The Opener | How the past informs our communities’ potential

The Potentiality inspires and educates passionate community builders.

One of the ways we do this is by featuring organizations (businesses, social enterprises, schools, and non-profits) that are doing cool things to build community. This month, we are focusing on ActiveHistory.ca, a website that connects the work of historians with the wider public and the importance of the past to current events. ActiveHistory.ca enhances community potential.

ActiveHistory.ca has pretty much everything a seeker of stories and context could ask for. There is even a great article about “Christmas Traditions of Past and Present” by Jay Young, one of the website’s Editors.

Part 1 – The Context | What is ActiveHistory.ca’s unique value proposition and how do you deliver on it?

ActiveHistory.ca is a website that connects the work of historians with the wider public and the connects the past to current events. It was launched with support by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian History, and York University.

Jim Clifford, Tom Peace, Christine McLaughlin, Jay Young, and Ian Milligan co-founded ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 an effort to facilitate and disseminate the ideas developed at the conference “Active History: History for the Future” at Glendon College in September 2008. The team behind ActiveHistory.ca define active history variously as:

history that listens and is responsive; history that will make a tangible difference in people’s lives; history that makes an intervention and is transformative to both practitioners and communities.

ActiveHistory.ca’s collaborators seek a practice of history that emphasizes collegiality, builds community among active historians and other members of communities, and recognizes the public responsibilities of the historian.

Young argues that ActiveHistory.ca got started at the right time; for example, the contexts of technology, a younger generation of graduate students and emerging scholars who had grown up with the web, and the growth of social media all contributed to the project’s growth. “I remember a colleague early on asking me what ActiveHistory.ca was going to do that was different,” said Young. “At that point, I realized it could be the first group blog (that I knew of) specializing in historical issues in Canada, and we were lucky that a generation of energetic young scholars and public historians were happy to write for us, which slowly helped build our reputation, which I think helped sway some older scholars to start writing for us.”

Part 2 – The Context | What community-based problems does ActiveHistory.ca help solve?

In general, History’s professional currency is peer-reviewed, conventional work. According to Milligan, ActiveHistory.ca began with the simple idea that the web could deliver quality, informed work, but Historians simply didn’t know how to deliver on it. “It was blogging, and social media, that really helped us achieve our mission.” There have been lots of active historians in the past, but the website seems to have created a lot of energy and enthusiasm for public engagement, too.

In addition to finding an online voice that blended academic discourse and social tools, there were other early motivations for the ActiveHistory.ca team. First, there was a need to address a perceived imbalance between the influence of economists in the public sphere; for example, historians don’t get as many interviews as the chief economist at RBC (while they are making headway, the team acknowledges that they haven’t yet supplanted as many expert talking heads as they’d like). Second, being community driven was equally central to ActiveHistory’s initial ideas, especially the conference that launched the project in 2008.

According to Peace, “it’s also worthwhile emphasizing that ActiveHistory.ca emerged during an upswing in the public’s and media’s focus on history-related public policy.” For ActiveHistory, the Discover Canada guide – which provided new immigrants with a basic overview of Canadian history – was a debut focus, highlighting issues around heritage-related public policy, and it remains a regular subject on the site. Some historians saw Discover Canada as promoting a new, conservative vision of Canadian past.

Indeed, a strong case can be made for the Harper government being a big help for ActiveHistory.ca over the years, as they’ve signalled a desire to reshape Canada’s historical consciousness, while at the same time cutting funding to Library and Archives Canada, providing some political flashpoints that both brought people to write for ActiveHistory.ca and many more to read these posts.

From the editors’ perspectives, the website has been most successful promoting public engagement among historians. Ideally, further public engagement in academic historical issues and ideas will challenge the traditional knowledge dissemination methods for scholars, such as peer-reviewed articles and books.

While articles provide a specialized venue to exchange and develop ideas, historians typically use more complicated terms that you might have to explain a bunch to the general public. And peer-reviewed books play a sort of hybrid function, in that they’re both a specialized venue but also an attempt to engage the public. At the end of the day, though, they’re clearly scholarly works with limited audiences, are expensive to produce, not well marketed, and all the rest of it – thinkers aren’t going to reach the public this way, but it’s what counts in academia.

Through social sharing and inclusive thinking, ActiveHistory.ca brings learning to a much broader audience that is eager to think and talk about how the context of current events and ideas.

Part 3 – The Community Potential | How does ActiveHistory.ca build community?

With humility, ActiveHistory.ca inspires people. To get an idea of the scale of their operation, here is a list of the outputs ActiveHistory.ca provides the Internet:

• 3-4 blog posts a week from editors, regular contributors and one-time contributors
• podcasts
• book reviews written by people outside of the academic history profession
• social sharing through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and all the rest of it
• public events, such as the History Matters series of public lectures in Toronto Public Libraries, which is now entering its fourth year in early 2014
• partnerships, such as Approaching the Past, a series of seminars for high school history teachers co-organized by ActiveHistory.ca and the History Education Network

The website also demonstrates that blogging isn’t too dangerous – recall that as recent as five years ago, the word on the street was that blogging could kill your career. This is could be true if you write ridiculous nonsense on your blog, but that’s not really the medium’s fault – lots of things can kill someone’s career within or beyond academia.

People can look at the stable of contributors, see recognizable names, see careers that have grown out of it, see well-received publications, and see incredibly apt discussions about contemporary events and ideas put in thoughtful historical context.

The same can be said for podcasts, which have become an increasingly regular feature over the past couple of years. The site’s podcast section features a wide variety of recorded lectures and conference panels from some of the top historians in the country. There is also the History Slam, a conversational podcast that tries to have fun with history while highlighting stories from the past. Among the 32 episodes already produced, some of the more popular one include the story of the Nantuck Brothers, interviews with passengers on Canada’s cross-country train, and a Prime Minister’s Fantasy Draft.

It’s a bit hokey, but many of the editors think that the group blog concept of ActiveHistory.ca makes blogging way less scary for people pursuing academic careers while providing communities an important public service.

Simply put, ActiveHistory.ca is a website that gets more public shout-outs than long-established academic journals. And this is a good thing.

The Closer | Impact happens because history matters

The team at ActiveHistory.ca combine academic thinking, approachable communication, non-traditional creativity, and pioneering leadership to create an online space that fosters both scholarly discourse and public engagement around historical issues. The website produces myriad credibility for everyone involved, as it is a springboard for professional potential, whether a contributor is focused on a career within or beyond the academy.

Community potential is absolutely enhanced with Historians leading conversations at the table of human wisdom, as opposed to hearing primarily from economists and political scientists as we so often do through the mainstream media. ActiveHistory.ca engages more people on more topics than conference papers, public lectures, scholarly publications, or textbooks (it has elements of all these things, too), and it is my sincere hope that the discipline of history is made to pivot into the powerful digital space that this website has created and join the conversation that ActiveHistory.ca has started.