and utter destitution go hand in hand.” In this context, Wilkie remained pessimistic. Pursuing “tourism to relieve Italy’s economic crisis,” he suggested, “seems about as helpful as wringing the necks of the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square to feed the beggars.”[4]

Anti-tourist sticker. Venice, June 2024. Author’s photo

Three years later, a Texan visitor similarly underscored the divergence between visitor and host community experiences. For tourists, especially children, Edward Harte explained, the City of Canals was a place where “fancy reigns.” Even the existential threat of the archipelago’s “rotting foundations” and “rising high-water marks” added to the experience. “For tourists,” Harte suggested, “there is a ‘sunset’ quality about all of Venice.” For “the old part of the city,” where tourists concentrated, “is in the twilight of its history.” Decline and degradation, from this perspective, were part of the allure. However, for the locals, Harte surmised, “[l]ife in Venice must be filled with frustrations.” The canals, so endearing to visitors, were a source of endless frustration and inefficiency for locals. Indeed, Harte concluded, “One cannot envy modern Venetians, hanging their ragged laundry to dry over quaint but garbage-choked canals, working and living in unimaginable congestion.”[5]

Local Venetians playing football, c. 1960. Source: Paolo Monti, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the discrepancy between tourist and resident experience, city officials pressed on with their attempts to expand tourism. In 1959, their focus settled on the declining fortunes of Lido beach. Accessible only by water, it struggled to attract visitors in comparison to beaches elsewhere along the Adriatic. The answer, according to the city’s former chief architect, Eugenio Miozzi, was a 4-mile-long underwater automobile tunnel. Miozzi’s supporters assured the doubters that the tunnel would facilitate the efficient and silent delivery of much-needed visitors to the beach. However, many Venetians balked at the proposal, suggesting it would threaten the city’s character and cost far more than the $9 million Miozzi predicted.[6] The project was shelved.

A few years later, the city’s gondoliers would also rally in defence of the city’s character and traditions. By the mid-1960s, roughly 400 gondolas serviced the city. They were a far cry from the 10,000 or so that had traditionally navigated the city’s canals but the gondoliers remained a powerful lobby. In 1965, for example, 54 gondoliers servicing Piazza San Marco withheld their services to protest the city’s decision to issue four docking permits for motorboats – a threat to their livelihood. Four years later a similarly agitated group of gondoliers faced arrest after taking issue with a city decision to prohibit their use of a particular canal. According to one report, the gondoliers, “broke up a city council meeting, smashed an 18^th Century chandelier and pulled down a waterpipe, flooding the council chambers.”[7]

Venetian Gondoliers, 1960. Source: My Past from Norway, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Common.

By the late 1960s, the debate over the city’s economic viability openly pitted industrialists against conservationists. The former emphasized the need to expand the city’s port operations and develop new canals to link Venice more effectively with central Europe. The payoff, they emphasized, would be much-needed jobs and a reversal of the city’s declining population. Some opponents countered that more dredging would disturb the city’s tides and accelerate its descent into the Adriatic. Others doubled down on the city’s reliance on tourism and “advised turning the city into a sort of historical Disneyland, which would subsist solely on tourism.”[8]

Indeed, beyond traditional advertising campaigns, the city pursued a wide range of idiosyncratic pro-tourism initiatives. In 1973, to “preserve the city’s architecture and sculpture,” officials endeavoured to dramatically reduce the city’s pigeon population “by resettling them in other cities and freeing them in wooded areas.”[9] Three years later the city hosted its second annual “Back and Forth Over the Bridges of Venice foot race.” Organized by the Regional Center for Youth and Social Tourism, the race featured over 11,000 participants, including a turkey named Astacchino. The winning (human) participant completed the 7.4-mile, 47-bridge, course in roughly 40 minutes. Astacchino’s time was not recorded.[10]

Pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. Source: I, Nattfodd, CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Piazza_san_marco.jpg.

