“The Testing Place of our Canadian Citizenship is Going to be Our Cities”: J.S. Woodsworth and the Settlement Movement in Britain and Canada.”

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Katherine Wilson-Smith

“A View From the Roof of the Residence.” Twenty One Years at Mansfield House, 1890-1911. Plaistow: W. S. Caines, 1911. 1.

“From the roof of the Settlement one looks over a vast, monotonous, dingy sea of houses, acre upon acre, mile upon mile, in long rigid rows – like frozen waves of the grey sea – broken only by gaunt chimneys and tapering masts to show the limit of the docks.”1

On 11 December 1899, this bleak scene greeted J.S. Woodsworth upon his arrival at Mansfield House, in London’s East End, where he spent two weeks over the Christmas break. Woodsworth resided at Mansfield House for a short time, but his daughter credited this brief sojourn with putting her father on the path to becoming the eventual leader of the CCF: the poverty he witnessed during his short time in the East End was both personally shocking and a jolt towards practical action.2 Less than a decade later, Woodsworth became the superintendent of the All People’s Mission in Winnipeg. There, his leadership would be inspired by the principles and practices he had observed in London and in particular, the use of Christian socialist values to foster a non-denominational environment in which the whole community was welcome. This somewhat overlooked period of Woodsworth’s life and his ties with the settlement movement are essential to understanding his political and ideological development, which is reflective of the broader climate of transnational socialism at the turn of the century.

Mansfield House was in Canning Town, an extremely poor neighbourhood that was reliant on the docks for work and home to large pockets of immigrants, east of the Metropolitan area of London and just before the Essex marshes. The settlement, which took up residence in a row of former shops, brought the charm and middle-class respectability of Mansfield College, Oxford to the notorious slum. Residents living at Mansfield were Oxford students and professors, “slumming” in the East End, simultaneously investigating the lives of locals and living among them.3 The public-facing rooms in the settlement were intended to be aspirational, as the house opened its doors to the community every day. Pre-arranged activities were held during the day for boys and girls clubs and in the evening for working adults. If sporadic visits occurred, there was also staff always on call to assist people on the doorstep.4

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Indian Act 150: An Introduction

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By Katie Carson, Sarah Kittilsen, and Sean Carleton

Canada 150—the sesquicentennial celebration of the country’s confederation—was marked with pomp and circumstance, as the Federal Government encouraged Canadians across the country to commemorate what it called “one of Canada’s proudest moments.” April 12, 2026 will mark another sesquicentennial: 150 years since the Canadian government passed the Indian Act, the cornerstone of the legislative apparatus that continues to govern Indigenous-settler relations in the country today. While the Act does not hold the same pride of place within Canada’s historical narrative, it too has played, and continues to play, a fundamental role in the trajectory of this settler-colonial state. Its 150th year can also provide an impetus for consideration and reflection.

Indian Act 150 is a year-long series that calls attention to the anniversary of a piece of formative legislation, one that today’s liberal state would rather ignore. It invites scholars, public intellectuals, graduate students, and community members to consider the 150-year-long history of the Indian Act, the histories that have been produced about it, and the future of Indigenous-settler relations in Canada.

Bob Joseph—authour of 21 Things™ You May Not Know About the Indian Act and most recently, 21 Things™ You Need to Know About Indigenous Self Governance—will kick off the series at the end of January. Today, Sean Carleton, a contributing editor with Active History, will offer some introductory comments on the history and historiography of the Indian Act in Canada.

Katie Carson & Sarah Kittilsen, series editors.

Stan Williams, Bridge at Garden River First Nation in Ontario.
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Canada’s National Debt – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week, I talk with Angela Tozer, author of The Debt of a Nation: Land and the Financing of the Canadian Settler State, 1820-73. We discuss how governments take on debt, the purpose of debt, and how colonialism fuelled land speculation. We also chat about how resource extraction was critical to servicing debt, the changes brought on by Confederation, and the on-going legacy of 19th century national debt.

Historical Headline of the Week

“Debt Management Strategy for 2020-21,” Department of Finance Canada.

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Spying and Lying: The Abortion Scandal that Helped Sink the Socreds

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By Lilia Scudamore

Few Canadian governments — federal or provincial — have been so embroiled in scandal as William “Bill” Vander Zalm’s Social Credit Party (known colloquially as the ‘Socreds’). The government was routinely caught performing an array of improprieties, ranging from back-door deals to openly disobeying the Supreme Court of Canada to fighting with journalists on air.[1] The contemporary reader may find comfort in knowing that the administration met its demise after four years in power and ultimately delivered a death knell to the provincial Socreds, who had dominated the province for nearly fifty years. However, the party got away with a tremendous amount before then. In one oft-forgotten incident, the Vander Zalm government spied on BC’s largest pro-choice advocacy group for more than six months. No charges were ever laid. The BC New Democratic Party (NDP) seized the opportunity to make promises to the public about reproductive freedoms, which it fulfilled when it assumed power in 1991.

