This interview was conducted by the series editors, Annabelle Penney and Raffaella Cerenzia, and has been shortened for publication.

Active History: Let’s talk about your initial involvement with the CUPW in 1972. Can you clarify how you came to be involved with the union itself and tell us a little bit about the atmosphere of the union when you first joined?

Evert: When I started in ‘72, it was only five years since the certification of what was called the CPU, the Council of Postal Unions certification. It was only three years since the first negotiated collective agreement under what was known as the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the act that governed labour relations in the federal government. In 1965 there was a recognition strike…by the postal unions that forced this emerging legislation to include conciliation and the right to strike rather than simply compulsory arbitration. So at the time that I started in ‘72, the vast majority of the leadership of the Vancouver Local that I was in, were made up of people who had gone through the experience of that recognition strike and were a product of the understanding that when workers get together, when they unite, when they decide that they’re going to make their case known, that many things can be accomplished.

Now, there was a recognition that postal work was considerably different than most other federal work. It was blue-collar, it was in an industrial setting, whereas most of the other federal government employees were office workers of one sort or another. The other thing that was brought to my attention early on when I started was how much the working conditions and work environment had deteriorated. One example that’s worth mentioning is that when I became a shop steward, we’d been receiving many, many complaints about the fact that there were no stools available or very few stools. There was a situation, in which, particularly for older people or people with one form or another of a disability were forced to stand for eight hours on end in front of a sorting case, sorting mail. Fighting to end this resulted in my first disciplinary suspension. The other thing that I was pretty immediately struck by when I started was the way in which the issue of automation was obviously looming. There was a lot of discussion about it among the postal workers at the time, and it eventually led to a real crisis. The situation that developed was that the Federal Government had rejected a fairly comprehensive proposal that was presented by a Postmaster General by the name of Eric Kierans. He was appointed in 1968 by Pierre Trudeau, and he actually came up with a plan to modernize the Post Office and to bring in…technological change but it was supposed to be done in a way which involved no adverse effects on the workforce, sharing benefits with workers, and was to be done taking into consideration a unionized workplace.

In fact, what happened was that this attempt to bring about a modernization of the Post Office—that included the establishment of a Crown Corporation to replace the Post Office Department—was rejected by the federal government and they maintained only the recommendation that automation be introduced. It was done in a very ill-considered and not well-planned-out way. Eventually, in 1974, the new National President of CUPW, Joe Davidson, was placed in the position where he had to call a strike because part of this introduction of automation was that all the new coders operating the new automated equipment were to be paid considerably less than the manual sorting clerks and the mail handlers [and] it was going to be done without consultation. They simply announced that a new classification was being introduced. Under the Public Service Staff Relations Act, the union did not have the right to negotiate classifications. So, in response to that…a national strike was called, an illegal national strike that challenged this attempt to bring in cheap labour. We knew that eventually the manual sorters were going to all be replaced by sorters on the machine, the new classification, so a strike was called that was eventually resolved through a decision that was made by an arbitrator…Eric Taylor, who simply made sure that the new classification that was going to be introduced along with the automated equipment being revised, so that the wage structure would be identical to that of the manual sorters.

Active History: I think this would be a great time to explain that in 1972 Canada Post was a department of the federal government. I think there’s a lack of clarity, in the public memory, on how Canada Post transformed. I was wondering if you could speak to that in more depth.

Evert: You mean how things were structured under the old Post Office Department? It was a very… complex situation. Because on the one hand the Post Office Department was its own department, but the Post Office Department dealt only with the day-to-day operations of sorting and delivering the mail. And in fact, the issue of the deteriorating plants, for example, the buildings, that was all dealt with by the Department of Public Works and the budget for that was their budget. The equipment and everything down to the pens that were used in the Post Office was determined and provided by the Department of Supply and Services and the negotiations that established wages and working conditions were done through the Treasury Board. It was a totally inappropriate way of operating and ensured that there was going to be a lot of conflict and division at the level of management. Indeed, the federal government during the time just resisted having to deal with the issue of the Post Office. In fact, in those days…even introducing a change in the amount that was charged for a stamp had to be done through an amendment to the Post Office Act. So, it was confusing and created a lot of problems. It was very difficult for the unions to get themselves organized to the point of being able to resolve them. And it seemed to me that only given a perpetual condition of threatening to go on strike were the issues of great importance dealt with at all.

 There’s one further thing that’s worth mentioning… in 1975 when CUPW was negotiating on its own, separate from the Letter Carriers Union of Canada (LCUC), we came up with a collective agreement that had a breakthrough technological change clause that involved a guarantee there would be no adverse effects… that there would be a consultation process that was meaningful, when new technological changes were brought in. And it was signed by the employer and when we got back to work, they reneged on it. They said, “no.” That the government Treasury Board said those clauses that were signed, that was not legal for their negotiators to sign them. So, this was, as you can imagine, one of the frustrations that led to the famous strike in 1978.

Active History: I guess that leads us into a discussion of the 1978 CUPW strike, which I think is probably one of the most well-known instances of the CUPW’s labour activism, especially because it eventually leads to the arrest of union leader Jean-Claude Parrot. Could you speak about the context of this strike, why it’s important, and then your own role and experience participating in it?

Evert: What I said about the situation that faced the postal workers after the ‘75 strike that was led by Joe Davidson, wherein the advances that we thought we’d made were reneged by the employer, by the Federal Government of Canada, it’s hard to imagine how frustrated people felt about that. In fact, what followed in 1976, my Local in Vancouver was the first one to actually go out for a day, followed by many other Locals who rotated out in protest against the reneging on the issue and the fact that the grievances around automation were piling up. We had a little bit of fun in Vancouver debating during that brief walkout, whether we would call it “Mackasey Flu” in honour of the much-despised Minister of Labour, Bryce Mackasey, or if we would call it postal digitalis or something of that sort. Generally speaking, the reason that we went out was very serious and reflected the level of frustration that existed in that post-1975 period.

There was then also in early ‘78 a Canadian Labour Congress convention that I attended, where the fight continued between a leadership wanting to promote a tripartite sort of system with considerable opposition, not just CUPW, but a number of other unions, it was definitely a source of huge debate. And then in terms of our own negotiations that took place during that time, the Treasury Board was continuing to refuse the negotiation on technological change and a number of other critical issues, citing the Public Service Staff Relations Act. The result was that what we were really fighting for in 1978 was all of the things that we thought we had won in ‘75. The straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say, was when during the first day of the strike, legislation was passed saying that our strike was illegal. This was just too much to take. In the case of Vancouver, I was Local Vice-President at the time, and the executive decided that because we had full support for the strike, we were going to have a mass meeting to determine whether or not we should continue the strike and when we had the meeting, the result of it was that we got a higher vote to continue the strike in ‘78 than the initial vote to go out on strike. So, there was an incredible amount of solidarity and that continued during the next ten days or so. During that period twenty-two of us in Vancouver were charged with refusing to obey an act of Parliament. That didn’t stop the strike, but what happened was that the government decided that they would use something called “abandonment of position,” as the tool to get people to give up the strike. No challenge to such a firing was possible. So, under those circumstances, there was no choice. Now we simply had to go back to work. But I remember how we decided in Vancouver that what we were going to do, is go in with our heads held high. So, we had hundreds of postal workers meet at the post office in downtown Vancouver, at the door of the post office, and we all marched in at midnight singing “Solidarity Forever” and circulated around the post office building and then marched out. And it was a message that we wanted to leave to the superintendents and the supervisors that yes, we were being forced back to work, there was no doubt about it, but they could be assured that on the work floor they were going to be held to accountable. Now that was…a highlight of my history in the union that I’ve always thought back on as being a moment worth remembering.

I do want to mention too that there was a considerable amount of dissent over the “illegal” 1978 strike within the Canadian Labour Congress. Although many unions, in fact I would say most unions were willing to support us during that period, the top levels of the CLC administration including the president at the time, Dennis McDermott, was horrified by the decision that we made to resist and publicly declared that we were…”trying to lead the union movement down the road to anarchy,” as he called it, and insisted that the CLC could not support this. This was something that I think he lived to regret because the result of it was that more support for CUPW developed in the labour movement than what he had expected, much more support.

Active History: And do you have any insight or kind of a hypothesis as to why the CLC wouldn’t have been supportive?

Evert: Oh yes, I think that what we were dealing with — the division in the labour movement — certainly hadn’t just developed overnight. There was a considerable struggle for years inside the labour movement around whether or not, as we had earlier discussed, the issue of tripartism, the issue of cooperation between government, labour and corporations, could resolve things without that sort of level of fight that was represented by what CUPW was doing. So, it wasn’t surprising there was some resistance of the CLC leadership that followed from the role that CUPW played…in which we really led the demand for change in the labour movement and support for militancy.

Active History: Do you recall your initial reaction to that Crown Corporation announcement?

Evert: Well, I think the reaction of most of us was, well, we were looked upon with considerable disdain by politicians on the right. But…the fact that we decided to confront the situation in ‘78 was the reason why Trudeau finally gave in on the Crown Corporation. So, it was generally considered a victory.

Active History: I think we’re wrapping up, and we wanted to ask you as a closing question if you could share one favourite memory from your time with Canada Post.

