According to UWO, I Have Now Mastered the Arts

"I Admit You."

When the Chancellor of the University of Western Ontario held my hands and said those three little words to me this past Friday, it was like music to my ears. In fact, after completing 8 months of course work and a grueling summer internship, the only thing that would have made this moment better was if he had followed with, "...and you're hired" (a girl can dream, can't she?!).

But alas, that wasn't to be. Instead, I begin my job search in earnest today, confident in the knowledge that my time at Western has helped prepare me for a multitude of career paths in history, heritage and beyond (provided, of course, that I can choose just one!).

I don't usually include photos of myself on this blog, but this is definitely one for the record books! Allow me to present UWO's Masters of (Public) History, 2010:


Back row, from left to right: Jordan Goldstein, Dana Johnson, Tim O'Grady, myself, Braden Murray, Tasha DiLoreto, Megan Arnott

Front row, from left to right: Sara Sirianni, Shelagh Staunton, Becca Rahey

Reading the Newspaper with a Public Historian's Eye

Newspapers. I'm my house, they're everywhere. They lay on the floor in my entryway, folded neatly and encased in coloured plastic. They're piled precariously on chairs and stairs by our side door. They overflow the blue recycling bins in the garage. They litter our kitchen table, the family room table and even the living room table. Articles are clipped, highlighted and/or written on and stuck on the fridge, filed away for future reference or slipped under my bedroom door as I sleep. As a three-newspaper family (receiving The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the Whitby This Week on a regular basis), it's quite possible that we are single-handedly responsible for creating a very large hole somewhere in the Amazonian jungle.

So, this morning when I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and some breakfast, I was not at all surprised to see various sections of The Toronto Star covering nearly every square inch of the kitchen table. Nor was I particularly shocked to see that my father had "conveniently" left the paper open to an article announcing that the "Spadina House [had been] restored to its glory days." Yeah, my father's about as subtle as sledgehammer, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up and start reading.

At first I read the article like I have always read articles of this type: I skimmed the story, interested to learn a little more about Toronto's built heritage (e.g. Spadina House was built in 1866 by James Austin, one of the founders of the Dominion Bank and later, a president of Consumer's Gas Company) and intrigued by the more minute historical details (like the fact that different quadrants of the city used to have designated days on which the muckety-mucks could fashionably receive visitors). I was also mentally adding Spadina House to my ever-growing list of places to visit in Toronto.

But, as I finished reading the article, my inner public historian started to work...

I found myself looking critically at the photograph which had accompanied the article. The photo shows one of Spadina House's newly refurbished rooms in all its glory. With its cheerfully striped furniture, luxurious silk wallpaper and dramatic chandelier, the house looks beautiful and the care that the museum staff put into the new renovations is evident. That said, I couldn't help but cross my fingers and hope that the photographer had restricted herself from using a flash. Heaven forbid we overly expose the new furnishings to intense lighting.

Next, my eyes turned to the title of the article and I just couldn't help my knee-jerk reaction: Glory days? What glory days? Why does everyone always assume that the past was more 'glorious' or simple than the present? And what good does idealizing the past at the expense of the present do for a historical site or for the historical knowledge/consciousness of the public at large? I know, I know... I'm being nit-picky, but that sort of oversimplification drives me batty.

The final paragraph of the article briefly related the types of public programming that the newly reopened heritage site would offer. As someone interested in museum education, I was pleased to see that the site was going to offer three types of tours, "Meet the Austins" for those that are more interested in the history of the family, "It's a Kid's Life" for school-aged children, and a restoration tour for those visitors more interested in the architectural significance of the house and the process that went into repairing one of Toronto's historical gems. It really seems like the staff at Spadina House has thought about their site and their visitors and have made significant attempts to appeal to and service the widest possible audience.

Of course, all of these 'criticisms' are relatively minor and more than a little tongue-in-cheek. In fact, I've only included them in this posting to illustrate a small bit of the thought process which sent me into this metacognitive spiral of a blog post. I have to admit, it's a little disconcerting to wake up one day and suddenly realize that a single year of school has significantly changed the way that I do a task I've been doing since the fifth grade.