However, an anti-tourism backlash was gaining momentum. In the mid-1980s Venice tourism official Augusto Salvadori introduced a law imposing fines on visitors who slept outdoors in Piazza San Marco. Keen to encourage tourists to pay for accommodation and not antagonize locals, politicians in other Italian cities embraced similar measures in what became known as a “war” on the “sleeping-bag people.” Inspired by Salvadori’s initiative, for example, the Communist mayor of Riccione declared it illegal for tourists “to sit, sprawl or picnic on the pavement or in gardens and public parks, to sleep in parked cars or turn on [a] sound-producing apparatus with windows and doors left open.”[11] In 1987, Venetian authorities called an “emergency meeting” to deal with unsustainable crowds. That spring over 100,000 tourists descended upon the city on three consecutive weekends, more than doubling the city’s population each time. This prompted officials to close a key bridge and introduce “one-way pedestrian systems.”[12] By the end of the decade, inflated real estate prices had priced many Venetians out of their city. The city’s population had dropped by 70% since the late 1960s. And many young Venetians now gravitated to Mestre on the mainland for entertainment and social interaction. “We are in danger of becoming a stage without actors,” one Venetian lamented.[13]

Crowds at Venice. Source: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=215327&picture=crowds-at-venice; Public Domain.

And yet the lure of foreign currency and international prestige proved too tempting to resist. In 1989, Venetian authorities agreed to host a Pink Floyd concert in Piazza San Marco. Local opposition was fierce. Augusto Salvadori pointedly suggested that the Piazza was an inappropriate place for a rock concert. In response to concerns about the impact of music vibrations on the city’s architecture, the band agreed to lower its decibel level by 40% and perform on a stage floating in the lagoon roughly 200 yards from the Piazza. In the end, it was the visitors, themselves, that did the most damage. Officials estimated that they “left behind 300 tons of garbage and 500 cubic meters of empty cans and bottles.” And with a dearth of available bathrooms, “concertgoers relieved themselves on the monuments and walls.” Public outrage – “[Y]ou’ve turned Venice into a toilet” – forced the resignation of the mayor and city council.[14] Perhaps that’s where local activists got the idea for their scatologically-themed anti-tourism stickers.

Michael Dawson is Professor of History at St. Thomas University where he teaches courses on Canadian history, the global history of sport and tourism, Disney and World History, and the comparative history of national identity and popular culture in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

[1] Julia Buckley, et al, “Rising waters and overtourism are killing Venice. Now the fight is on to save its soul.” CNN, May 12, 2025, cnn.com.

[2] Adam Durbin, “Venice bans large tourist groups and loudspeakers,” BBC, June 1, 2024, bbc.com.

[3] For a fine survey of contemporary overtourism and its opposition, see Elizabeth Becker, Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

[4] Douglas Wilkie, “Hope Tourist Trade Will Beat Poverty,” Courier-Mail [Brisbane], February 19, 1949,

[5] Edward H. Harte, “Venice Still Paradise For Tourists But Not For Home,” San Angelo Standard-Times, November 12, 1952, 1B.

[6] Eugene Levin, “Canal City Eyes Tunnel For Autos,” The Herald-Palladium [Benton Harbor, MI], April 23, 1959, Sec. 2, 14.

[7] “Aid Asked by Gondoliers,” Pensacola News Journal [Pensacola, FL], March 6, 1965, 2A; “That Does It For Gondoliers,” Evansville Press [Evansville, IN], April 30, 1965, 4; “Nine Extra Gondoliers Charged,” Kitsap Sun [Bremerton, WA], August 12, 1969, 3.

[8] Dennis Redmont, “Venice Dilemma: Invading Waters,” The State [Columbia, SC], July 7, 1968, 6F.

[9] “De-Pigeoning Venice,” Sun Post News [San Clemente, CA], October 17, 1973, 12.

[10] “Defending Champ Holds Crown,” Rushville Republican [Rushville, IN], March 15, 1976, 2.

[11] Uli Schmetzer, “Italy says arrivederci to sleeping-bag people,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1985, Sec.4, 12.

[12] “Venice seeks ways to slow tourism,” The Palm Beach Post [Palm Beach, FL], May 4, 1987, 8A.

[13] Robert Fox, “Bad news from the Rialto,” The Daily Telegraph [London, UK], March 18, 1988, 23.