Evert: One? A[n] element that I think is quite interesting and that captures, for me, some of the important elements of what the union has done and my involvement in it was our discovery that it wasn’t only postal supervisors that were watching over what the union was doing, but so was the RCMP and CSIS. There is a book that was written about this called State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies. It includes a chapter that I wrote about discovering the RCMP security police and later CSIS were involved in checking out and surveying the union. It was pretty clear that from the beginning, from ‘65 onward, the RCMP was taking a particular interest not just in strikes but in day-to-day organizing. The files that we were able to recover which were very much “severed,” as they call it, not too much information was released…but we were allowed to see what showed that they were following the day-to-day activities of the union. I have in front of me one of those pages that is largely blacked out but it says, [according to] the RCMP officer who was writing it, that, “when any particular person makes too much trouble in the Post Office, that person is either fired or moved to an undesirable position which results in the person quitting.”

Active History: Wow, what year is that [document] from?

Evert: February ‘73.

Active History: Thank you for sharing that with us. That’s fantastic. Is there anything just in general that you’d like to put on the record for Active History before we end the interview? And it’s been a fantastic interview, thank you so much.

Evert: Well, I just want to mention something about the bringing in of rural and suburban postal workers, a struggle begun during this period, because…in a way, I see the rural postal workers up until they became unionized as being the precursors of the gig economy. They were considered to be independent contractors even though they were utterly dependent on the Post Office. They had no rights; they had to make bids on jobs, and to make matters worse they were forced to deliver bids on their own jobs that were being made by somebody else, who, if they were underbid would take over their job. It was a horrible situation and went on for many, many years. And eventually when even though the attempts started back in the ‘70s to move the rural contract workers into a union, it really wasn’t possible until after the members, and the merger of the membership between the letter carriers and the inside workers happened in ‘89.

Active History: Definitely worth bringing up. Thank you for that. That concludes our interview but thank you so much for joining us, for answering all of our questions, sharing this history, and giving us so many interesting memories.

Evert: You’re welcome.

For more on the surveillance of CUPW activism see Evert Hoogers, “In Whose Public Interest? The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and National Security” in Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, Whose National Security? Canadian State Surveillance and the Creation of Enemies (Between the Lines, 2000).

This week, I’m joined by Jamie Jelinski, author of Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tatooing in Canada. We talk about Jamie’s interest in the history of tattoos, the connection to art history, and the beginnings of tattoos as an industry in Canada. We then discuss questions over regulation and the criminalization of tattooing before chatting about some of the unique case studies in the book.

Historical Headline of the Week

Steven Dyer, “Tattoos in the workplace, how has society’s perception of ink changed?” CTV News, September 21, 2024.

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

This is the second post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

If the Great Acceleration – the dramatic increase in human activity and the resulting impact on the Earth’s natural systems since the mid-20th century – is a valid framework, then surely Canada helped set the pace.¹ After all, Canada emerged as a major producer of fossil fuels during the Cold War and has earned the moniker of climate villain with one of the highest per-capita emissions in the world.

The start of the Great Acceleration (GA) is generally held to be about the midpoint of the twentieth century (for many, the GA is intertwined, even synonymous, with the Anthropocene). That the 1947 Leduc oil strike, marking Canada’s ascent as a major oil-producing nation, occurred at this time seems to solidify the applicability of the Great Acceleration frame.

But Canada was an energy superpower long before fossil fuels became one of the country’s major exports. And that was in the realm of hydroelectricity. Electricity has proven to be the foundational driver of modernity (and also of both the GA and the Anthropocene). To illustrate, while fossil fuels are deeply embedded in the consumption patterns of most Canadians, I can imagine my life free of hydrocarbons much more easily than I can imagine it devoid of electricity.

If indeed electricity is even more necessary for modern lifestyles than fossil fuels, might the inception of Canada’s Great Acceleration be tied to the country’s growth of hydroelectricity? If so, then the start of the GA, at least in the Canadian context, can be located in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Energy Transitions?

To make this case, I’d like to begin by invoking Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s 2025 book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.² Fressoz takes issue with the “energy transition” concept, largely attributing its origins to western twentieth century academics, scientists, and institutions – including atomic power advocates, fossil fuel companies, and the International Panel on Climate Change. Adopting a global perspective, the author contends that primary energy types in the modern period have actually been symbiotic and cumulative, but this has been obscured by the tendency to focus on relative over absolute use.

Thus, we speak of the historical replacement of wood and coal by oil and gas, for example. Except that, as Fressoz stresses, coal and wood use continued to go up after they were supposedly replaced, even if their percentage of the energy mix shrank. In fact, more total coal and wood are being burned and used today than ever before in human history.

Consequently, flawed beliefs about the timing and duration of historical energy transitions underpin present attempts to decarbonize. That is, environmental historians, political ecologists, and other academics have, according to the book, reified this supposed past pattern of energy transitions into the basis for our contemporary approach to a transition away from fossil fuels.

Yet Fressoz avers that this energy transition theory reflects the “ideology of capital in the twenty-first century”³ since it justifies our current too-slow approach to climate mitigation, fostering the belief that we can wait for unproven technological solutions rather than making far-reaching political and economic transformations now. Following this line of thinking, even if we do dramatically increase our sources of renewable energy, we are likely to just keep using even more fossil fuels on top of that.

Canada’s Great Acceleration

 So, what does this all mean for Canada’s Great Acceleration? The cumulative and symbiotic use of energy forms can certainly be read as supporting the GA. Even as Canada become a petro state and a nuclear state, it remained a hydro state; that is, the rise of Canadian oil and reactors didn’t lead to a decline in hydroelectricity nor coal.

Indeed, by several metrics the peak of Canadian coal use occurred near the end of the twentieth century (since then natural gas usage in the country has increased, often in place of coal). And Canada has continued to build larger and larger hydroelectric dams.

Global hydropower installed capacity growth since 1900. https://www.hydropower.org/blog/blog-hydropower-growth-and-development-through-the-decades

If we look at the charts and graphs marshalled in support of the Great Acceleration, some noticeable upswings began before the Second World War, especially in North America. Economist Robert Gordon has argued that, at least in the U.S. context, the post-1945 age was not the period when the majority of the “acceleration” took place, but rather the era when it reached its top-end speed.⁴

For Gordon, it was actually the first four decades of the twentieth century that were the most revolutionary period of concentrated expansion in human history, characterized by inventions that could “only happen once”. By 1940, most American homes were “networked” and had electricity, heating, running water and sewers, telephones, etc.

Given Canadian proximity and connections to the U.S., one might surmise that the American situation also applied to its northern neighbour. Apart from a handful of  larger urban areas, however, Canadians remained reliant on power derived from the organic energy regime for residential use until about the middle the twentieth century.⁵ Though electricity in homes wasn’t as common in Canada as in the U.S. before the onset of the Second World War, that energy form was nonetheless more widespread within Canada than in almost any other country around the world.

Electricity

Starting in the 1880s, some of the world’s first hydroelectric stations were opened in Canada. Since the birth of hydropower, Canada has been one of the globe’s preeminent developers of this energy type both in gross, relative, and technological terms. It was among the earliest to feature the central station model, several of the world’s largest hydroelectric stations were erected in Canada, and the first ever crossborder power line traversed the Niagara River.

Canada’s installed hydro capacity went from 1,011,000 horsepower (hp) in 1910 to 1,754,100 hp in 1920 – at which point hydroelectricity was responsible for 97% of the nation’s electricity, compared to 20% in the U.S. – and then 5,114,100 hp by 1930.⁶ As of that year, Canada and the U.S. led the globe in hydropower, together accounting for about half of global capacity (see Figure 2 – note that this graph represents the year 1930). 

Leading installers of hydropower capacity, 1898-2023.. https://visualizingenergy.org/what-countries-have-the-greatest-hydropower-capacity/

Electricity is a major driver of the Great Acceleration. Until recently, the majority of it worldwide was derived from fossil fuels (aside from Canada and a few other countries). But more critically, electricity indirectly enables so much of our consumption of resources and so many of our environmental impacts. Plus, nuclear fission, another key energetic aspect of the Great Acceleration, has been primarily used to generate electricity.

Thus, there is a strong case to be made, based on its hydroelectric history, that the Great Acceleration commenced before the Second World War in Canada (and in the United States). If so, the opening of Ontario Hydro’s Queenston-Chippewa (later renamed Beck No. 1) power station at Niagara Falls, the world’s largest when it came online in 1922, might serve as a “golden spike” of sorts.

Conclusion

Electrifying everything and developing “green” power – solar and wind especially – might be the closest thing humanity has to a technological silver bullet in the face of the climate change threat (see Mark Jacobson’s Still No Miracles Needed and Saul Griffiths’s Electrify). Granted, because of the ecological and social impacts of dams and reservoirs, I doubt we should be building new hydroelectric facilities, but that is a different topic for another day. 

Fressoz’s More and More and More doesn’t sufficiently stress the fact that what might separate historical energy transitions from today’s decarbonization efforts is that we have a strong moral and scientific imperative to make the switch (of course, the vested interests opposed to decarbonization are likely stronger than the adversaries of previous transitions). The book has other weaknesses too, including Fressoz’s presentation of a straw man argument about energy historiography and his overstating of the novelty of its arguments.