* Photograph is for dramatization purposes only and does not represent the actual condition of this blogger's home. :)

Public History is Alive and Well in the Archives

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I’ve always been enamored with museums. As a child my parents made sure to expose both my brother and I to as many museums as possible. And, whether these were traditional or living heritage, large or small, they were a staple of family vacations, day trips and parentally-supported school outings. Occasionally, my parents even managed to schedule museum visits for after games when we’d travel for soccer tournaments (they were sneaky like that). Most of the time, I loved wandering from room to room looking at artifacts and dioramas. And when I didn’t? Well, I still learned something. More importantly, I learned to appreciate the important role that museums play in caring for the history, heritage, culture and values of a place and/or a people.

Even with all that interest in museums, I had never given much thought to archives and the role that they play within a community. In fact, I’m almost ashamed to admit that the first time I ever stepped foot into an archive I was already in my fourth year of university. I certainly never envisioned myself – a scant 8 months since starting the Public History program at UWO – working in one archive and volunteering at another. But, this summer I’m doing both.

The main portion of my internship this summer will take place at the Sunnnybrook Archives (SBA) in Toronto where I’ll be an archives assistant to a graduate of UWO’s Public History program, Phil Gold.

The Sunnybrook Archives exists primarily to collect, organize, describe, make available and preserve records materials of historical, legal, and administrative value to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. As the Archives Assistant, I’ll be working in all areas of the archives, including working first-hand with print and graphic records, and with medical artifacts and other college memorabilia. My primary duty will be to assist Phil with the arrangement and description of the collection (specifically the archive’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs Fonds) according to RAD standards in preparation for the submission of a fonds level description to ARCHAEION. It’ll probably be a tedious and exacting process, but one that I’ll learn a great deal about archival practices from.

Since my contract with Sunnybrook Archives is only part time, I’ll be making up the remaining hours of my internship by volunteering at the Ontario Jewish Archives working on a number of archival and public history projects. To begin with, I’ll be helping organize/work “front of house” activities at the archive’s Doors Open Toronto site this weekend. From there I’ll move onto doing an inventory and some digitization of the archival holdings belonging to R.H. McGregor Elementary School in Toronto in preparation for a more extensive school history section on their webpage and a display for the school’s entryway. I’ll also have a hand in a few smaller projects, including helping to organize the OJA’s summer tours, helping update one of the Holocaust Education Centre’s displays and working on a number of item level RAD-compliant descriptions and digitization of some of the archive’s photographic records.

There are two other major projects that I’ll be working on at the OJA this summer and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to have a hand in both of them. The first is a podcast to accompany the OJA’s Facets of Fame: Portraits by Toronto Photographer Al Gilbert display at the Market Gallery in the St. Lawrence Market (see Facets of Fame blog post). I’ll be responsible for setting up interviews with some of the artist’s subjects for inclusion in the podcast, scanning images from the exhibit and helping to create a script for the podcast (Look Ma, I’m writing for the public!). The second major project that I’ll be working on is the continuation of the OJA’s huge oral history project. The project aims to record the stories of WWII veterans and I’ll be responsible for scheduling interviews, conducting pre-interviews and accessioning the videos once they have been recorded.

The summer’s barely begun and already I’m feeling very lucky to have the opportunity to work with the Director of the Ontario Jewish Archives, Ellen Scheinberg, who has been kind enough to include me in so many of the institution’s public history projects. The wide variety of projects she has schedule for me to help on will surely broaden my exposure and practical hands-on experience with public history in the “real world.”

Too Rich For My Blood

In September 2009, our Public History class was introduced to Adam Crymble of NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), Eve Duchesne of EcoKids and the major group project that we would be working on over the course of the upcoming year: that is, conceptualizing, researching, planning and completing several environmental history lesson plans which would be compliant with the Ontario elementary school curriculum and fit for online display in the teacher's section of the EcoKids website. The idea was to create engaging, informative, interactive and historically nuanced lessons plans that took into consideration both multiple intelligences and different learning styles.