[14] Dave Lifton, “35 Years Ago: Pink Floyd Brings Down Venice’s Government,” UltimateClassicRock.com, updated July 15, 2019, https://ultimateclassicrock.com/pink-floyd-venice-1989/

On 16 April 2026, five thousand long-term care (LTC) workers in 56 facilities throughout Nova Scotia began a strike. A tentative agreement ended the labour action after eight weeks, another example of a lengthy labour dispute in a nursing home. Indeed, some of the longest strikes in recent Canadian history have been in LTC.[i]

Striking long-term care workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia, June 2026. Author photo

I have previously argued that focusing on nursing home workers opened up new analytical paths and that these offered an opportunity to contribute to the revitalization of Canadian working class history. My interest in this question was inspired by another Active History post.[ii] Specifically, I saw the opportunity to focus on groups that are, largely, without a history of their own. This would include continuing care assistants (CCAs), the largest group of caregivers in LTC. Striking CCAs in Nova Scotia earned $18.77 per hour when the dispute began, barely above the provincial minimum wage.[iii]

As Pat Armstrong, a leading scholar of LTC, has repeatedly highlighted, “the conditions of work are the conditions of care.”[iv] The labour dispute in Nova Scotia was, then, not only about wages but also the demanding nature of caring work. During the strike, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) collected two thousand submissions on its website Stories of Care that document the challenges that health care workers face every day.[v]

One worker noted that “CCAs are over worked and tired.” Another highlighted that the work was “physically and mentally exhausting” and that it could also be “dangerous.” Many of the accounts link the poor pay in LTC to the issue of staff retention. This, in turn, leads to high rates of turnover and ‘working short’, which is a euphemism for being understaffed. One noted that the “wage gap matters” and that workers will protest with their feet, looking for better opportunities elsewhere. She added that the poor pays “affects staff retention and the consistency of support for vulnerable individuals.” Another CCA said “I know how difficult this job can be, what its like to be mandated to work double shifts, to work short handed, to have a work load that beyond a single person’s capability.”

These stories also open a window onto what Eric Tucker recently described as the ‘third wave’ of occupational health and safety (OHS).[vi] According to Tucker, this wave was characterized by “stubbornly high injury rates, growing awareness of occupational disease … and by the emergence of militant worker health and safety movements.”  Tucker helpfully focuses attention on how ideas about occupational health expanded in the late 20^th century to encompass a greater range of issues and more workers, including health care workers.

Despite a brief flurry of interest in the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic, there is not much written about the history of occupational health and safety in health care. Labour and working-class historians have, of course,  been attentive to the many risks associated with factory work and the hard labour of mining, forestry, and fishing.[vii] Other historians have examined a select group of occupational diseases, including silicosis, black lung, brown lung, and radiation poisoning.[viii] Some have explored the history of protective legislation for women and children and the history of worker compensation laws.[ix]  Beyond the confines of industrial workers, however, there are few histories of OHS. 

Thank you workers. A sign that has seen better days but one that was still hanging on a fence outside a Cambridge, Massachusetts, hospital in the summer of 2025. Author photo.

Evidence also suggests that health care was hardly at the leading edge of occupational health and safety in the late 1970s. According to a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study completed in 1976, only 8% of surveyed hospitals in the United States met the minimal criteria for an effective health and safety program. Almost one third of them did not have a formal occupational health program.[x]

In these years, health care workers grappled with several occupational health issues, including exposure to infectious materials, toxicological hazards, radiation exposure, and other unique problems.[xi] In the summer of 1978, CUPE completed a survey of hospital hazards. It was the first such study in Canada and it documented the range of threats to worker health.[xii]

Newsletters like WOHRC News shared information and promoted awareness of the occupational health hazards faced by women workers. WORHC News, 6, 2 (April/May 1984). Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Used with the permission of Dr. Jeanne Stellman.

The risk of exposure to pathogens like hepatitis B and HIV captured the attention of workers, and their unions, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One article found that 7% of health care workers reported a history of hepatitis, more than twice the rate experienced by the general public, because of exposure on the job.[xiii] The risk of transmission through needlesticks or dealing with soiled laundry prompted the rise of universal precautions, such as wearing gloves when handling blood. In 1983, the CDC released a “Guideline for Infection Control in Hospital Personnel.”[xiv] This was the first time the CDC addressed this issue, an illustration of the slow progress of safety culture in hospitals.

