Category: ActiveHistory.ca

Repurposing a Map of Greater London’s Industry (1893-5)

[Originally published on ActiveHistory.ca]
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A few years ago, I worked with some students to develop a database of all the factories we could find on very detailed 5 feet to the mile maps of London from the second half of the nineteenth century. This database is central to my academic research on the environmental history of industrialization in Greater London. I created maps using this historical GIS database for my first book and I’m busy working on a second major project with this spatial data at its centre. But I’ve also been thinking of how to make the HGIS data accessible and interesting to a wider public audience. I’ve created a number of interactive maps using Carto.com and StoryMaps and shared them over social media. Each time they are shared by other historians, but the statistics suggest they’ve not reached a large audience. I’m hoping this post might elicit suggestions from public historians on whether these interactive maps are worthy of more effort on my part to reach a wider audience and how I might succeed in doing so. Build it and they will come is clearly not working.

The Giant Cost of Past Pollution

Originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

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Some historical artifacts pose a dangerous and costly challenge to those of us living today and to future generations. Unlike stone ruins, carefully preserved books or dusty archival papers, the toxic waste produced by past industrial activities contaminate environments around the world, threatening our health and our economic future. Here in Canada, a review board just released a report on how to clean up the “237,000 tonnes of highly toxic arsenic trioxide dust stored in 15 underground chambers” that remained after the closing of Giant Mine in Yellowknife  (CBC). The outlook is grim. The clean up will costs up to one billion dollars, but will not provide a permanent solution to freeze the toxic waste in place. Because current technologies can not safely remove the arsenic, the report requires further research and a reassessment every twenty years until a permanent solution is found. Giant Mine was an economic success story, which extracted 220,000 kg of gold in a little more than half a century of mining , but also left behind a costly and dangerous toxic legacy.

London’s Great Smog, 60 Years On

[This post first appeared on ActiveHistory.ca]

When did the modern environmental movement begin? Did one event mark its beginning? Earlier this year we commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is often identified as bringing about the environmental movement. While this book’s importance is without question, focusing on it as the birth of environmentalism ignores the importance of urban environmental problems, from unsafe drinking water to severe air pollution, in raising people’s environmental awareness.

Ten years before Carson’s book, a great smog blanketed Greater London. From Friday December 5th through to the following Tuesday (Dec 9) 1952, the thick air pollution disrupted daily life and killed thousands of people. In the aftermath of the Great Smog, the British passed the Clean Air Act (1956).

Remembering the War of 1914

Vimy Ridge Memorial – Dedication Ceremony

[Originally published on ActiveHistory.ca]

It is very strange to celebrate the start of a war. Nonetheless, this is exactly what we have done here in Canada over the past year. The War of 1812 spanned from June of 1812 through to February of 1815, but this did not stop our government from starting their celebrations of the “Fight for Canada” during the 200th anniversary of the first months of the war. Perhaps they felt the need to keep the schedule open to celebrate the start of another war in 2014.

ActiveHistory.ca: 2012 Olympic Park Through Time


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The 2012 Summer Olympic park is located in the Lower Lea River Valley in the east of London. The games were sold to the British public from the beginning as an opportunity to transform one of London’s most economically disadvantaged regions. Early promotional material on the London 2012 website in 2006 put the goal of revitalizing the “underdeveloped” valley as the main legacy of the games:

Currently one of the capital’s most underdeveloped areas, the Lea Valley is an area of outstanding potential which will be transformed by the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games… The natural river system of the valley will be restored, canals would be dredged and waterways widened. Birdwatchers and ecologists will be able to enjoy three hectares of new wetland habitat… The rehabilitation of the Lower Lea Valley lies at the heart of the Olympic legacy to east London, restoring an eco-system and revitalising an entire community.

Labeling one of the most important sites of Greater London’s industrial development as underdeveloped ignores the significance of the Lower Lea Valley’s history. It might have been more accurate to borrow the phrase “rust belt” from the United States to label the river valley as a major location of deindustrialized brownfields, but even this would disregard the large number of surviving industrial jobs lost only after the expropriation of the Olympic site.

Celebrating Three Years of ActiveHistory.ca

By Jim Clifford

Three years ago, in the lead up to the Canadian Historical Association meeting, Christine McLaughlin, Ian Milligan, Thomas Peace, Jay Young and I founded ActiveHistory.ca. At the time we were all graduate students in the history department at York University. The website emerged out of the Active History symposium held in September 2008. Having budgeted to disseminate the conference proceedings, we considered publishing an academic book or a special issue of a journal. But these options, we thought, seemed counter to the public outreach goals of the symposium. Instead we decided to launch a website that embodied the Active History mission, instead of simply publishing some of the essays presented at the workshop (though, Ian Milligan also worked with Left History to publish a special issue).