For our part of the project, Shelagh Staunton, Tim O'Grady and I chose to focus our efforts on creating a lesson plan about Samuel de Champlain's contact with the Hurons for the 6th grade Social Science unit on First Nation Peoples and Early European Explorers. It has taken us seven months of blood, sweat and tears, but I think the end result is that our group has put together a pedagogically sound lesson plan for teachers which is engaging for students and accomplishes the stated goals of both of our clients.

But, with just over two weeks until the final project deadline, our group is struggling to put together the copyright permissions for the images that we need to supplement the written materials of our lesson plan. Our difficulties with this aspect of the project are two-fold: 1) since the copyrights for our desired visual materials are held by third-party cultural institutions we are at the mercy of their schedules (which is not nearly as pressing as ours, it seems) and 2) some of the best images are prohibitively expensive and we're being forced to seek cheaper and somewhat less authentic alternatives, a solution we feel has the potential to compromise the integrity of our end project.

Although difficulty #1 is frustrating, it's also understandable - archives and museums are busy, chronically understaffed institutions which likely have more pressing in-house concerns to attend to than completing our image requests. Difficulty #2, however, is another matter entirely.

In order to give our students as much exposure to primary sources as possible, we decided to utilize a large number of photographs of Huron artifacts from the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Unfortunately, when it came time to get copyright permissions for these items we hit a rather large brick wall: the price of purchasing the permission to show a single image that had already been digitized on a website was $50/yr (or $200 for 5 years). That's INSANE! Since our group originally wanted to use 6 or 7 photographs from the Museum on the EcoKids website indefinitely, that meant that our copyright costs were going to be upwards of $1500 for the first five years alone! That's highway robbery!

Because EcoKids is a not-for-profit organization and we are intending to use the materials for educational purposes, our group approached the Museum of Civilization again a few weeks ago, explaining the situation to them and received a second quote -- this time they were willing to 1/2 their original price, but even that is way out of our budget.

Now we are being forced to seek alternatives to these images, a situation which has the potential to put the integrity of our lesson plan at risk.

What I don't understand is how a national museum, like the Museum of Civilization, can get away with charging a non-profit, educational organization such ridiculously high fees for using images from their collection. Aren't two of the main goals of any museum to educate and serve their public? And aren't the teachers and students who use the EcoKids website considered part of the Museum's "public"? Therefore, shouldn't the rights to these images be more realistically attainable to these sectors of the public?

I'm not saying that the Museum should just give away its copyright permissions. I understand that there were some original costs incurred by the museum in order to photograph these artifacts and a small subsequent cost to host them on the museum's website. But these costs are minuscule compared to the cost of using a single image for a year at the Museum's regular price.

Somehow that just doesn't seem fair.

A House on Talbot Street

Since our historic homes project officially came to a close last week with the installation of the exhibit for ARCC, I thought I would also include my 250-word summary about my property (585 Talbot Street) here as yet another example of how the Public History MA Program at UWO is preparing us to write for the public. It wasn't easy to get 2500 words of research notes into a 250 word summary. I definitely had to leave out salient details in order to create a cohesive blurb, but I think the final product works. You be the judge.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Built in 1877, 585 Talbot St. became the family home of Laurence Gibson. A successful entrepreneur, Gibson, along with William Yates, was the proprietor of the London Machine Tool Company (est. 1873) which manufactured engines and iron-working tools for machinists, boiler makers and brass finishers. At its peak, the London Machine Tool Company employed between forty to fifty people, making it a significant local employer. In addition to his work as a manufacturer, Gibson also worked as an accountant, an insurance agent and a manager of the Huron & Erie Loan and Savings Company during his lifetime.

The centred gable style of the building at 585 Talbot St. represents a subtype of Italianate architecture which is typical of only 15 per cent of Italianate buildings. The simplicity of this design, combined with the white brick that is characteristic of many of London’s buildings, lends the structure a sense of understated elegance. Typical of the style, the building is largely cubic in shape, has a low-pitched roof with exaggerated eaves and tall windows with gently-rounded tops. Among the building’s most notable features are its intricately carved verge board, elaborate Gothic trusses and the cut stone work of the window crowns. Interestingly, the building only sparingly uses the most common feature of Italianate architecture, paired roof-brackets, to accentuate the top of its pilasters. Considered one of the City of London’s finest examples of the Italianate style of architecture, 585 Talbot St. is an integral part of the area’s aesthetic value and historic streetscape.