In an article published in Occupational Health Nursing in 1982, Jeanne Stellman, a distinguished researcher and the director of the Women’s Occupational Health Research Center at Columbia University, highlighted the hazards of hospital work. Stellman was an important ally to both union and women’s groups, and an important advocate for improved worker safety. In the article she noted that hospital workers were injured at twice the rate of workers in other service industries. However, it was likely that the numbers were underreported, since employees did not always report their issues. Stellman noted that “Employees … are often too busy or untrained or have become so accustomed to these accidents that they neither report accidents nor seek treatment for them in employee health services.”[xv]

Workers, too, had to change the way they did tasks. Among the problems identified were “insufficient and sloppy garbage disposal facilities” and “improper pipetting practices” which exposed workers to unnecessary risks. An American survey found that 82% used their mouths when pipetting liquids “at least occasionally” and half of the respondents had at taken liquid into their mouth at least once. Workers who routinely used their mouths when dealing with samples was a common practice, and they had three times the risk of workers who had not ingested liquids. This issue could have been solved by using automatic pipettes but they “were not routinely provided or used in most hospital laboratories.”[xvi] Employers proved all too willing to sacrifice worker health and safety if there is a cost involved but workers, too, needed to be attentive to their own work culture and ensure that they were acting as good fellow servants.

An example of safe pipetting.WOHRC News, 4,4 (September 1982), 2.  Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Used with the permission of Dr. Stellman.

The history of occupational health in health care presents a rich opportunity to explore the expansion of occupational health and safety in the late 20^th century to encompass more workers and a greater range of issues. Importantly, the efforts of workers and their unions also helped to improve health and safety for other workers too, including office workers and those in the service sector. Cumulatively, examining such workers, who are the largest part of the labour force, will result in new perspectives on the history of of occupational health and safety.

Peter L. Twohig writes and reads history in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His current research is on the history of occupational health since 1950, supported in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. His latest book, The Labour of Care, will be published in July 2026 by University of Toronto Press.

[i] For example, a strike at Parkland nursing home in Edmonton lasted for four years at the end of the 1970s. A strike at Keddy’s Nursing Home in Halifax lasted for 16 months over 1983 and 1984. In between these, there were long strikes in nursing homes across Canada. I explore several of these strikes in my forthcoming book The Labour of Care (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2026). I have written previously about the strike at Keddy’s in Twohig, “COVID-19 and the Labour of Care,” Acadiensis 50, 2 (Autumn 2021): 96-114.

[ii] Christo Aivalis, Greg Kealey, Jeremy Milloy, and Julia Smith, “Back to Work: Revitalizing Labour and Working-Class History in Canada,” 21 September 2015.  https://activehistory.ca/blog/2015/09/21/back-to-work-revitalizing-labour-and-working-class-history-in-canada/

[iii] I explore several of these groups in The Labour of Care.

[iv] See an interview with Armstrong, at  https://www.healthcoalition.ca/the-conditions-of-work-are-the-conditions-of-care-says-pat-armstrong/

[v] CUPE NS, https://storiesofcare.ca/

[vi] Eric Tucker, “Regulating Health and Safety and Capitalist Workplaces: History, Practices and Prospects,” 2023. https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/all_papers/364/

[vii] There are too many fine studies to list but for an excellent recent analysis, see David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Building the Worlds That Kill Us: Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).

[viii] For an early historical account, see George Rosen, “On the historical investigation of occupational diseases: An Aperçu,” Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 5, 10 (1937), 941-46. See also David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work: Workers Safety and Health in Twentieth Century America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); Alan Derickson, Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014); and Robert Emil Botsch, Organizing the Breathless: Cotton Dust, Southern Politics, and the Brown Lung Association (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014); Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

[ix] See David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York: Penguin, 2011) and Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (London: Simon & Schuster, 2016). Greenlees argues that at the turn of the 20th century, cotton factories in Britain and the United States, which employed large numbers of women, were “the first factory environments where questions about health at work and the forces that determined them came to the fore.” Janet Greenlees, When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 2. On compensation, essential studies would include Eric Tucker, Administering Danger in the Workplace: The Law and Politics of Occupational Health and Safety Regulation in Ontario, 1850-1914 (Toronto: UTP Press, 1990); Julia Moses, The First Modern Risk: Workplace Accidents and the Origins of European Social States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Robert H. Babcock, “Blood on the Factory Floor: The Workers’ Compensation Movement in Canada and the United States,” in Raymond B. Blake and Jeffery A. Keshen, eds., Social Fabric or Patchwork Quilt: The Development of Social Policy in Canada (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006; Michael J. Piva, “The Workmen’s Compensation Movement in Ontario,” Ontario History, 67 (1975), 39-56.

[x] Hospital Occupational Health Services Study. U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare, Public Health Service, NIOSH, Division of Technical Services, Vol. 1-7. Cincinnati, Ohio, 1976 and Robert Lewy, “Prevention Strategies in Hospital Occupational Medicine,” Journal of Occupational Medicine, 23, 2 (February 1981), 109.