Postcard from the CCCA, reprinted in BC NDP Women’s Rights Committee publication, Priorities, Spring 1987.
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Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (book review)

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By Samir Shaheen-Hussain

The “thrifty gene” has a decades-long history that can be traced back to James V. Neel, an American physician-scientist, considered by many in his field as the “father of modern human genetics” [90]. Neel expounded his hypothesis in 1962 by proposing that such a gene would have emerged in hunter-gatherer societies as an adaptive response to a feast-and-famine lifestyle [2], but that it would have detrimental effects if food scarcity was eliminated. His idea was based on the assumption that “Indigenous bodies were genetically predisposed to diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic syndromes because of the foodways of their ancestors” [1-2], and relied on the now widely discredited “myth of forager food insecurity” [14-15, 146]. Neel’s own quest to discover the thrifty gene led him to conduct questionable studies on Indigenous populations in Brazil and Venezuela throughout the 1960s [2, 86-97]. In 1989, Neel sought to bury his own idea, writing that “the data on which that (rather soft) hypothesis was based has now largely collapsed” [100].

Yet, in 1999, Canadian scientists working with the Sandy Lake First Nation to address increasing rates of diabetes-related complications in the northern Ontario community announced to great fanfare that they had identified a genetic variant that “certainly had all the earmarks of what a thrifty gene would be” [136, 141]. Critics, including Indigenous scholars [144-5], questioned the layers of flawed premises upon which their conclusions rested and highlighted how they diverted attention away from the impacts of decades of colonial policies on Indigenous food sovereignty and mobility. Several years later, the lead authors of the study backtracked on their findings: there was no thrifty gene to be found [145-6].

This is the history that Travis Hay compellingly develops in Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism. The persistence of the thrifty gene hypothesis to this day is itself reflective of the enduring consequences of the science of settler colonialism [19, 137, 149, 152].

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Rediscovering Private Hasan Amat: Canada’s First Muslim Soldier Killed in the First World War

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Warrant Officer Daniyal Elahi, 337 Queen’s York Rangers Royal Canadian Army Cadets

Growing up, I often felt as though Muslim Canadians were a recent part of this country — as if our connection began only in 1965, when my grandfather immigrated from Pakistan. In school, the Canadian soldiers we learned about seemed to share the same background and the same story. Nothing suggested that someone like me, a young Muslim Army Cadet, had any place in that history.

That changed when I discovered Private Hasan Amat.

His name first appeared to me not in my history textbooks, but in a passing online reference. A Malay Muslim seaman born in Singapore in 1894, he enlisted twice in Canada, trained in England, and ultimately died fighting with the 1st Canadian Infantry Battalion at Hill 70 in 1917. The more I read, the more incredible his story became — and the more confused I felt that I had never heard it before.

My family and I, through our public history project Our Shared Sacrifice, obtained his full service file from Library and Archives Canada (LAC). Thirty-seven pages, filled with fragments of a life: his attestation papers, his medical records, his pay sheets, the two wills he signed, and the short, devastating entry confirming his death on that fateful day of August 20, 1917. These were not abstract facts. They were the pieces of a young man’s journey, recorded in his own hand.

Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force attestation paper from 1916. The form shows handwritten responses to questions. Multiple signatures and official stamps appear throughout the document.


Private Hasan Amat’s first attestation paper, completed in Halifax in January 1916. Library and Archives Canada, Personnel File of Private Hasan Amat (Reg. Nos. 478860 & 1075269).

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Crossing the Line: Women’s Opposition to the Winnipeg General Strike

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Ella Prisco

This essay is part of a 2-part series. See the other entry here.

Two women strikebreakers working at a gas station, posing beside a gas pump.
Women Volunteers at Gas Pumps. May 1919. University of Manitoba Digital Collections.  http://hdl.handle.net/10719/2694587.

“They have borne the lonely hours with fortitude,” stated the Winnipeg Citizen in its coverage of scabbing women during the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.[1] Indeed they had, taking up positions as telephone switchboard operators and waitresses in response to the nearly thirty thousand workers who walked off the job in Canada’s largest general strike to date.[2] The strike had put the middle and upper classes on edge. They understood the strike as moving beyond a demand for collective bargaining and signaling a desire for socialist revolution.[3] This anxiety only increased as the strike expanded beyond the purview of the public sphere and encroached on the private sphere of the home, resulting in middle- and upper-class women being unable to fulfill their traditional domestic duties. As a result, these women were motivated to intervene, becoming scabs and engaging in anti-strike activity to prevent the strike’s immoral force from further impacting the domestic sphere and ‘tainting’ society at large. In doing so, these women extended their accepted social roles as nurturers, caregivers and guardians of the domestic sphere into the public sphere, justifying their entrance into the workforce as a form of socially acceptable political activism rooted in traditional femininity.

