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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resources/Further Reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Did

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

Interlude: what about accessibility?

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

What I Didn’t Do

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

What Students Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
The Active History Editorial Collective

It Won’t Be Long Now! A Scene at the Bathing Beach at Port Dalhousie, Ontario,” May 2, 1930, photo by Canadian National Railways, published by the Toronto Star (Toronto Star Archives, Toronto Public Library).

ActiveHistory.ca is on a hiatus for our annual summer break, with a return to daily posts in mid-august.

Thank you to all our contributors, guest writers, guest editors, and readers for making 2026 a very successful year. In the meantime, we will be periodically reposting some excellent posts. 

Wishing you all a great summer we look forward to continuing our work soon!

Generations of social historians have scoured archives and invented new ways of doing history through their collaboration with other fields. A new “vintage AI” model, talkie, is an example of what happens when knowledge extraction replaces collaboration.

Parsing the various communications around the model, the team behind talkie has framed their new LLM in two ways. In their blog post introducing this new model, and in an interview with the podcast Hard Fork, the team behind this project describe its predictive potential. They aim to test whether language models can predict events beyond the period of the training data, and do so by training it with pre-1931 documents. The team presupposes that if this “vintage” model can predict its future, then modern models trained on the current web can predict our future.

talkie chatbot interface, however, does not engage with the model as a predictive tool. There is no proof of its efficacy. In our testing, their local model is not shipped with any predictive capabilities, nor do they provide sufficient documentation to achieve any prediction. Instead, it acts more like a toy to interact with a particular version of history. Their tagline advertises the model as “an LM from 1930,” as if the user is talking with an entity from the past. The framing between prediction and history disguises a tool whose use is unclear and whose underpinnings are flawed.

These flaws begin with the data on which talkie was trained. Its training corpus was a subset of the published English-language record before 1930. Like most western archives, this is a corpus likely dominated by white, male, and elite writers. Other voices are outweighed in the records and further filtered by digitization. The result is a model that speaks confidently for the past in the voice of its narrowest slice.

The talkie team made these choices deliberately. On the podcast Hard Fork, talkie team member Dr. David Duvenaud, associate professor at the University of Toronto, stated they “wanted to make everything entirely publicly available in open source, and 1930s is the most recent date that has almost zero legal headaches.” However, the team has not released the training data sources, so what little we know about the data set is based on their public statements. The training dataset seemingly contains only print-origin English-language texts, excluding hand-written or multilingual sources. Their blog post specifically lists “books, newspapers, periodicals, scientific journals, patents, and case law” as their training corpus. They drew these materials from repositories like Harvard University’s Institutional Data Initiative, the Internet Archive, and products from the Common Pile project. In so doing, the team relied on data that was easy to find and ready to use, instead of developing a representative corpus with diverse perspectives from the past. A concentrated reliance on ready data can produce problems, like reproducing narrow-minded points of view held by certain people in the past.

This reliance on easy data was not from a lack of access to expertise. Five months before talkie‘s release, one of us, Farr, met with Levine and Radford for an hour-long discussion about optical character recognition (OCR) and accessing historical archives. As part of the talkie project, state-of-the-art OCR is in development, intersecting with Farr’s research on vision language models for archival transcription. However, instead of discussing new AI-enabled transcription tools as Farr had expected, the team questioned her about how to source training data for their forecasting model. Farr’s questions about their corpus curation methods, such as what would be included or excluded, and how the gaps would be acknowledged, were met with only vague interest. They considered these questions out of their present scope. Five months later, the model shipped with the corpus problems Farr had flagged represented only as ‘limitations’ and ‘future directions’ in the release post, which acknowledges her contribution in ‘helpful discussions’.

Heeding warnings like Farr’s may have lessened some of the problems with talkie’s outputs. As seen in Figure 1, talkie produces bigoted responses then frames them as a representation of 1930; an outcome of the project’s methodology. The hard work of expanding the archive is being subverted. Humanities researchers have read marginalized experiences against the published record, mapped enslaved people’s lives using colonial ledgers, and reconstructed Indigenous histories from oral traditions and the margins of colonial documents. The talkie team’s use of easy and accessible documents, and the model’s resulting bigotry, overshadows the professional and collaborative efforts that have gone into diversifying and expanding the archives beyond these problematic voices. These efforts have grappled with the archival challenges ignored by talkie: much was never printed; much of what was printed is not digitized; most digitized handwritten sources are not transcribed. The ephemeral and multilingual sources needed to train a model on anything approaching the full archive of the past simply do not exist in machine-readable form.