Nevertheless, Fressoz’s arguments about the patterns of past energy transitions are valuable. And running like a thread – or maybe a transmission line would be more apt – through the changes of this century and the previous one is electricity. As such, Canada’s hydroelectric history suggests that we may want to reconceptualize the starting point of this specific country’s Great Acceleration.

Daniel Macfarlane is a Professor in the School of Environment, Geography, and Sustainability at Western Michigan University. He is an editor for The Otter-La loutre and is part of the NiCHE executive. A transnational environmental historian who focuses on Canadian-American border waters and energy issues, particularly in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, Daniel is the author or co-editor of six books on topics such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, border waters, IJC, and Niagara Falls. His book “Natural Allies: Environment, Energy, and the History of US-Canada Relations” was published in summer 2023. His newest book is “The Lives of Lake Ontario: An Environmental History” (September 2024). He is now working on a book about Lake Michigan, co-editing a book on the St. Clair River/Delta/Lake, and is planning to eventually write a book on the environmental history of the Great Lakes. Website: https://danielmacfarlane.wordpress.com

1. John R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History Since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
2. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2025).
3. Fressoz, 220.
4.  Robert Gordon, Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 122-128.
5. Richard W. Unger and Thistle, Energy Consumption in Canada in the 19th and 20th Centuries: A Statistical Outline (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Instituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, 2013).
6.  Historical Statistics of Canada, 1st ed, Series P1-6, 2nd ed. Series Q81-4; table also found in Armstrong and Nelles, Wilderness and Waterpower, 4.

This is the first post in a series exploring the potential of the Great Acceleration as a framework and reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history. The posts in this series are cross-posted with NiCHE.

In 2016, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke made the bold prediction that “the Great Acceleration will not last long. It need not and cannot.”¹ A decade later, there are signs that this companion (some same synonymous) phenomenon of the Anthropocene endures. As one example, the energy required to generate the electricity needed to power accelerated servers that carry out the computational work of artificial intelligence (AI) is the next surge of the Great Acceleration.² And as with so much else during the Great Acceleration, Canada seems poised to play an important role in the rapid rise in the use of AI.³

According to Steffen, et al., the term, the Great Acceleration, “aims to capture the holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System.”⁴ By many measures, as a social, cultural, and political idea, as much a socioecological and socioeconomic reality, Canada is a child of the Anthropocene. As the planet shifted from the Holocene into a new epoch, Canada served as an incubator for its defining concepts, a laboratory for the experiments that gave it form, and ground zero for witnessing its consequences.⁵

The concept of the Great Acceleration, therefore, offers a potentially valuable framework for a reconnaissance of Canadian environmental history, and a better understanding of the field within a broader global and planetary context. Several environmental historians have written synthesis overviews to provide coherence to the field.⁶ These early efforts to explain what is distinctive about Canadian environmental history will continue as scholars pursue new questions, sources, and innovative methods. What has been missing from these efforts, however, is a unifying theory or concept that researchers can apply, or work within, to investigate what helps the field hang together across time and space.

To what extent has Canadian environmental history been shaped by the changes of the Great Acceleration? How might (re)thinking about the Great Acceleration in the Canadian context help us better understand the country’s environmental history and its contributions to environmental history more broadly?

The Great Acceleration Trends, adapated from Steffen, et al. (2015). http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html

Steffen, et al. offer 24 indicators of the Great Acceleration, 12 global socioeconomic trends and 12 planetary Earth system trends (Figure 1). With perhaps the exception of shrimp aquaculture, all these indicators offer potentially fruitful avenues for Canadian environmental history since 1950, and a handful have already been explored in the scholarship.⁷ Yet, just as the rise of AI suggests new dimensions for measuring the continuation of the Great Acceleration, there are many, almost countless, ways to evaluate the phenomenon depending on time and place.

So, what other indicators might help Canadian historians better understand Canada’s role in, and experiences of, the Great Acceleration? How might attending to those indicators specific to northern North America help environmental historians develop new questions and uncover new insights about Canada’s past?

Historians of Canada’s Great Acceleration will necessarily find themselves branching out into interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary efforts. Identifying indicators of Canada’s Great Acceleration may not end up being as challenging as then figuring out how to find sources and develop methods to understand what they can tell us about the past. In many cases (e.g. Methane or Ocean Acidification), historians will need to collaborate with researchers in the hard sciences who have the expertise to collect samples and analyze soil and water chemistry, and who might be eager for interesting new questions to pursue. In other cases, understanding how the Great Acceleration has shaped Canadian history, or how Canadians have played important roles in giving form to certain aspects of the Great Acceleration, will require that environmental historians branch out into, and become deeply familiar with, several related subfields, including economic history, agricultural history, and the history of science and technology.

Delving into a clearer understanding of the Great Acceleration will also reveal that the full story simply cannot be sufficiently understood and explained by starting in 1950. The history of the phenomenon that emerges distinctly after the Second World War began much earlier. The ideas and practices that informed the Great Acceleration’s social relations, patterns of economic activity, and environmental transformations have histories that must be studied in the context of the Great Acceleration’s long tail. The part of the graphs that seem flat and unexciting contain very important histories. For these longer time frames of Canada’s Great Acceleration, historians will need to identify indicators that help reveal trends that predated the Great Acceleration and inform its broader temporal context.

So how might environmental historians periodize the country’s part in the Great Acceleration?

Putting the Great Acceleration into the context of its antecedent ideas and practices offers new insights into the value of the concept for understanding environmental history more broadly. For example, extending the scope for Canada’s Great Acceleration back to the period between 1914 and 1945 can reveal how many of the most important socioeconomic and Earth system trends emerged as a result of both the immense and coordinated efforts by the state and private corporations to mobilize human and natural resources towards war efforts, as well as a growing demand for a higher standard of living from a broad segment of the population. If the origins of Canada’s Great Acceleration are extended back to Confederation in 1867, it becomes apparent that its foundations rest on the pursuit of resources, territorial expansion, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples that formed the origins of Canada as a project of liberal order.⁸ Pulling the frame even further back to the Conquest of New France and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 demonstrates that settler colonialism and monopoly corporate control over trade set down patterns that informed the creation of social, political, and economic life in northern North America for the next 250 years. And as scholars studying BIPOC have been pointing out for some time, the Great Acceleration and its companion, the Anthropocene, have only just begun to make white and settler scholars aware of monumental changes to the world that people of colour have felt acutely in North America since the start of the sixteenth century.⁹

The challenge and opportunity presented by the concept of the Great Acceleration is not only temporal, but geographic and place based as well. Undoubtedly, the sites for, and sources of, evidence for Canada’s Great Acceleration have emerged most clearly in urban and industrialized places, particularly cities and locations of large-scale resource extraction and processing. But as the indicators of the Great Acceleration suggest, the scale of changes that have unfolded since the mid-twentieth century make it clear that nearly every part of northern North America is either implicated or impacted. Thinking about where Canada’s Great Acceleration unfolded, and attending to how place shaped its particular indicators, reveals both the significant contributions that Canadian environmental history has to offer this framework, as well as the important gaps within the historiography that require further study. Canada’s enormous geography gives it an odd spatial scope of analysis; the framework of the Great Acceleration can help provide some coherence. Indeed, as a twined global and planetary concept, the Great Acceleration necessarily pulls Canadian environmental history outside its peculiar national borders to demonstrate how what unfolded in Canada was always part of broader trends happening in places at continental, hemispheric, oceanic, atmospheric, and whole world scales. Canada’s Great Acceleration obliges environmental historians to extend what makes Canada distinct to what it shared and contributed historically.

For more roughly thirty years, environmental historians have been helping to shape new ways of understanding Canadian history, and Canadian historians have been at the forefront of helping to advance the field of environmental history. What makes Canadian environmental history hang together beyond the existence of a nation-state? Perhaps a concept that could reasonably be applied to many other countries in the world is not what will help Canadian environmental historians determine the answer. But as the Great Acceleration inevitably draws to a close in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, perhaps it is worthwhile to consider whether its interdisciplinary methods, long analytical tail, and vast geographic scope offers something of value to Canadian environmental historians.

Andrew Watson is the Director of NiCHE and Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. His current research includes commodities and urban metabolism in Toronto between the mid 19th and mid 20th centuries; and a study of the relationship between liberalism and fossil fuel energy in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. His first book, Making Muskoka: Tourism, Rural Identity, and Sustainability, 1870-1920, was published in 2022 with UBC Press.

