Celebrating Three Years of ActiveHistory.ca

By Jim Clifford

Three years ago, in the lead up to the Canadian Historical Association meeting, Christine McLaughlin, Ian Milligan, Thomas Peace, Jay Young and I founded ActiveHistory.ca. At the time we were all graduate students in the history department at York University. The website emerged out of the Active History symposium held in September 2008. Having budgeted to disseminate the conference proceedings, we considered publishing an academic book or a special issue of a journal. But these options, we thought, seemed counter to the public outreach goals of the symposium. Instead we decided to launch a website that embodied the Active History mission, instead of simply publishing some of the essays presented at the workshop (though, Ian Milligan also worked with Left History to publish a special issue).

New Publication

The University of Pittsburgh Press Twitter Feed announced that a new book, Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America, edited by Stéphane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden, arrived from the printers yesterday. This is particularly exciting, as I’m publishing a chapter in the collection. My contribution, chapter 2, examines the importance of the River Lea in facilitating industrial development in West Ham: “The River Lea in West Ham: A River’s Role in Shaping Industrialization on the Eastern Edge of Nineteenth-Century London.”

Environmental History Mobile App

By Sean Kheraj and Jim Clifford

The Environmental History Mobile application has now landed in the Apple App Store! iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad users can now download and install this new mobile application on their devices. EH Mobile provides users with a single portal to connect with a wide range of global environmental history content on the internet. The app aggregates news, announcements, H-Environment messages, blogs, podcasts, the #envhist Twitter tag, and even Environmental History, the journal. This is a new way to connect with the environmental history community.

To download this app, simply search “Environmental History Mobile” in the Apple App Store or follow this link.

History vs. Geography and Sourcemap.com

First published on ActiveHistory.ca

The interactive map above, produced by Leo Bonanni, the CEO of Sourcemap.com, demonstrates the impressive power of geographical analysis in the early 21st century. The map shows the supply chains for a typical laptop computer and provides a fascinating insight into the complicated mix of natural resources and manufacturing labour needed. It raises questions about the environmental and social consequences of the computers that many of us interact with daily.

To what extent has geography emerged as a more powerful tool than history to shed light on the social and environmental consequences of today’s global economic and political systems?

West Ham 19th Century Industry Source Map

I am working on a paper for the American Society of Environmental History conference in Madison at the end of this month. The paper examines the global supply chains that fed factories in West Ham with raw materials throughout the nineteenth century. This included sugarcane for the Tate refinery, cinchona bark for making quinine, an antimalarial drug, at Howard & Sons, gutta-percha for making underwater telegraph cables in Silvertown, palm-oil and pot ash for making soap at the numerous soap works in the area. These industries also relied on local and British suppliers for coal and rendered animal fat, among other things. I’ve started playing with a web service called Source Map to map the network of trade that supplied West Ham’s factories and some of the places the manufactured goods were then exported to in the British world. I’ve not been super precise with the locations of the various factories and commodity frontiers in this early draft. [The map above continues to update as I work on this project. It is getting more accurate and more detailed than when I wrote the post below.]

I’d like to thank Devon Elliott (@devonelliott) for answering my Twitter question looking for a software or web service to map this trading network and turning me on to Source Map.