Framing talkie as a chatbot dictates how the public will use it. The chatbot has largely been received as a toy. In one Reddit thread, users repeatedly prompted it to predict Hitler’s rise. A chatbot ‘from 1930’ invites users to ask it what 1930 did not yet know. The interface produces this behavior and the model’s construction makes such use inherently fraught.

Without historical framing, a casual user of talkie has no reason to read “‘[A woman] is inferior to a man intellectually” as anything other than a broadly-accepted historical truth, instead of it being a perspective held largely by the white elite. This is a direct result of talkie’s team taking minimal steps towards preventing users from interacting with problematic results. Standard industry approaches like post-training guardrails are common for language models trained on bigoted internet-scraped data. The talkie team characterized these post-training guardrails as “put[ting] their thumb on the scale,” ignoring how they already tipped the scales through their dataset choices.

The talkie team is well equipped to perform post-training on their model. talkie was built by a group including Dr. Duvenaud, whose research focuses on AI governance and ethics in AI use, and who previously worked on Anthropic’s Alignment Science team; Alec Radford, a former employee of OpenAI and principal author on GPT-2, CLIP, and Whisper; and Nick Levine, a former quantitative researcher and financial historian at the hedge fund Winton. Levine has an MPhil on the history, philosophy, and sociology of science from Cambridge and has published on “information overload in postwar America”.

This team has expert knowledge and experience, but talkie represents a minimal application of this expertise in relation to the bigoted output of the chatbot. Their only apparent safeguard, added post-release, is an additional model (Qwen3Guard family) that reviews the chat inputs and outputs and flags content “as potentially inappropriate”, obscuring the output with a “Show it anyway” button (see Figure 2). An accurate warning would instead explain that the content is likely incomplete and is, at best, a narrow perspective of the past.

talkie’s poor representation of history is a side effect of a larger problem. The model was conceptually built as an experimental tool to see if language models can accurately predict the future, also known as “forecasting.” The blog post assertively claims the models predictive capabilities, yet is devoid of evidence enabling researchers to reproduce their experiment. The version that could serve serious research is gated behind compute, and is the same version released with no guardrails at all.

As we have mentioned, we have no proof of the predictive capability of talkie. However, the team’s framing of talkie as a predictive tool aligns with an explosive growth in the gambling and prediction markets in North America. In February of 2026, the night before the United States struck Iran, hundreds of bets correctly predicting the strike appeared on Polymarket. The New York Times reported on these betting markets, raising questions about asymmetric information shaping these markets. Prediction markets are now a multi-billion-dollar industry built on the geopolitical forecasting the talkie team wants to test. A sufficiently capable model in this lineage would be valuable to anyone whose decisions depend on prediction, including the markets, and would therefore be very attractive to investors. As we have seen with the rise of language models like ChatGPT and its competitors, the developers do not get to decide how the tools they develop are used once released into the world. talkie is similarly positioned.

Whatever their intentions, the team should release the training data and co-design these models with archivists and historians rather than using them as beta testers. The team says they intend to work with historians on future post-training and model development. Yet, they already had that chance and failed to use it.

In releasing this chatbot, the team has set aside Farr’s warnings, and what humanities researchers have spent a century working out. Documents are only partial records of the past. Archives preserve the records those in power choose to keep. Absence in the record is itself evidence. Reading those absences requires interpretive expertise the model does not have and the interface does not invite. Modern models are far more than statistical mimics, but they remain tethered to their inputs. They cannot represent perspectives or facts outside of the dataset. If we want complete answers, we must build complete foundations.

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

Chloë Farr is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Victoria, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, archives, and digital humanities. Her research focuses on large-scale text recognition and analysis of historical documents, including newspapers, maps, and archival records. Learn more about Farr’s work on GitHub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Headline of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To answer these questions, I gave students two options:

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

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

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

When Art Imitates Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All Men Are Created Equal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom Motherfucker, April 2026 (Shared with student permission)

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

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

You’re Cordially Invited

Speaking of the main event…

2026 Invitation (All invitations shared with student permission)

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

1976 Invitation                                                                              1926 Invitation

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

1876 Invitation                                                                   1826 Invitation

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

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

The OG, 1776 invitation

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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