[xi] Robert Lewy, “Prevention Strategies in Hospital Occupational Medicine,” Journal of Occupational Medicine, 23, 2 (February 1981), 109.

[xii] “The Hazards of Hospital Work,” Health Alert, 3, 1 (October 1978), 1.

[xiii] “Health and Safety in the Clinical Laboratory,” Women’s Occupational Health Research Center News, 1,1 (Jan/Feb 1979), 2-3.

[xiv] “CDC’s new personnel health guideline praised,” Hospital Employee Health, 2, 9 (September 1983), 113

[xv] Jeanne Stellman, “Safety in the Health Care Industry,” Occupational Health Nursing, October 1982, 7. On Stellman, see Amanda Lauren Walter and Elizabeth Faue, “In the Shadow of Tragedy: Jeanne M. Stellman and the Work of the Women’s Occupational Health Resource Center,” Journal of Women’s History,  34, 1 (Spring 2022): 93-114.

[xvi] “Health and Safety in the Clinical Laboratory,” Women’s Occupational Health Research Center News, 1, 1 (Jan/Feb 1979), 2-3.

This is the ninth post in a series about the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance for Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posed with NiCHE

The relationship between agriculture and the Anthropocene unfolds across a temporal and conceptual spectrum punctuated by the various proposals for a “Golden Spike.”¹ At one end of this spectrum lie the first domestications of plants and animals, which initiated an anthropogenic alteration of Earth’s climatic trajectory. At the other end stands the Great Acceleration and its planetary dashboards that document the explosive growth of human impacts after the Second World War as indicated by the extinction of species, the expansion of domesticated land, deforestation, increased nitrogen in the atmosphere, and rising atmospheric methane concentrations.² Together, these indicators reveal the transformation of agriculture into a global force reshaping the Earth system.

Yet the processes associated with the Great Acceleration did not emerge suddenly after 1945. At regional scales, earlier agricultural transformations set in motion socio-ecological trajectories that anticipated many of its defining characteristics. The dairy transition that transformed Laurentian agriculture in the late nineteenth century offers one such example.³ This was the most substantial agricultural change since the arrival of European settlers in the region in the seventeenth century. Driven by the growing demand in the British market for butter and cheese, it reshaped land use, livestock populations, patterns of farm ownership, and agro-industrial infrastructure in ways that foreshadowed later processes of agricultural intensification, specialization, capitalization, and environmental change.⁴ Viewed from this perspective, the Laurentian dairy revolution can be understood as an early manifestation of the processes later captured globally by the concept of the Great Acceleration.

The changes in Laurentian agricultural production resulting from the rise of dairy farming at the end of the nineteenth century can be summarized as follows: within fifty years, the average dairy herd on each farm increased by nearly two-thirds, while the proportion of land devoted to feeding dairy cows increased by more than one-fifth for pasture and more than doubled for forage crops.⁵

From an ecological perspective, mixed farming was far more sustainable than the cereal monoculture practiced since the beginning of European colonization. The reliance on the repeated sowing and harvesting of wheat led to the depletion of soil fertility. However, the crop and livestock specialization associated with mixed farming resulted in a loss of biodiversity in Laurentian rural environments and contributed to the industrialization of the countryside.

The growth of dairy cattle population—by nearly one-fifth across the province and slightly less than two-thirds on the average farm—occurred at the expense of sheep. The near stability of sheep numbers (from 824,981 to 856,169 head between 1871 and 1921) masks a relative decline in their presence in the Laurentian countryside, owing to the emergence of larger flocks on the fringes of the ecumene, where the number of small farms increased. Horses remained the primary source of farm labour until the Second World War, but they did not rival dairy cows in number, as cattle came to dominate the animal landscape. These changes concerned not only the size of the herd—the number of cattle increased from 406,542 to 796,029 between 1871 and 1921—but also its composition. Census data from the early decades of the twentieth century reveal the growing predominance of dairy breeds, particularly Ayrshires and Canadienne, within Quebec’s livestock population.

Census of Canada (1871–1921) and, for 1700–1861, vol. IV of the 1871 census.

The dairy specialization of Laurentian agriculture was also reflected in patterns of land use. Farmers devoted more land to animal feed than to crops intended for direct human consumption, whether through natural pastures or forage production. Another characteristic of the landscape transformation associated with the dairy transition was the concentration of land ownership. Farmers seeking to expand their herds or support larger numbers of livestock took advantage of the abandonment of small (4–20 ha) and medium-sized (20–40 ha) farms to enlarge their holdings. The increase in the average size of farm properties also reflected efforts to make increasingly expensive machinery economically viable and to compensate for labour shortages.