1. J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2016): 209.
2.  “Energy demand from AI,” Internation Energy Association (2025). Last accessed April 30, 2026.
3. Canada has a federal Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and new data centres are being planned in many places across the country, including Alberta and Saskatchewan.
4. Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review vol.2 (1): 82.
5. Alan MacEachern, “Canada’s Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” The Otter. January 24, 2018; Sean Kheraj, “Culpability and Canada’s Anthropocene: A Response.” The Otter. January 29, 2018; F.M. McCarthy, et al., ”The Varved Succession of Crawford Lake, Milton, Ontario, Canada as a Candidate Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point for the Anthropocene Series.” The Anthropocene Review, 10,1 (2023): 146-176.
6.  Neil S. Forkey, Canadians and the Natural Environment to the Twenty-First Century. University of Toronto, 2012; Laurel Sefton Macdowell, An Environmental History of Canada. UBC Press, 2012; James Murton, Canadians and their Natural Environment. Oxford University Press, 2021.
7. For Primary Energy Use see Richard W. Unger and John Thistle, Energy Consumption in Canada in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries. Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Instituto di Studi sulle Società del Mediterraneo, 2013; R.W. Sandwell, ed. Powering Up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy From 1600. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. For Large Dams see Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River. Cambridge University Press, 2004; Tina Loo and Meg Stanley, “An Environmental History of Progress: Damming the Peace and Columbia Rivers,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no.3 (September 2011): 399-427; Caroline Desbiens, Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec. UBC Press, 2013; Brittany Luby, Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishnaabe Territory. University of Manitoba Press, 2020; Daniel Macfarlane, Fixing Niagara Falls: Environment, Energy, and Engineers at the World’s Most Famous Waterfall. UBC Press, 2020. For Paper Production see Mark Kuhlberg, In the Power of the Government: The Rise and Fall of Newsprint in Ontario, 1894-1932. University of Toronto Press, 2015. For Marine Fish Capture see Dean Bavington, Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse. UBC Press, 2010; David Banoub, Fishing Measures: A Critique of Desk-Bound Reason. Memorial University Press, 2021. For Domesticated Land see Jame Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia. UBC Press, 2007; Shannon Stunden Bower, Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba. UBC Press, 2011; Peter A. Russell, How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012; Joshua MacFadyen, Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil That Covered a Continent. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018; Shannon Stunden Bower, Transforming the Prairies: Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada UBC Press, 2024.
8. Ian Mckay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” The Canadian Historical Review, vol.81, no.4 (2000): 617-645.
9. Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol.16, no.4 (2017): 761–780; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Somewhere, I’ve forgotten where, I remember César Aira writing that “monsters manage to escape from the net that brings humans to the surface.” It’s a compelling image, but I don’t think he’s right. I’m not so sure there is a clear distinction between humans and monsters—or that the net is so selective, or that monsters are particularly good at escaping the net’s clutches.

After years of teaching history, I can assert that monsters are good to think with. They are instantly recognizable and one of the great universals across time and place: because monsters are everywhere, their study invites comparative investigation of myth, stories, and beliefs all over the world. Monsters constitute a familiar entry point into tackling a broad array of social and cultural questions, because they hold up a mirror and reflect the fears and anxieties of a people as a means of warning. This prompted me to develop a course on the history of monsters at McMaster University in 2019; I have been teaching variations of that original course since. HIST 2GR3 (the course code may be some of my finest work…) meandered through foundational mythologies from every continent, the medieval and early modern worlds, before turning its attention to modern popular culture and the horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I never pretended toward any kind of comprehensive survey, but rather invited students to follow their own enthusiasm within (or beyond) the content I laid out. I subscribe to the notion that teaching and learning the tenets of historical methodologies is infinitely easier if students are already captivated by historical content that is meaningful to them. My presentation of the course had a clear narrative arc, but the real thrust of the course was around student discovery and helping them to navigate their own wonder and curiosity.

The Latin roots for monster—monstrum and monstrare—mean divine omen and to point out or show. These roots suggest that monsters have always been meant to show us something about the world. Contemporary scholarship takes that charge seriously, asking what lessons these creatures have to offer. Through these warnings, monsters and their stories foster conformity and discourage deviance. And they continue to possess considerable currency in the modern world. But history is full of human monsters too, and it is equally important to recognize the shared space between human and mythical monsters within a singular narrative.

PAZI SNAJPER: watch out: sniper. One of many such markings in Sarajevo. Photo credit: Paalso, July 1996

The tagline for my course was that every society gets the monsters it deserves. It’s a cute way of suggesting that monsters are a product of their time and place. It’s no accident that Bram Stoker’s Dracula captivated a late Victorian period worried about immigration and a loosening of sexual mores. It might be equally easy to recognize how and why Godzilla emerged from post-World War II nuclear fears in Japan. In a more contemporary world, zombies do a lot of heavy lifting. Not unlike Dracula, they offer another xenophobic image of barbarians at the gates, but they also speak to the mindlessness of capitalist labour and the fatuous, all-consuming twitterings of social media and entertainment echo chambers. Recent reports suggest that North Americans check their phone over 100 times a day, which maybe speaks to an undead-like erosion of presence, patience, and attention (but that’s another essay).

Of course, monsters and their place in human societies have changed over time.  In broad brushstrokes, the course identified distinct periods, and I split my survey of the history of monsters across three imperfect and overlapping chapters: 

The Monster as the Unknown. The earliest chapter leaned into monsters in a world shaped by magic, myth, mysticism, and the supernatural, where not everything can be explained and morality tales provide stark warnings about what’s “out there.” This is the bump in the night or the fear of the deep dark woods; those stories were designed to keep communities close to the hearth.

The Monster as Other. Somewhere between the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment—I’m deliberately a little loose with my timeline: this is a slow and uneven transition—the bent toward explaining and justifying the cosmos was revolutionary in demystifying the world. The rationalization of the world provoked a doubling down on the othering of monsters from creatures that were unknown to known, demonized miscreants or, simply, non-conforming others. This demonization of difference took on unsavoury forms of racial ideologies and established “rational” racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to underpin contemporary thought.

The Monster as Self. We are all monsters. Alternatively, we are all legacies of the history that made us, and the history of the modern world is replete with catastrophe: war, genocide, violence, exploitation. On the one hand, this third chapter turns the exploration of monsters inward to strike at the imaginative fears that have always concocted and created monsters. On the other, it is a meditation on the “banality of evil.” This is a function of the unspoken, compassionless social complicity that ignores the suffering of others—a lack of imagination—but also the tendency towards conformity and unquestioning order. We are our own monsters, and that’s something with which the contemporary world ought to reckon.

Implying that we are products of the horrors that preceded us—and we are all monstrous—is a difficult (but important) pill to swallow. Where monsters in popular culture spark the imagination and invite some entertainment, play, and wonder, the alchemy of connecting these kinds of safe monsters to the real-world horrors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in this final chapter can be discombobulating. In the classroom, I found I needed to find a way to walk back some of the darker implications with which the course was wrapping up in order to help students make more thorough connections across the various themes we’d covered. The monster as self was unsettling, and I discovered that many students were depressed by the historical and psychological legacies that came with kinds of compassionless social complicity that recent history suggests might lie at the heart of the human condition.

I landed on a conclusion that submitted the imperative of loving monsters, or understanding them, which maybe amounts to the same kind of thing. This was less advocating forgiveness for past transgressions and more about appreciating, reveling in, difference. I quoted Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red quoting Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “I will never know how you see red, and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.” The belief in an undivided being between us as first movement is, I have come to think, one of the central tenets of understanding the importance of radical dignity through the study of history and a critical step in making connection in an evermore disconnected world. Making space for the idea that we aren’t in constant confrontation with each other (and our perceived monsters)—and that we might insert ourselves into a more complex ecosystem—means that the idea of monsters does not disappear, but it loses its harsh oppositionality. It becomes an acceptance of otherness and an appreciation for variety through practicing a kind of kinetic energy that treats all living things with dignity.

That is how we might all accept our monsterhood and come to love our monsters. Yes, there are monsters; yes, we are all monsters in one way or another; yes, these are dark times. But the mission remains the same: there is hope for a better world and it begins with according love and dignity to ourselves and to each other. And the best way to do that is in cultivating the imagination so that it doesn’t fail us and we are better able to recognize our complicity in the suffering of others or our failure to embrace variety. It’s a punchy ending. It flirts with edginess. It makes a case for the importance of a liberal arts education. But it is also just another iteration of the imposition of conformity omnipresent in morality tales. It’s a jeremiad warning of darkness and danger but offering redemption in the final analysis.

Maybe there’s a little more to it than that. Histories of monstrosity challenge students to reflect on the power of stories and the limits of their empathy. Where every society gets the monsters it deserves, not all monsters deserve the societies that make them. And make no mistake: monsters are very frequently invented. Natalie Haynes’s novel, Stone Blind, reminds us that Medusa is unfairly portrayed as a monster; her story is far more complicated. She was a beautiful priestess to Athena until she was violated by Poseidon. Because Athena couldn’t punish Poseidon, she transformed Medusa into a monster capable of turning all those who looked upon her (men) to stone. Lost in this account, of course, is the reversal of the ubiquitous male gaze which, when turned back on men, petrifies them. In a similar vein, Maria Dahvana Headley has gone to some length in humanizing Grendel’s mother in her streetwise translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf as well as in her contemporary adaptation, The Mere Wife, a novel set in a post-Iraq, suburban United States. In both treatments—Haynes’s and Headley’s—the traditional concept of hero is due a reckoning. Perseus and Beowulf are one-dimensional creatures, intent on restoring a violent and patriarchal order. Both authors ask us (in much the same way that Mary Shelley did in Frankenstein): who is the real monster here? Compare, too, the Caliban from Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the Caliban in Aimé Césaire’s anti-colonial adaptation, and maybe it’s possible to challenge preconceived notions about what, who, and why is a monster. There is a further lesson here: monsters make convenient scapegoats (and excuses) for human cruelty in the name of policing and performing a moral conformity.

