In November 2020, two books on the Spanish Civil War, Guerre d’Espagne et socialisme international: Dernière chance pour l’ordre démocratique d’entre-deux-guerres by Nicolas Lépine, and Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada, and the Spanish Civil War by Tyler Wentzell, were launched as part of the Ottawa Historical Association’s first virtual book event. This event was organized with the help of Dr. Dominique Marshall of the CNHH and was co-hosted by Dr. Marshall and, historian and war journalist, Michael Petrou.
Category: Blog (Page 2 of 6)
by Elizabeth Reid
In the Winter of 2020, I had the opportunity to work with the communications department at the World University Service of Canada, or WUSC, to help sort through decades worth of documents, photos, and other forms of media stored in its Ottawa office. Shortly after the First World War, WUSC, under its original name, European Student Relief, was created in Switzerland to help support European students displaced by the war. Although the archives I had the chance inventory did not span all the period back to the 1920s, they helped to paint a picture of the work WUSC has done in the last several decades, and the aid they have been able to provide to students on an international level. While most of WUSC’s archives are held in an off-site storage facility, a small portion of them are still stored in their main office and needed to be inventoried.
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by Jill Campbell-Miller
This post originally appeared on Active History and is cross-posted here with permission.
“I just hope he’s at a cottage without a cell signal and wi-fi.”
I said that to my mother-in-law several times during a recent visit to Cape Breton. After all, I told her, the book project that Greg Donaghy was co-editing with myself and fellow historian Stacey Barker had recently been progressing ahead of schedule (Breaking Barriers, Shaping Worlds: Canadian Women and the Search for Global Order, UBC Press, 2021). Perhaps he felt no need to respond to my texts and emails quickly. But even as I said it, I knew it was not right. If Greg was anything, he was conscientious and dedicated to his work. Emails, texts, and phone calls rarely went unanswered. The thought of him lounging at a cottage while his inbox filled up was, in fact, patently un-Greg-like, but I did not let myself think about alternative explanations. I had been waiting to hear from him for some guidance before I undertook a few revisions to our introduction. On July 5, we all learned the terrible truth – a heart attack left Greg in a coma, which led to his death on Canada Day.
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by David Webster
This blog is cross-posted on David Webster’s website.
The Asian-African Conference Bulletin, published daily during the African-Asian conference at Bandung in April 1955, 65 years ago, is a significant and unused source in international history. In its pages, as much as in the conference hall around it, was born the idea of Asian-African solidarity and non-alignment. The Bulletin and other sources from the conference are now digitized as an e-dossier at historybeyondborders.ca (a new web site to which CNNH members and readers are invited to contribute).
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by Helen Kennedy
As everyone’s inboxes and newsfeeds are flooded with announcements of cancellations and postponements of all things academic and otherwise, it is nice to have the opportunity to announce the start of something.
The Canadian Network on Humanitarian History and Carleton University’s Department of History have partnered with five Canadian NGOs to conduct historically grounded work relevant to each organization. With matching funding provided by a MITACS Accelerate grant, Dr. Dominique Marshall and Helen Kennedy (PhD candidate) are aiming to demonstrate how micro-histories of individual organizations can be used to address global humanitarian challenges and effectively contribute to the future of humanitarian networks.
Continue readingBy Sandrine Murray
Julie Delahanty’s voice softens remembering Meyer Brownstone, a knowing smile spreading across her face: “the world we know is a much, much better place for having him in it,” the executive director of Oxfam says, ending her speech.
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by Greg Donaghy
This article is cross-posted with the permission of the Bill Graham Centre of Contemporary International History.
On November 14th the Graham Centre marked the launch of A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid, a University of Calgary Press publication, edited by Centre Director Greg Donaghy and David Webster of Bishop’s University. The launch took the form of a lively and well-attended panel discussion that featured two contributors to the volume, David Black of Dalhousie University and Stephen Brown of the University of Ottawa, as well as Margaret Biggs, former President of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the 2019-2020 Graham Centre / Massey College Visiting Scholar in Foreign and Defence Policy. The discussion and an invigorating Q & A was moderated by Donaghy.
David Black’s opening remarks highlighted the historic relationships between Canadian aid policy-makers and the university community. Early aid, dominated by technical assistance programs, drew regularly on university researchers for expertise. From the 1960s to the 1980s, universities also provided a supportive if not uncritical constituency for ODA.
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Our Advisory Group member, Professor Dominique Marshall, has recently notified us that with the assistance of Dr Sarah Glassford, historian of the Canadian Red Cross, selected materials from the Canadian Red Cross archives have now been deposited in the Archives and Special Collections of Carleton University’s MacOdrum Library (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada).
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CNHH members Jill Campbell-Miller and Kevin Brushett at the recent Annual General Meeting of the BCCIC. The following blog from BCCIC focuses on the presentation given by Dr. Campbell-Miller regarding the history of the BCCIC as an organization. Dr. Brushett’s presentation, not featured in the blog to follow, spoke about the history of international cooperation in Canada more generally. Continue reading
By Sandrine Murray
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- On the occasion of the celebrations of 40th anniversary of the Year of the Child, the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History used the archives of the Landon Pearson Resources Centre for the Study of Children and Children’s Rights (LPC) to prepare an exhibition on the report.
The United Nations proclaimed 1979 the International Year of the Child (IYC). Back then, television was the technology of the day, colour broadcasting introduced only a few years prior. No one could predict the arrival or impact of social media on children decades later. But how they viewed children’s rights at the time set a standard for today. Continue reading