Thus, dairy specialization and land-use intensification went hand in hand in the Laurentian countryside. The replacement of cereal crops by pastures and hay meadows created favourable conditions for the expansion of a cattle population that had initially been deficient in both quantity and quality. The rise of dairy farming accelerated this process while encouraging farmers to increase the size of their operations in order to support growing numbers of dairy cattle.

The industrialization of Laurentian agriculture during the dairy transition resulted in the emergence of large-scale commercial farms. Although their owners belonged to an elite whose resources greatly exceeded those of the farming population as a whole, their operations illustrate the transition from largely self-sufficient farms to enterprises deeply integrated into a market economy. They also exemplify the transformation of an increasingly industrialized agroecosystem, in which intensified land use and expanded areas devoted to forage crops and pastures supported a growing and specialized cattle population through the selection of dairy breeds.

Beyond the emergence of large farms—often at the expense of smaller farms that disappeared from the rural landscape—the industrialization of the Laurentian countryside was also reflected in the proliferation of cheese and butter factories that dotted the rural environment. At the provincial level, after two decades of steady growth, the number of factories increased exponentially between 1890 and 1900.

J.A. Ruddick, L’industrie laitière au Canada. Tableau historique et descriptif, bulletin 28? (Ottawa, Ministère de l’Agriculture, Division du commissaire de l’industrie laitière et de la réfrigération, 1911).

The emergence of factories and large commercial farms coincided with the simplification of livestock production and the intensification of land use through the expansion of forage crops and pastureland. These developments reflected increased capitalization of an industrial rural landscape, as both agricultural production and food processing required increasingly large financial investments. The effects were long lasting, paving the way for another wave of landscape changes after the Second World War, associated with the widespread use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, increasing mechanization and dependence on fossil fuels, and the growing production of animal waste which resulted from the concentration of livestock farming.⁶ Indicators for these ecological consequences exhibited an exponential growth, a trend also experienced by the bovine population and the cheese and butter factories in Quebec in the late nineteenth century. Thus, the anthropogenic impacts of Laurentian agriculture had already begun to accelerate during the dairy transition.

Stéphane Castonguay is a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières and a researcher at the Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises (www.cieq.ca). His research analyzes the genesis of the Canadian agri-food system and its integration into international trade.

Colin Coates is a full professor of Canadian studies at Glendon College, York University. His research focuses on the environmental, social, and cultural history of the St. Lawrence Valley. Castonguay and Coates recently published in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, “Remember Bristol and the “French Cheese” The marketing of Quebec and Ontario dairy products in Great Britain, 1880-1914”.

1. E. Reisman et al., “Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111, no. 3 (2021): 687–697.

2. W. Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785.

3. S. Castonguay et C. Coates, 2026, “ L’écologie du régime alimentaire britannique et l’agriculture laurentienne, 1871–1921,” Études rurales, 116 (forthcoming).

4. On the landscape changes of Quebec agriculture after the Second World War, see Julie Ruiz, “Modernisation de l’agriculture et occupation des terres agricoles au Québec (1951-2011), ” Cahiers de géographie du Québec 63 (2019): 213–230.

5. Régis Thibault, “Périodisation et spatialisation des débuts de l’industrie litière au Québec, 1871-1911,” Histoire sociale/Social History 29, no. 57 (1996): 133–157.

6. Marit Rosol and Christoph Rosol, “Food, pandemics and the Anthropocene: On the necessity of food and agricultural change,” Canadian Food studies, 9, no. 1 (2022): 281–293.

This week I talks with Shelisa Klassen, author of Imprinting Empire: Land and Settler Colonialism in Manitoba Newspapers. We talk about late 19th century Manitoba newspapers, the audiences both in Manitoba and the rest of Canada, and how the press framed colonial practices. We also discuss how newspapers fit into other commercial projects, what information was included and what was intentionally omitted, and the legacy of the era’s newspapers.

Historical Headline of the Week

Clare Hennig and Jean Paetkau, “Digital archive of old B.C. textbooks highlights ‘constant dehumanizing of Indigenous people,’ CBC.ca, September 4, 2018.

Sean Graham is a cultural historian, an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and a contributing editor with Activehistory.ca