But, and this is really what I wanted to say, there are monsters: real monsters so unfathomable that they cannot be reconciled with the hopeful ending advocating greater kindness and empathy. And they live among us, drawn up to the surface by the same net. A growing body of evidence suggests that during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, well-to-do bankers, lawyers, and doctors from Europe and North America (Canadians among them) engaged in weekend “sniper safaris.”^[i] Hunting and weapons enthusiasts paid exorbitant prices for the experience of shooting Sarajevans in the streets. From Trieste, these hunters were flown to Belgrade, where the Bosnian Serb militia provided them passage to and positioning in the 1984 Olympics concrete bobsled track on Mount Trebevi?. Emblem of the Winter Olympics turned fortified sniper’s nest gave rise to a new kind of “weekend warrior” driven by some pornographic Nietzscheian fantasy. What kind of monster is it that can travel into a distant war zone, pay for the privilege to hunt human game, and deny that it is looking at another self through the crosshairs of its rifle? In addition to travel and logistics, fees were assigned for targets. Elderly citizens were free. Children cost extra. Between 6 April 1992 and 29 February 1996, 11,541 Sarajevans were killed by shelling and sniper fire. More than 1,500 were children.

I will abdicate meaning and conclusion to readers as well as the problem of how to square this kind of monster with other historical and mythical horrors. This is not some variation on Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil or some grotesque lack of imagination. Something else is at play here for which psychopathy is insufficient as explanation. I have locked Sarajevo and its international band of hobby shooters deep inside for a long time, but it rattles around in my mind at the most inopportune times. Maybe for obvious reasons, I have not shared it with my family even as its intrusive images haunt me at the dinner table. It is also a story that I was unable to wrap into the last iteration of my history of monsters course, because it seemed to suggest an ineffable category of monstrosity for which I lacked language, category, and imagination (who is the monster now?).

A part of me is sorry to share this story with you, reader—to infect you with such monstrosities—but my own stunned silence is counterbalanced by the kind of compulsion or obligation that drove Coleridge’s ancient mariner” to tell his tale. Maybe this is a selfish act of gaining temporary relief from the “woful agony” of wrestling with  knowledge of the Sarajevo story. But maybe it is in shining a light on the darknesses in the human psyche that a more fulsome reading of the past can be realized. Modern history is a violent and untidy enterprise. If monsters serve as a lens or mirror through which to read a particular historical moment, and we are all the legacy of those past moments: What is the nature of the undivided being that connects us with such monsters? And what can history offer as pathways toward redemption?

^[i] Inspired by the Slovenian director Miran Zupanic’s 2022 documentary, “Sarajevo Safari,” and research conducted by the Italian writer Ezio Gavazzeni, just published in I Cecchini del Weekend: L’Inchiesta Sui Safari Umani a Sarajevo (Rome: PaperFIRST, 2026), a formal inquiry was initiated in Milan in late 2025 to investigate these sniper safaris and to bring to light who was involved. The first suspect was called to testify in February 2026. Should more perpetrators be identified, this could become one of the great trials of the century, and a critical confrontation with a monstrous evil that should rattle the cage of what it means to be human.

Michael Egan is an historian and academic director of the INSPIRE Office of Flexible Learning at McMaster University. In addition to writing a history of monsters, he is at work on a book about the abduction and murder of the Moroccan anticolonial activist Mehdi Ben Barka in 1965. Toxic Fear: Pollution Anxieties in the American 1980s is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press later in 2026.

In this episode, I talk with Jean-Michel Turcotte, Acting Chief Historian of the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defence and the convenor of the 2025 Shannon Lecture Series. We talk about Jean-Michel’s background, how that influenced the series theme of ‘Revisiting Canadian Armed Forces Experiences’ and some of on-going projects at the Directorate. We also discuss the changing nature of military history, incorporating more voices into the stories of Canada’s armed forces, and how those changes relate to broader historiographical trends.

The final session of the Shannon Lecture Series, entitled The Transnational Making of United Nations Peacekeeping by Brian Drohan, will take place on May 6 at 4p ET on Zoom. You can find more information here.

Historical Headline of the Week

Defence Stories, “Web portal to military historical documents open to the public.” June 11, 2024.

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

Understanding the far-right is key to making sense of our political moment.

We are witnessing a resurgence of explicitly fascistic organizations, like the “active clubs” springing up in several Canadian cities, as well as strains of right-wing populism that clearly recall the tactics and rhetoric of historical fascism. Debates over the fascism label/analogy have tended to gravitate towards discussions of Donald Trump and Trumpism.

Similar conversations have been taking place in many contexts, however. In India, the affinities between the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and European fascism have been subject of serious discussion on the left for decades. Attending to Indian anti-fascist criticism and considering the common features and differences between contemporary far-right movements around the world can enrich our understanding of the global right and its relationship to historical fascism.

In one sense, the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and fascism is not a question of analogy at all.

The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s paramilitary parent organization, subscribe to a project explicitly inspired by European fascism. Hindutva, their guiding creed, is premised on the idea that India is a Hindu nation in which non-Hindu minorities live on sufferance. V.D. Savarkar, who defined modern Hindutva in the early twentieth century, greatly admired European fascism and fantasized that India’s Muslims “would have to play the part of the German Jews.” Hindutva’s ethnonationalist ambitions threaten many communities in India, but its proponents have always reserved a particular animus for India’s Muslims. Today’s Hindutva ideologues may be less likely to invoke Hitler and Mussolini as inspirations, but they embrace Savarkar as a national hero.

The contemporary Indian debate over fascism began in earnest in the early 1990s. The watershed moment in the political ascendancy of the BJP was the illegal 1992 demolition of a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya by party activists. Ensuing anti-Muslim riots killed hundreds, especially in Mumbai. In the wake of the violence, leftist activists and scholars drew pointed comparisons between the RSS-BJP and European fascism (Sumit Sarkar’s 1993 essay, “The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar” is a major intervention).

The violence and polarization only fuelled the BJP’s success; the party won its first national election six years later in 1998. This pattern of profiting from anti-Muslim violence has shaped Modi’s own career: he was propelled to national prominence by his notorious complicity in the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat, while he was Chief Minister of the state. Today, Modi presents himself abroad as a business-friendly reformer, but his twelve years in power have also been marked by the mass disenfranchisement of Muslims, intensifying repression in Kashmir, and a rise in mob violence and lynchings directed especially against Muslims and Dalits. 

Historian Jairus Banaji has drawn particular attention to the work of Arthur Rosenberg, a communist member of the Reichstag. Rosenberg’s 1934 essay, “Fascism as a Mass Movement,” distinguishes fascism from other reactionary political movements, above all by its mass character and strategic use of paramilitary violence. As Banaji argues, these features of fascism are disturbingly present in contemporary India. The RSS has been periodically banned since its founding in 1925, including in 1948 after one of its members assassinated Gandhi. Today, the paramilitary organization counts millions of members in its ranks and has managed to deeply embed itself in Indian civil society, operating through thousands of front organizations and affiliated groups including student associations, trade unions, charities, and more. Known for their marches and parades, RSS cadre have a well-earned reputation for instigating violence and harassing political opponents.

The RSS boasts an organizational infrastructure and capacity for mass mobilization that is unique among the global right—fascistic non-state actors elsewhere generally still belong to looser, inchoate networks, and are more likely to carry out lone-wolf attacks than coordinated assaults.

If the Indian context is in this sense, exceptional, there are other significant parallels between fascistic movements in India and the rest of the world. For example, they are united in their deluded fantasies of victimization; where white nationalists in the West promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, Hindutva activists imagine themselves on the defensive in a “demographic war” purportedly waged by Indian Muslims. While this conspiratorial paranoia is consistent with past fascisms, the far-right in India and elsewhere has generally dispensed with the utopianism of historical fascism. Supporters of far-right movements worldwide appear quite willing to accept business-as-usual austerity and rapacious capitalism to see their enemies humiliated. Modi’s rule, as Richard Seymour puts it, might be aptly described as “capitalism with pogromist characteristics.”

While the impulse to “provincialize Europe” typically takes the form of a positive reclamation of non-European traditions, Indian anti-fascist critics have long observed how claims to post/decolonial difference have been exploited by the Hindutva right. Understanding the global far-right demands serious attention to reactionary movements beyond the West. Far-right actors themselves recognize the connections between their movements; Trump advisor Steve Bannon has admiringly referred to Modi as “Trump before Trump.” Contemporary fascism consists of a diverse array of forces; to the extent that a “Fascist International” can be said to exist, it encompasses movements including MAGA, Zionism, and Hindutva, which are united in their shared violent ethnonationalism and Islamophobia. Any adequate left response to this challenge requires the development of global solidarities and a principled universalistic politics that stands firm against the rising tide of nationalism everywhere. History might suggest, however, that this is easier said than done.

In India, as in the United States, the electoral success of the extreme right has not seen the complete destruction of democratic institutions and dictatorial seizure of state power associated with classical fascism. Since 2014, the BJP has faced major challenges to its authority on the streets and, recently, at the polls: in 2024 the BJP lost its majority in the Lok Sabha and now leads a minority government. For some, this fact alone might seem to invalidate the fascism diagnosis. However, as Dilip Simeon argues, recent Indian history might helpfully serve to “dispel apocalyptic theorisations of fascism.” Rather than a “singular event,” in which political possibility is suddenly and definitively eclipsed, this is fascism as a “slow bleeding process”: a protracted corrosion of democratic institutions, increasing exposure to state and mob violence, and a chilling of public dissent.

