Blog

MAKING HISTORY MAKE HISTORY

Enthusiastic young Nazis in 1934. What if they controlled the narrative? Image courtesy of Bundearchiv Again back to high school. I had a wonderful English Lit teacher in grade 12 named Mr. Redford. In class one day he said to us about the Holocaust: “Don’t think, look what the Germans did, think, look what humans…

HISTORIANS ON FILM AND WHY WE SHOULD CARE

History surely goes back as far back as talking. Having the ability to talk about the past, and adapt, is something some scientists have conjectured separated Homo Sapiens from Neanderthals. Although there are some famous names from way back that we would consider early historians: Thucydides and Herodotus among them, historians as a professional class…

TWO SOLITUDES: Leaving History to the Historians/Will You Walk On By?

Group of Cree men at Fort Pitt, Saskatchewan, 1884. Image: NA-382-1 courtesy of Glenbow Archives. Questions this image raises: How do we tell these people's stories in documentary form with care, detail and critical distance? Who would each one identify with in The Breakfast Club? Does anyone ever identify with the principal? Note: Mean Girls…

HOW TO (SHOW &) TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PAST

If you have ever broken up with someone, only to hear from friends that you got dumped, then you know how unreliable the witnesses to history are. Conventions used in films to tell tidy, linear stories about the past have bothered me for about as long as I can remember. For many years I’ve wondered…