Searching for Life, Sustaining Life: The Rise of Food History

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Searching for Life, Sustaining Life: The Rise of Food History

News dropped this week of NASA’s “discovery” of a new planet outside our solar system, described by scientists as the “closest twin” to Earth found to date. If you haven’t heard the details just yet, a planet dubbed Kepler 452b was discovered using the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope. The newly found planet is about 60 per cent larger than Earth, which places it in a category of planets called super-Earth. Early reports suggest that the found planet is rocky and, very excitingly, may have an atmosphere similar to our own and fully capable of holding and producing water – the bloodline of life as we know it.

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Robot Historians and the Future of History

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Robot Historians and the Future of History

In a world where technology continues to advance at an incredible pace, each generation is exposed to new and powerful transformations. Facebook, Twitter, and Smartphones were all unimaginable changes to the ordinary person of 1995.  By 2035, maybe we will see an unrecognizable world changed by Virtual Reality, Solar Power, and who knows what else. So what might this incredible future hold for history?

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New Identities and the Cultural History of #GamerGate

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If you have an ear to the gaming world, you might have recently read about the #GamerGate campaign and the furious debate between its supporters and opponents. Both sides hold complex opinions that are blurred by the variety of individuals supporting them – it’s hard to pin down what each actually represents. The diversity of positions and actions taken in the name of one side or the other obscures any claims to the debate’s cohesion. To better understand #GamerGate, we turn to cultural historians to shed light on the problems raised by the messy divides of the newest “culture war” in 2014.

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Historians of Canada's First World War: What do we know?

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Recently, the Canadian Historical Review published a series of articles reviewing the state of First World War scholarship in Canadian history. This collection is great for scholars, but probably more difficult for the public to engage with it.  So, we’re going to talk about where Canadian historians stand on the First World War in 2014 – how does it compare to what you’ve read?

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Stuck in Time: A Call for the ‘Transtemporal’ Historian

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Historians are considered experts, not of all history but certainly of a particular subfield. There are those of us who study Canadian history, or British or Japanese history, and within those subfields are additional ‘areas of expertise,’ such as political, environmental, or economic history. The Canadianist is certainly not bound to a Canadian context, nor is she/he restricted to study specific subfields or genres. Nonetheless, and despite recent interest in adopting inclusive modes of inquiry, historians are generally taught to embrace a sense of familiarity in their work that derives from research focused both topically and temporally. Clio’s Current has previously explored issues related to national and regional identities, political and social histories, and inquiry-based methodologies, but given that we recently passed the one-year mark, it’s perhaps appropriate for us to investigate the impact of time on historical writing.

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Historical 'Authority' and the Value of the Oral Interview

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History is an ancient and ever varying discipline whose practitioners continually redefine the parameters of what constitutes ‘history proper’. Indeed, the very notion that there exists proper techniques to investigate the past has been ridiculed into complete obscurity by most. Today in Canada and elsewhere, historians reconstruct a past based on their personal reflections with an expansive and diverse body of evidence. Genres and subfields have been developed which allow historians to further delve into the individual and collective human experience, in hopes of finding nuance in the past. But each historian reconstructs a version of the past using methodologies that are unique as well as common. Clio’s Current provides insight into contemporary issues using historical perspective, and to do so we must continually reassess our understanding of historical methodology. In today’s post we further investigate the research kit of the historian, with a focus on the oral history interview.

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The Stress and Anxiety of Surviving Creativity

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We've recently been discussing the benefit of the Canadian Historical Association for bringing together historians and ideas. Having attended this year's meeting in St. Catherines, Ontario, it's clear that the CHA remains a fruitful space for scholars to debate new directions and the boundaries of our profession. To close out our discussion of the CHA, it's worthwhile to raise the darker side of conferences and grad student life. It is a topic that is often discussed behind closed doors or at least discreet whispers: anxiety. For graduate students anxiety is a fact of life and most, if not all, of us suffer from it.

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What is the Canadian Historical Association?

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Next week, the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) meeting is being held in St. Catherines, Ontario. For historians, it is an opportunity to gather and discuss Canada's history, but also to see colleagues who may normally work on the other side of the country. For young grad students, it's an opportunity to network and participate in the world of professional history and the changing landscape of academic scholarship. For non-historians, most of whom have probably never heard of it, it might sound like a boring conference. Next week we are going to offer some on-the-ground coverage of the CHA, but today let's introduce the origins of the organization and explore why it's so worthwhile to historians.

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Post-Modern Malaise and the Truth About Stories

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One of the most significant developments in academics in the last several decades is the rise of Post-Modernism. For the uninitiated, post-modernism questions the truth of everything – from social tradition to personal ritual, a post-modernist would argue that every aspect of human existence is constructed by human themselves. If everything is a construct, nothing is “true,” or we might say nothing is “real.” Post-modern historians have likewise questioned the value of history, since every fact or idea a historian has about the past represents their bias and the choices they make about how and what history they are presenting. But if it is so constructed, is history valuable? Today we examine our struggle with that question.

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Anyone Can Cook: AskHistorians and Engaging with History

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One of the recurring themes of Clio's Current is history in the digital age. As the existence of our blog suggests, we are continually trying to map out the space historians occupy in 2014 where we are no longer restrained to the “real world.” The virtual world of the internet is a diverse, complex and often chaotic space. Our blog is a “work in progress” as we seek to define these new boundaries. Regardless, there will always be a responsibility for historians to communicate history to the public. This post examines one aspect of the new digital “tool set” of historians, how we use it to fulfil that responsibility, and the online community where historians of all stripes are doing the same: /r/AskHistorians.

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Reflections on Clio's Current

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It has been almost three months since we launched Clio's Current.  We are about to introduce a four-part series where we explain our idea of history and its practice in the 21st century.  Before we do that, it is worthwhile to take a day and reflect on our time as authors of this blog.  We will examine our goals, the challenges and failures we've faced, and discuss our experience of blogging history.

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The Digital and Print Revolution

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All sorts of media are dealing with the consequences of the digital age. From movies and music, to newspapers and books, any industry involved in the distribution of media has been affected. There are signs that such changes are increasingly impacting the world of academic publishing, which might have an enduring effect on new scholars for years to come.

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History and Morality

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Conversation is an unavoidably personal way to educate others about history. That connection leads to serious questions about how we relay the facts about the past. Outside of the lengthy space of articles and books, we are forced to condense our thoughts and sometimes deal with complicated issues in simple ways. The most problematic are the historical events that reflect on the terrible nature of humankind – the wars, atrocities, the cruelty of one human being towards another. How do we discuss these issues in conversation? Or, how do we as historians deal with morality, let alone convey it to others? Is it our place to judge the past?

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The Study of History - and its Decline?

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Daniel Johnson has lamented in a recent article appearing in Standpoint Magazine that the study of history has reached an all-time low.  We agree that the ways in which politicians and the public at large value history is problematic, but we would argue that the fragmentation of history—from the grand narratives of Leopold von Ranke and Auguste Comte to the nuanced approaches to historical subjects—affords great insight into our place in the world and those who came before us. 

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