We must remain alert, in short, to the dangers of fascism in the making. As Arundhati Roy puts it: “The division in opinions on the use of the term comes down to whether you believe that fascism became fascism only after a continent was destroyed and millions of people were exterminated in gas chambers, or whether you believe that fascism is an ideology that led to those high crimes – that can lead to those crimes – and that those who subscribe to it are fascists.”

Christopher Balcom defended his PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University in 2025.

This post is part of an activehistory.ca series “The Time of Monsters.” It looks at the challenges contemporary times pose to history and how historians can and have responded to it. Our aim is to highlight how history and historians can address matters such as denialism, the manipulation of public history, the appeal of authoritarianism and a host of other topics. The editors encourage submissions or personal reflections. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Roberta Lexier at rlexier@mtroyal.ca.

You can find the first post in the series here.

Danielle Terbenche completed her PhD at the University of Waterloo. During her time there, Danielle co-founded the Tri-University Graduate Students’ Association, published two peer-reviewed papers, and won the tri-university history programme’s award for “Best Paper or Article submitted to a Scholarly Conference or Journal.” Her dissertation, “Public Servants or Professional Alienists?: Medical Superintendents and the Early Professionalization of Asylum Management and Insanity Treatment in Upper Canada, 1840-1865,” was supervised by Wendy Mitchinson, along with guidance from committee members Heather MacDougall and Doug McCalla.

Danielle went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at York University (2012-2014) that focused on pre-Confederation Upper Canada/Canada West and the history of 19th century mental health care in Canada.

In 2018, Danielle pivoted and undertook a psychotherapy degree at OISE. In particular, she was interested in helping people through those times when life doesn’t quite work out as planned and believed that while you grieved the road not travelled, you also redirected yourself in meaningful ways that helped you adjust and grow.

Danielle was an active member of her church and was able to bring her love for and expertise of history to that community. In 2015, she shared her experiences with the cemetery board at the church. In honour of her contributions and passion for history, Active History is reposting her blog, “More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill.”

More than “Prisoners”

Five grave markers

In 2012, I began attending Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Thornhill, Ontario. After learning I was a historian, some church members invited me to join the cemetery board. During my first visit to the church’s historic cemetery, I was intrigued by five concrete crosses marking the graves of eight men, dating from 1928 to 1931. In a poor state of repair, and inscribed only with the names and death dates of the men, they looked nothing like the more elaborate marker that surrounded them, both historic and modern. At the time, I had no idea that over the next year, these crosses would lead me to an investigative journey of the history of early twentieth-century welfare institutions, social policy, homelessness, and unemployment. It was a project that demonstrated the hidden stories and social histories that may be represented through small, seemingly inconsequential artefacts. This article documents my search for answers about these mysterious gravestones.

Built c. 1829-30 on Yonge Street, Trinity Church (as it was formerly known) is the oldest church building still in use in the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. In 1950, the church was moved to Brooke Street, southwest of the original location; however, the cemetery remains at the original site on Yonge. Still in active use, Holy Trinity Cemetery contains several graves of historical significance to the Thornhill and Richmond Hill areas, including the grave of Colonel Robert Moodie, killed on Yonge Street near Montgomery’s Tavern during the 1837 Rebellion.

Holy Trinity Church

This history made me wonder if the five “mystery” crosses occupying a small rectangular plot of land towards the rear of the cemetery were historically significant. Age, weathering, and inappropriate repairs over eighty years had left them in a deteriorated condition; the names and death dates on some were barely visible. I wondered: Why were these graves so different? Who were these men buried in these plots? What was significant about the period 1928-31? Who installed the markers? Why were they not as structurally sound as other markers in the cemetery?

I asked about the graves at a cemetery board meeting and was told the men were “prisoners” from the Langstaff Industrial Farm. The farm, which opened in 1913 as an adjunct facility to ease overcrowding at Toronto’s Don Jail, operated as a minimum-security men’s prison for inebriates and petty criminals until it closed in 1958. It occupied a 386-acre property in the present area of Yonge and Highway 7, approximately 5 minutes drive north of Holy Trinity Cemetery. Inmates of Langstaff spent their days “productively” engaging in farm labour; most food for the institution was grown on-site. From 1915 to 1935 a women’s industrial farm operated at Concord under the same management, and men from Langstaff were transported daily to work its fields. I have spoken with a few senior, lifelong residents of Thornhill who recall seeing groups of uniformed men working in the Langstaff farm fields in the 1940s and 1950s. After the farm closed in 1958, a variety of ideas for using this land were proposed; in the 1960s it was a suggested as a site for the Toronto Zoo, but was rejected in favour of the Rouge Valley area of east Scarborough. The area is presently occupied by Highways 7, 407, rail lines, and shopping malls.

Langstaff Farm. City of Toronto Archives

With my academic interests focussed on Ontario social welfare institutions, I was interested in learning more about these burials, any background information about the men, and how so-called “prisoners” came to be buried in the cemetery. I was a bit skeptical that they were “prisoners,” at least in a criminal sense, since overcrowding was a problem that plagued most municipal and provincial institutions throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inmates/patients with a variety of problems often coexisted in facilities designed to manage specific problems.

In 2013, the deteriorated condition of the crosses brought about an opportunity to research the history of these graves. Under the terms of the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act, 2002 (FBCSA) Ontario cemeteries are required to ensure plot markers do not compromise public safety. It became necessary for Holy Trinity to take down the Langstaff crosses markers before they fell, potentially causing injury. The members of the cemetery board wished to replace the crosses for aesthetic, historical, and practical reasons. It did not seem proper to leave them laid flat, for some had double-sided inscriptions (such that the men’s names would be hidden); doing so also seemed to contradict the intended appearance of the monuments. Historical preservation was important since late-twentieth century redevelopment of the Langstaff property had erased all traces of the farm. These crosses were the only remaining physical indicator of the industrial farm’s history. Although it is my understanding that additional plots were purchased for the farm in other local cemeteries, no grave markers exist to indicate their presence. I suspect Holy Trinity Church installed the markers in its cemetery sometime in the 1930s.

The initial problem faced by the cemetery board was determining ownership of the plots, since the FBCSA requires permission of the plot owner in order to remove or replace any marker. Who owned these plots? The Langstaff farm was an institution under the jurisdiction of the Province of Ontario, but had been founded and funded largely by the City of Toronto. Even so, it was not clear that either the province or the city was the legal owner. Given that the farm closed more than sixty years ago, we anticipated that it might be challenging to establish ownership. Municipal borders have also changed considerably since the 1950s, with the cemetery now situated in the City of Vaughan. Intrigued, I volunteered to try to solve this historical and legal conundrum.

I began by trying to learn more about the men and their relationship to the institution. My first discovery was a November 1930 article in the Globe & Mail about Charles Flowers, one of the names appearing on the crosses. It indicated Flowers was a middle-aged man hit by a streetcar on Yonge Street near the farm; he died en route to hospital in Toronto and his body was sent to the morgue for a coroner’s inquest. The article stated “there was nothing on the man which would lead to his identification” except “a spectacle case found in his pocket, bearing the name ‘Charles Flower’ [sic]”. Since no local person seems to have identified Flowers, it suggested that he was not a Langstaff inmate. Confirmation of this fact would come later in my search.

Clues about the status of the other men emerged in documents related to the industrial farm. A 1926 Royal Commission report following an inquiry into Langstaff’s superintendent and mismanagement at the institution identified one problem to be the number of elderly inmates who “were not really prisoners but [were] sent to the gaol farm to give them refuge.” According to the report the men were “committed for vagrancy but in many instances this [was] only a matter of form to get them to the farm.” In other words, these men were homeless without any other means of support. An April 1931 Globe article about the relocation of Langstaff’s “indigent old men” to “proper institutions” confirmed the persistence of this issue into the next decade.

Using the information available about the graves from the Holy Trinity burial records (Anglican Diocese of Toronto Archives), I submitted a request to access the inmate files at the Archives of Ontario (currently protected under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act). References to admission circumstances, their ages, work history, and state of health led me to conclude that the men on the crosses were from this sector of inmates who had committed no crime other than being infirm and living on the street. They were jailed as a course of last resort when no public housing or sources of welfare support were available. Several of them seem to have been close to death at the time entered the farm.

The inmate records contained no references to a “Charles Flowers”. While this absence confirmed Flowers was not a Langstaff inmate, it more importantly indicated that the plots containing these burials and cross markers may have been purchased specifically for Langstaff’s displaced, indigent population. I believe City of Toronto officials decided to bury Flowers in this group of plots near the site of his death since they that had been purchased by the superintendent of the Langstaff Industrial Farm on behalf of the city.

The legal issue concerning replacement of the markers was greatly simplified by the indigent status of the men. Consultations with City of Toronto legal and real estate service divisions, and other city cemeteries revealed that in the case of indigent graves, all issues pertaining to plot and marker maintenance are the responsibility of the cemetery management. To this end, Holy Trinity had full freedom to decide the appearance of replacement markers. For advice concerning the appearance of the new markers, I contacted Marjorie Stuart, formerly Cemetery Co-ordinator for Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society, and now Cemetery News editor for the Ontario Historical Society. Following her recommendations, the Holy Trinity cemetery board opted to create replicas of the original crosses with the same inscriptions. The only changes to be made on the new crosses – to be installed in the spring of 2015 – are corrections of some death dates, since the archival records revealed errors on the original crosses. A photo record has been taken to preserve the history of the former crosses, which were removed in September 2014.