First Foray into Exhibit Design

Recently our Public History class put the finishing touches on a major project by installing an exhibit in the Schweitzer Gallery, which is located in the entrance to the Archives and Research Collections Centre (ARCC) inside of the Weldon Library at UWO.

Beginning in September, each public history student was assigned a historic home in the Talbot/Ridout Street area. Our job was to research the historical, architectural and contextual values of the homes, evaluate them according to a numerical rating system designed by members of LACH and present both our findings and our recommendations for the homes at a LACH meeting in December. In addition, we were required to write a 250-word description of the home and its significance that could be used as the text for a walking tour booklet or for a heritage plaque. The culmination of this assignment, of course, was creating a exhibit for ARCC which would highlight our research on some of London's historic gems.

Having never worked in a museum or archive before, this was my first true foray into exhibit design; it was considerably more challenging and time consuming than I had expected it to be.
Thankfully, it was a total team effort and we managed to get the display installed without too many headaches.

Although I am pleased with the end result, there are definitely areas for improvement. For instance, we had far too much text and some of it was repetitive. This could have been solved by taking the time to edit the written portion of the exhibit more carefully. As well, what text we did have needed to be displayed in a larger font so that it would be easier for visitors to read. In our defense, however, our font choices were limited by the amount of text we had and the size of the displays cases that we were using. In such a limited space we could not have possibly gone larger without overwhelming the photographs and further cluttering the design. The aesthetics of the display were also hampered by the numbers, size and type of display stands available for our use (many were already being used in ARCC's other three display cases). Without them it was difficult to vary the height and depth of the mostly 2-dimensional materials.

In an ideal world, I also would have liked to include more items that highlighted how we used the resources that are available to the public at ARCC. From city directories to local histories, fire insurance plans, diaries, artwork, pamphlets, walking tour guides, architectural dictionaries, etc., our public history class relied heavily on both the resources cared for by ARCC and the expertise of their staff. Unfortunately we were once again hampered by issues of space. If we had been given a third case in which to display our work, I am confident that we could have followed through on this aspect more thoroughly.

Controversy Over Heritage Designation Grows

2020 Lambs Road in Bowmanville is the site of the only battle of the Second World War to be fought on Canadian soil.

What would come to be known as the “Battle of Bowmanville” began on Thanksgiving weekend 1942, when hundreds of German prisoners of war at Camp 30 rioted in response to a federal government order that 100 of their highest-ranking officers be shackled. Using a variety of makeshift weapons including jam jars, baseball bats and hockey sticks, the German PoWs seized control of the camp, taking one guard hostage and barricading themselves in the main hall. The three-day standoff ended only after guards stormed the building, using fire hoses and tear gas to subdue the inmates.

While the Battle of Bowmanville isn’t likely to make it into many history books, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson believes Camp 30 to be a critical piece of Canada’s wartime history. Now in a state of disrepair, this collection of 18 buildings in rural Bowmanville is thought to be the world’s last remaining German prisoner of war camp. A small camp, it housed 880 of the Third Reich’s high-ranking officers during the Second World War. Hodgson believes that by containing these officers and denying Hitler some of his most strategic minds, Canada did its part to ensure Allied victory.

This belief has been at the centre of Hodgson’s ten-year campaign to preserve the site and to turn one of the buildings into a small museum.

Sadly, it has been an uphill battle. Over the years Hodgson has faced uncooperative property owners (Kaitlin Group, a housing development company), demolition plans, vandalism, property damage and, most recently, arson that gutted the camp’s administration building and damaged two others.

Fortunately, a new year has brought new progress. Sort of. In January, in the wake of intense backlash, Kaitlin Group offered the Municipality of Clarington a third of the property to develop as a park.

Victory was short-lived, however. A splinter group, led by Clarington councillor Charlie Trim, has emerged among preservationists. Trim believes that highlighting the war history of the site honours the German officers and could offend veterans living in the area. Instead, Trim wants the site to preserve the history of the training school for delinquent boys that occupied the site for the majority of the time from 1925-1979.