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13th Annual (?) Year in Review (100 Years Later)

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By Aaron Boyes & Sean Graham

We offer our two cents on the events of 1925. Let us know in the comments what you would have ranked as the year’s top event.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already half-way through the 2020s, which means that we are now one hundred years removed from events of 1925. As with past editions (see the end of the post for links to all our previous editions), we use historical hindsight to analyze and debate what was the most important event of that year. It is only with the vision of one hundred years, we argue, can you truly declare an event “the most important”. And as always, events that heavily overlap with previous winners are ineligible for consideration.

For this year’s instalment, we have four brackets: the Foreshadowing Bracket, the Culture Bracket, the International Bracket, and everyone’s favourite the Potpourri Bracket.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy discovering what we think is the most important event from 1925.

Round One

Foreshadowing Bracket

Benito Mussolini Declares Himself Dictator

v.

Mein Kampf Published

Aaron: The political atmosphere in post-First World War Italy, like many nations in Europe, was fraught with dissent and division, largely between two incompatible views on the state: socialists and fascists. This, of course, is an oversimplification, but we don’t have enough space here to write about the entire rise of fascism in Europe in the interwar years (Aaron recommends To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw for an accessible overview). For Italy specifically, the rise of fascism is linked to Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, who, following the March on Rome in 1922, became Prime Minister on October 30 when he was appointed to the position by King Victor Emmanuel III. As the years progressed, Mussolini and his Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) assumed more control over Italy’s government, and Mussolini gained more power for himself. On December 24, 1925, a law was passed that changed Mussolini’s title from “President of the Council of Ministers” to “Head of Government”. Mussolini was no longer responsible to Parliament and only the King could remove him from office. Italy, from 1925 until the Second World War, was a police state controlled by Il Duce.

As we wrote in last year’s edition, in November 1923, Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff launched the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Government and seize power. In April 1924, after a three-month trial, Hitler was sentenced to a paltry five years in prison at Landsberg. It was here at Landsberg that Hitler wrote (or narrated) Mein Kampf – My Struggle. The book outlined Hitler’s worldviews, his rabid antisemitism, his hatred for communism, the need for a pure German “race”, the need for lebensraum (living space) in Soviet-occupied territory, and the weakness of the German Weimar democracy. The first volume was published on July 18, 1925, but had slow initial sales. Once the Nazis assumed power in 1933 with Hitler as dictator, sales jumped significantly. Within the book, Hitler clearly outlined his ideas for the world to see, many of which became evident once the Holocaust was exposed. A highly controversial work even to this day, its publication was banned in Germany until the copyright expired in 2015. Although highly influential for its promotion of Nazism, the book has been criticized by contemporaries and translators for Hitler’s poor writing and style.

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“We’ll Fight To The End:” Working Women and the Winnipeg General Strike

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Ella Prisco

This essay is part of a 2-part series. The second post will be published next week.

“Girl Strikers Urged to Stand Firm by Unions.” The Winnipeg Tribune, May 26, 1919. http://hdl.handle.net/10719/1605837.

Depending on who you asked, Winnipeg on May 15, 1919 was either a city in chaos or on the precipice of a brave new world. It was the first day of the Winnipeg General Strike, the culmination of weeks of tension between employers and unions, and upwards of 25,000 workers abandoned their posts.[1] Over the next six weeks, this number grew to nearly 30,000, encompassing a wide variety of workers, from transit workers to those in the metal and building trades, as well as postal service workers. The sheer number of those on strike shut the city down – shops were empty, restaurants were closed, the water supply was limited, and milk and bread deliveries were halted.[2] The strikers’ demands were both simple, calling for collective bargaining rights and a living wage, and transformational, calling to reorient society around people’s needs, striking fear into the hearts of the city’s upper class, and evoking the spectre of revolution, societal upheaval, and uncertainty.

Amidst the widening ranks of striking workers, women played a significant role and did so in ways that transgressed predominant gender norms. By stepping out of their assigned roles in the private sphere to join the fight for a living wage and collective bargaining rights, working women actively contributed to the strike in many ways. As leaders, newspaper saleswomen, and hecklers, striking women were a force to be reckoned with. Their contributions, often characterized as hostile and aggressive, diverged greatly from existing gender norms that highlighted women’s passivity and caregiving nature. Ultimately, this transgression of gender norms contributed to a broader characterization of the strike as a threat to the status quo and possibly a revolutionary movement. Indeed, as striking women took up public roles that countered traditional expectations for women, they contributed to the growing image of upheaval in the city.

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Teenage Consumers – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week I talk with Katherine Rollwagen, author of The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar: Creating the Youth Market in Mid-Century Canada. We discuss the creation of the ‘classic’ teenager, how marketing shifted to attract young people, and how much family considerations shaped advertisements. We also chat about Eaton’s, how it attracted teenagers to the store, and the legacy of mid-century marketing today.

Historical Headline of the Week

All Things Considered, “How Tech Companies Are Catering to Generation Z Teens,” NPR, November 27, 2017.

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