Replacing the crosses

Yet, the indigent status of the men was important in ways that extended beyond the practicalities of marker replacement. No longer were the crosses only memorials of industrial approaches to prison management and the Langstaff farm as a penal institution. The grave markers were now historically significant as representations of the problems of unemployment and inadequate welfare provisions in Toronto during the early twentieth century. After World War I, unemployment had risen sharply with the collapse of wartime industries and the return of thousands of servicemen. It was a problem that would continue to worsen throughout the next two decades: an initial economic depression in 1920-21 brought numerous job losses, which multiplied after the crash of 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression.

By the 1920s, public employment bureaus could secure employment for only half of registrants, in Toronto leaving 3,000-15,000 men without work. In an era before unemployment insurance or other modern forms of support, social workers observed that many families were slowly starving. As the epidemic of unemployment spread, homelessness abounded. Toronto’s House of Industry – the city’s only “poor house” welfare institution – did not have the resources or space to accommodate all of the city’s homeless residents. Many indigent persons refused to enter the facility due to its reputation for harsh conditions and regimens of demanding, physical labour. By 1925, with no other options available, 16,500 people were housed in city jail cells, many of them unemployed ex-servicemen. Typically, these individuals were charged with vagrancy and given sentences of 3–6 months as a temporary housing measure. Such cases demonstrate how legal loopholes, however flawed, provided short-term solutions to prevailing welfare problems.

The elderly were particularly vulnerable once age or poor health rendered them unemployable. Family support systems had declined with the urbanization of the early twentieth century. Geographical distance of kin, the decline of farm inheritance, and poverty all contributed to old age becoming a much more precarious stage of life. Canada’s first old age pension scheme was not introduced until 1927 by the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King. The abundance of elderly men residing at the Langstaff Industrial Farm by the mid-1920s illustrates how common it was for elderly people to find themselves alone without a home or any source of support. Although not explicitly stated, the government commissioners investigating the farm’s management in the 1920s and 1930s were concerned that the farm was no longer primarily functioning as a prison, but rather as an old age home and rudimentary palliative care facility. Such was the case for the men in Holy Trinity’s plots, for whom old age pensions came too late since Ontario did not participate in the plan until 1929, which was then limited to persons over 70 years of age.

Given this social context, the decision to install these concrete crosses in Holy Trinity cemetery may be read as an act of dignity and grace, offering the men respect in death that was not given to them in the last part of their lives. From a present-day perspective, the Langstaff graves are a reminder of the persistence of homelessness and social isolation as cultural problems, and the continuing (and growing) need for support networks for seniors. Reflection on the attempted welfare and pension solutions of the 1920s and 1930 should lead us to ask ourselves what assistance or solutions we might contribute to alleviating this issue.

Danielle Terbenche completed a Ph.D. in History at the University of Waterloo in 2011 and recently finished a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at York University.

Further information:

To mark the church’s 185th anniversary and replacement of the markers, a special service celebrating the cemetery’s history will take place in Holy Trinity Cemetery on Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 1:30pm. Tours will be given after the service to identify graves of historical significance, including the Langstaff crosses. For further information please see the list of events on the church website.

Bryan D. Palmer and Gaetan Heroux, “‘Cracking the Stone’: The Long History of Capitalist Crisis and Toronto’s Dispossessed, 1830-1930”, Labour/Le Travail, 69 (Spring 2012).

James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

In today’s increasingly online world, historians, researchers, and students want and expect online access to historical documents offered by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This includes not only journal articles and ebooks, but also primary sources and archival documents, which researchers increasingly expect to find online in searchable, digital formats. In turn, cultural heritage institutions have responded by trying to meet these demands, with various levels of success, for items ranging from census data to yearbooks to photographs. But offering access to digital and digitized collections has a very high cost, in terms of planning, scanning, adding metadata and accessibility features, and most crucially maintenance and long-term preservation. The invisible costs and labour behind online collections are frequently overlooked by researchers. This raises a question that few of us pause to ask: who did the work that made our digital sources accessible, and under what conditions?

This question matters because some of the digitization and data verification work that enables our online access to historical documents relies on the labour of incarcerated people—labour that is, I argue, exploitative. As researchers who depend on digitized primary sources, we have a responsibility to reckon with the hidden human costs of the online access we increasingly take for granted.

A worker operates a book scanner at a library digitization centre. The labour that makes digital collections accessible to researchers is often invisible to those who use them. Image: Book scanner digitization, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Consider the Yearbook Project, a digitization initiative that operated in Oklahoma prisons from at least 2013 until its suspension in 2022. The project scanned and processed high school yearbooks at no cost for high schools, libraries, museums, and historical societies across the United States, justified by the recognition that yearbooks are of irreplaceable historic value. How was the Yearbook Project able to offer this service for free? As a former coordinator candidly explained, it was possible because of the low labour costs associated with employing incarcerated people. According to reporting by Wendy Suares, workers on the project earned $1.45USD per hour, while the Oklahoma Department of Corrections earned $7.25 for each hour of their labour. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, the Yearbook Project generated over $600,000 in revenue for the Department of Corrections.

Prison labour of this kind is unethical. According to philosophers Matt Zwolinski and Alan Wertheimer, “to exploit someone is to take unfair advantage of them: to use another person’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit.” In mutually beneficial exploitation, both parties benefit, but the interaction remains exploitative because it is fundamentally unfair. The exploiter derives far more value than the exploited. This is the case in prison labour: the incarcerated derive some benefit from their work, such as earning money, gaining skills, or simply passing the time, but remain unfairly exploited. For example, in the United States, incarcerated people earn, on average, between $0.86 and $3.45USD per day – not per hour. In Canada, the range is from $5.25 to $6.90CAD per day. Even when incarcerated people gain something, such as this pittance, from their labour, the system degrades and disrespects them.

The Yearbook Project is not an isolated case. Incarcerated people in South Dakota enter state census data into databases for $0.25USD per hour. The American federal prison industries program UNICOR advertises that its digitization contracts will significantly reduce costs for labour-intensive work. In Utah, Idaho, and New Mexico, incarcerated people have indexed genealogical records for FamilySearch, the freely accessible platform operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon Church). This last example raises a genuinely complicated moral question. Some of these individuals volunteer for indexing work and describe it as personally meaningful, even spiritually fulfilling, and FamilySearch offers similar volunteering opportunities to people who aren’t incarcerated. But the conditions of incarceration, where options for how to spend one’s time are severely limited, make the notion of truly free choice difficult to sustain. As one incarcerated person in Utah told a recruiter for the program: “I would have done anything to get out of my cell.”

Notably, I have not found evidence of similar practices with regards to memory work (e.g., digitization, data entry, and the like) in Canadian prisons, although the federal correctional industry, CORCAN, offers a number of goods and services, including office furniture, industrial laundry, printing and engraving, and even, controversially, the creation of Indigenous-made handicrafts such as moccasins. However, Canadian researchers should not assume that they are insulated from this issue. Companies with ties to prison labour operate internationally: FamilySearch, for example, has well-documented ties to prison labour for indexing in the United States, and Ancestry has profited from offering content produced through prison labour, such as yearbooks digitized by the Yearbook Project. Both companies partnered with Library and Archives Canada on the recently released 1931 Census of Canada; LAC has confirmed that the census project did not directly benefit from prison labour. It is worth noting, however, that digitized sources with ties to the United States or to companies that operate internationally may have benefited from exploitative labour in ways that are not always transparent to the end user.

In a 2023 article published in the Library Quarterly, I proposed an intervention for librarians and archivists to increase transparency with researchers: that we clearly and honestly label items, collections, and databases that have benefited from exploitative labour. This intervention was inspired by the concepts of metadata justice and inclusive metadata: using accurate and appropriate language in library and archival systems and catalogues to promote transparency and accountability. This could take the form of neutral, informative statements that appear alongside the collections researchers access, noting the role played by incarcerated labour. On my genealogy guide at the McGill Libraries, for example, I note that “many genealogical companies and websites rely on the use of un/underpaid and exploitative prison labour in order to make genealogical materials such as census records available online and easy-to-use. Keep this ethical consideration in mind when deciding to undertake a genealogical project.”

This kind of labelling is beginning to happen elsewhere. A librarian at the Johnson County Library encountered my research in 2023, and was inspired to implement such a statement on her institution’s online holdings of yearbooks digitized by the Yearbook Project. The process took eighteen months – longer and, by the librarian’s own account, more complicated than she had anticipated. But the statement is now in place. This example demonstrates that institutional change is possible, even when it is slow and difficult. It also suggests that the conversation I hoped to begin is reaching beyond the pages of a scholarly journal.

Here, I hope to start a conversation with a different audience, beyond librarians and archivists: with historians and other researchers who use digitized primary sources, as well as members of the public who access digital collections for personal or genealogical research. Researchers are, after all, the driving force behind many digitization projects.

As researchers interested in learning—and teaching—about the lives of historical actors and in untangling power dynamics, we should extend this consideration to the invisible labour that makes available the resources we rely on finding not just in the archives, but online. It is extremely difficult in many cases to learn who digitizes historical materials, and under what conditions.