But this proposal is not without its own controversy. In fact, members of the community have stepped forward to remind Trim that the school has its own dark past of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that some may not wish to commemorate either.

It appears there is no easy solution for the preservationists in Durham Region. The Municipality of Clarington has the land. Now the question becomes, what are they going to do with it? Whose history should be privileged? Whose buried? Perhaps the answer lies in finding a compromise that would use the site to interpret all aspects of the area’s history.


Notes:

* This post was originally written as an assignment for my Public History class. The focus of the assignment was to learn how to write a 500 word article about history that would engage and inform a public audience. As it stands, this post represents a significantly altered second draft of my original article and includes corrections I made in response to the constructive feedback of Dr. Jonathan Vance and my peers in UWO’s Public History program.

* Although few people remember it, more than 37,000 German prisoners of war once forcibly called Canada ‘home.’ CBC Digital Archives has done a wonderful job of compiling both contemporary and subsequent news footage about German and Italian POWs here.

* To see what Time Magazine had to say about the Battle of Bowmanville at the time, see this article.

* Click here to see Hodgson's proposal for the site.

Tweet at Me, I Dare Ya...

Ok, I’m a nerd. I fully and freely admit this fact. I love school. I love history. And, as my time in Korea comes to a close (30 days and counting!), I find myself more and more excited for my next big adventure – the Public History MA program at the University of Western Ontario.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the requirements of the digital history course that I’ll be taking in September is that students keep a blog related to issues of public history. It should be pretty apparent by now that I’ve embraced that part of the course wholeheartedly. Most days I have no shortage of topics that I’d like to discuss or reflect upon. But, when I sat down at my computer today to make a long overdue post, my mind was suddenly blank; the few half-formed thoughts floating around in my brain refused to become fully formed. What to discuss?

Eventually I turned to the current crop of Public History students and their blogs, hoping for a little inspiration. Sadly, when I arrived at the Digital History page today I found that Dr. Turkel had updated it since my last visit and that the links to past blogs had been removed! I was stumped for a moment. But, as I read the updated schedule for September and all of the notes about different course components, I realized that the inspiration for today’s blog was part of the update – not only would we be required to maintain a blog this year, but we’d also be responsible for creating and utilizing a Twitter account as part of an effort to “experiment with new forms of interaction and learning.”

I have to be honest. My initial reaction went a little something like this: Twitter? Really?! Isn’t Twitter mainly home to celebrities who think you care about every waking minute of their lives and businesses trying to use “the next big thing” on the internet to promote their products and increase their bottom lines? How can it possibly be useful to me?

Twitter’s homepage claims that it is a social networking tool that acts as “a modern antidote to information overload,” but I see it as being the exact opposite. I really don’t need to know when my friends or peers are eating a bagel, watching Jon and Kate Plus 8 or contemplating the meaning of life (unless, of course, they find the answer).

It’s strange, but I never would have questioned it had Dr. Turkel suggested that the Public History students use a group page on Facebook to discuss issues that arise in class, scheduling for group projects or to arrange social gatherings. I’ve used Facebook in similar ways in the past and it has worked out amazingly well. But, I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around how a social networking tool that relies solely on 140 character status updates can be helpful to my learning process. At least with Facebook you can supplement your status updates with a slew of other practical (and some not-so-practical) features.

That said, perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to write Twitter off completely. Maybe the importance of Twitter is not in how I will use it (as a student of public history), but in how others use will use it. If you think about it, Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking sites that have blossomed in the last two decades are constantly changing what we consider to be primary documents. Records of internet activity, be it Facebook posts, Tweets, emails or chat room histories have almost become to current generations what journals and letters were to past generations. Who knows, maybe the big news in the future will be about how Facebook or Twitter can make or break a career, or how a political debate on YouTube was more influential to voters than the televised one. Maybe in a few years historians will even be citing Tweets or Wall-to-Wall messages in the footnotes of their books about our next great public figure.

Until then, however, you can "follow" me on Twitter @ www.twitter.com/ccaughell.