We may not have the power to end the practice of exploitative prison labour. But we can ask about the labour behind our sources. We can seek out and, when needed, demand transparency from the institutions and companies that provide our digital collections. We can consider whether these practices are acceptable as part of our research process. And we can insist that the practices taken in the name of making our heritage materials available meet our expectations and ethical demands.

Further Reading

Kristen C. Howard, “Digitization and Exploitation: Acknowledging and Addressing the Use of Exploitative Prison Labour by Libraries and Archives,” Library Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2023): 241–55. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/articles/s4655n73p

Shane Bauer, “Your Family’s Genealogical Records May Have Been Digitized by a Prisoner,” Mother Jones, August 13, 2015. Link

Kristen C. Howard is a liaison librarian and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. In addition to her library degree, she has a PhD in history (University of Arizona, 2020). Her research examines the ethical use of information, primary source literacy and pedagogy, and the emerging uses of generative artificial intelligence.

As a child, on Friday nights just before 9:00 pm, I’d tuck myself under a living room end table. If I was quiet and hidden, I could usually get away with watching at least part of Dallas. I was equal parts enthralled and scandalized. The epic “Who shot JR?” storyline was my first memorable introduction to crime and, like millions watching, I was captivated. A few years later, I made the leap to true crime as a somewhat under-supervised, voracious reader with ready access to a bookshelf full of not quite age-appropriate content.

In recent years, true crime stories have become a ubiquitous part of the public conscience. There is no shortage of docuseries, books, or social media accounts dedicated to murder and mayhem. Analyses suggest women are drawn to true crime for a variety of reasons ranging from a sense of control over patriarchal/existential violence to more philosophical considerations about evil, retribution, and how well we can know another person.[i] For me, as a child, I recall being drawn to the unfinished stories. The idea that someone’s life could be interrupted in the middle of living, both horrified and fascinated me. As historians we try to piece together fragments of people’s lives in meaningful ways. I think this is why the true crime narratives have always held such an appeal to me. But where history tries to complicate its subjects, much true crime overly simplifies them.

For some time, I contemplated writing a true crime book. Looking through local unsolved cases, I encountered Geraldine Pickford. Not a lot of information is publicly available about her death.

Most of the material is available via the York Regional Police cold case website. Pickford was killed on the evening of September 18, 1965. She had worked a shift as a waitress in the dining hall at St. Andrews College in Aurora, Ontario. Her belongings were found on a path, and a search team found her body some hours later.

“The Woman Nobody Knew: The Story Behind a Murder Victim,” Toronto Telegram, September 20, 1965, p. 1.

But if you Google Pickford, you’ll find a recent uptake in interest, which includes podcasts, message board entries, and a walking tour. Why? My guess is that the interest stems from one of the few publicly available sources: a Toronto Telegram article about her case titled “Story Behind a Murder Victim The WOMAN NOBODY KNEW.” The article contains commentary from people in Pickford’s life, enough of it salacious to be intriguing, and a fair bit of conjecture. For me, the writing underscores the idea that how the story is told is important for maintaining public interest. This point was clearly illustrated in Kristen Gilchrist’s work “Newsworthy” Victims? wherein she compared the newspaper space given to Indigenous and white women victims of crime. In contrast to the personal stories and intimate photos of white victims, Gilchrist observes how the shorter, less personal articles devoted to Indigenous women contributed to invisibilizing them as victims of crime.

Within the proliferation of true crime narratives, historians can make meaningful contributions. Using the Pickford case, I reflect on three interpretive lines to explore what true crime would look like if more historians helped produce it. To do so, I explore the following topics:

• voices that are in and missing from the historical record;
• the idea that proximity offers truth in evidence; and
• the importance of understanding victims as full human beings with complicated lives.

I’ve chosen to focus on Pickford here because the evidence is biased and incomplete; nevertheless, many are fascinated by the story.

In the Toronto Telegram article about Pickford’s death, several voices are included: her brother, employer, estranged husband, and a long-term “friend” who is also a sometime landlord, Margo Iula. The friend’s comments to the reporter call to mind the adage, “with friends like this, who needs enemies.” However, the colourful narrative that Iula provides is also likely what has kept Pickford’s case alive. The depiction of Pickford is vivid.

From her brother we learn their mother died when Pickford was nine, she quit school in grade 8, she was quiet, a reader with no other hobbies, and that even he didn’t know how she acquired the significant scar on her shoulder blade. From her estranged husband, we learn that Pickford was “very moody. If company came she might talk to them or she might not.” During the course of their six-month marriage, Pickford became “more and more remote,” then quit her job and left. The friend’s comments seem to be criticisms, but they make Pickford into a compelling subject. She confirmed Pickford was an avid reader, but also a picky one: “she seldom read all a book. She would skip pages if she was bored or came to a section she didn’t like.” Iula continued, disparaging Pickford: “When she did say something, she would often lie. You never knew when to believe her.” And inadvertently enticed with this observation: “She could be aggravating to another woman. She could be particularly aggravating to a man.”

Of course, the missing voice is Pickford’s. As the victim, she had no opportunity to affirm or counter these characterizations. We see this a lot in true crime. Sometimes so little information is available about a victim, that they are reduced to one-dimensional characters depicted in ways that are not verifiable. Historians wouldn’t necessarily have access to information that other people don’t. But, here, context is key. For example, to flesh out our understanding of the victim, we might look more closely at how Pickford–as she is described–conformed to or defied cultural norms and what can we suggest from that information.

One of the moments that drove me to write this piece, came from casual viewing of true crime. While we were watching one show, my attention was piqued because the narrator on the screen was labelled a “historian,” which is not a common title used in these shows (although I have started to see it used more frequently). As I listened to the speaker talk, it became clear that she was the daughter of the police officer who had led the initial investigation into the crime; the daughter commented on the case from her (now deceased) father’s perspective. There was no indication that she had any formal training as a historian. I’m not typically one to gatekeep titles, but using “historian” in this case was clearly meant to confer authority on someone who had no apparent authority. It speaks to the question about proximity too – are we to believe this “historian” is reliable because she’s the police investigator’s daughter? Her having expertise would have required her father to disclose confidential information. And, while I am not naïve enough to think such casual disclosures don’t occur, surely such a discussion would not have entailed a fulsome accounting of the evidence. The source (beyond, presumably, conversations with her father) and the nature of her knowledge of the case was never explained.

In the case of Pickford’s unsolved murder, Iula’s voice dominates. What’s interesting about her voice is that it is given authority because of their friendship/living situation. We have no way to judge how Pickford perceived Iula or their relationship. This is a line that is often lost in true crime documentaries. Proximity is not the same as authority or truth, but it is often treated as such. This is where historians typically shine. We already relentlessly evaluate our sources. We look for biases, we interrogate language. We understand that such testimony is not the same as truth telling; sometimes it is entertainment, sometimes mythmaking, sometimes the motivation remains unclear.     

What the articles suggests, is that Pickford was not an “ideal” victim.[ii] She was, however, an intriguing one. In addition to the characteristics noted above, which earned Pickford a reputation for having a ‘difficult’ personality, the article also portrays her as mysterious — and not as a compliment. For example, it is said that Pickford would disappear for a month or two, and when she reappeared, “She usually said she had been going out with somebody. She would never say who.” Iula also indicated that Pickford never had any money and observed that the money shortage began 18 years ago following a time when Pickford disappeared for a year and a half. Iula speculated Pickford was being “blackmailed,” although she had no evidence to support this suspicion. Speculating further, Iula suggested Pickford had a child during that period whom she was quietly supporting. Is it any wonder readers are mesmerized by this article? It is the primary document that keeps on giving.[iii]

The line between storytelling and exploitation can be very thin and is easily missed. In our efforts to share hardships and struggles, we often rely on individual stories to illustrate harms. The risks of this approach include sensationalism, voyeurism, and narrowing people to the worst moments of their lives.[iv] As historians, it’s worth considering how we can contribute to these conversations in important ways. I don’t propose that other historians join my true crime obsession. But I think historians are well-positioned to engage with these narratives in meaningful ways.[v] We excel at interrogating sources (including missing voices), establishing context, scrutinizing authority, living with ambiguity, and approaching subjects ethically. In so doing, we could help move the focus away from a sensationalized focus on crime, to more fulsome recounting of fragmented, interrupted lives.

Shannon Stettner is a historian specializing in reproductive health and activism, oral history, and lived experience. She is an avid traveller, dog enthusiast, world class putterer, and a regular contributor to Active History. 

[i] On this, see Laura Browder, “Dystopian romance: True crime and the female reader,” The Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 6 (2006): 928-953.

[ii] Nils Christie, “The ideal victim,” in From crime policy to victim policy: Reorienting the justice system, pp. 17-30 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1986): 12-13.

[iii] The article also goes into some depth about Pickford’s suspicious comings and goings in the weeks leading up to her death. I won’t recount those here because I’ve already outlined the ways Iula’s speculations have fueled interest in the case.

[iv] On this, see Christine Linke, and Lisa Brune, “Intimate Yet Exploitative: Representations of Gender-Based Violence in Platformed True Crime Narratives,” Media and Communication 13 (2025), https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8964.

[v] A recent excellent example of how historians can tackle these stories, is Ian Radforth, Deadly Swindle: An 1890 Murder in Backwoods Ontario that Gripped the World (University of Toronto Press, 2024).