Public History (As I Currently Understand It)

I suppose that the natural starting point for a blog about public history would be for me to establish my current understanding of the discipline (however rudimentary that might be at this point). Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on this entry at the end of my year in the Public History program at UWO and see how much course readings, guest speakers, field trips, group projects, class discussions and self-reflection have deepened my understanding of the subject.

According to the Public History page for UWO, public history as a discipline is broadly defined as one that “explores how history is understood by and communicated to the public.” The method of communication to the public can take many forms including, but not limited to, historical fiction in books and movies (an admittedly guilty pleasure of mine), documentaries, museum exhibits or historical sites, websites, archives, video games on historic themes, etc. It is the Heritage Moments that used to run on television during commercial breaks and those blue commemorative plaques on the side of the road in Ontario. It is Doors Open Ontario events and those statues of the dude on the horse that every capital city from here to Europe seems to have in spades.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me to be the innumerable ways that historians try to engage those outside of academia (whose first priority might not be the study of history - blasphemy, I know!) to learn about the past in ways both meaningful and interesting to them as individuals. Emphasis also seems to be on the responsibility of the public historian to communicate their specialized knowledge to an audience in a manner appropriate to their level of understanding.

Well, that’s public history as I currently understand it. It isn’t pretty or detailed, but it is a starting point.

Questions? Comments? Statements of brilliance?

Third Time's the Charm...?

I have been agonizing about the beginnings of this blog for weeks. Seriously. I’ve actually lost count of the number of times I loaded this webpage and eagerly clicked on “New Post” only to find myself staring at the white text box and a blinking cursor with no idea how I wanted to go about establishing myself in my own little corner of the World Wide Web.

I think my trepidation stems from the fact that this is not my first kick at the proverbial blogging can. In fact, this is not even my second attempt at a blog. I created my first blog as a procrastination technique during my first essay season of university more than six years ago. Unfortunately, what started merely as a traditional journal in digital form quickly devolved into a slam book of sorts (Baby-sitters Club reference, anyone? Anyone?). Let’s just say that the entries weren’t worth preserving. If memory serves, I deleted the blog long before my first set of exams.

My second foray into the blogosphere started in July 2008 when I decided to try to chronicle the ups and downs of living and working as an ESL teacher in South Korea. The blog, in conjunction with a trusty Flickr account, was my way to stay in touch with friends and family back home who had yet to jump on the Facebook bandwagon. Blogging went smoothly for a couple of months, but eventually it deteriorated into hastily scrawled notes on Post-Its that got “filed” in the junk drawer of my desk and never made it onto the web. After allowing my blog to languish for several months without updates, I finally gave up the ghost and took it down. (In hindsight, perhaps I should have left it up...?)

Which brings us to attempt #3...

Eventually this blog will become a course requirement for History 9808, Dr. William Turkel’s Digital History course, which focuses on representations of history on the web and interactive systems (whatever those are... Do blogs and wikis count?!?). It will act as a forum in which I, along with my peers in the Public History program at UWO, publicly engage in reflective practice. At that time, I suspect that the tone, style, format and content of this blog might change to reflect a significantly more academic bent. Until then, I’d like to use it to explore (rather informally) the concept of public history as I currently understand it.

As a recent graduate of Brock University’s Faculty of Education, I have to admit to cringing inwardly a little at the mention of reflective practice. Since its introduction in Donald Schön’s 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner, the concept of reflective practice has become one of the cornerstones of teacher training programs in Ontario, including the one at Brock. As such, I’ve written countless reflections over the last five years on topics ranging from teaching techniques to current issues in education to my evolving philosophy of education; the list goes on and on. Although I think the process of reflective practice is generally a valuable one both personally and professionally, I had secretly hoped that I’d done enough reflecting in teacher’s college to last me a lifetime. :) In fairness to the Public History program at UWO, however, this is the first time that I’ll be applying the concept of reflective practice to the discipline of history and in a digital format, so I’m excited to see how this experiment works out.

With that said, I’ll end this entry the same way my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Blight, ended all of his classes, “Questions? Comments? Statements of brilliance...?” If you’ve got them, feel free to leave them, but please be gentle. This is a learning process. :)