Pier Perspectives Blog

Whether entering the country by land, air or sea, returning Canadians, immigrants, temporary workers, students, and tourists must go through Canadian customs before being permitted to continue on their journey. Studies of immigration and ethnic history in Canada often overlook this vital part of a newcomer’s experience in Canada. This blog will introduce the historic role of customs officials in Canada, and share some of the more amusing anecdotes from experiences on the job.

When historians take a historical perspective, they must also remain mindful of the responsibilities they have as scholars to critically analyze, discuss, and remember historical events. What obligations are there for historians to recall sensitive and controversial historical events? Using our 2012 temporary exhibit, Shaping Canada: Exploring Our Cultural Landscapes as an example, we can see how awareness of the ethical dimension of historical interpretations plays an important part in research to support exhibit development.

Our histories will be distorted if we are looking at events through a present lens, so we follow the principle of taking historical perspectives. In the temporary exhibition, Shaping Canada, the Acadian case study gave us a challenge in adopting historical perspective. Acadie was not a place of pacifists in a modern sense. Instead, the geography of Acadian settlers in indigenous spaces, at or beyond the limits of empires and colonies, fostered a unique community.

Understanding how events are related, and establishing cause and consequence, is an important and difficult part of constructing history. In our temporary exhibition, Shaping Canada, we explored Sikh participation in public space in Canada. Racism contributed to exclusionary attitudes in Canada towards Sikhs, including in immigration policy—but stopping with racism as our only explanation misses many other contributing and complicating factors, like colonial histories, class, and the contemporary politics of secession and independence.

One day, a letter simply addressed to “Pier 21, Halifax, Nova Scotia,” arrived on my desk. The first line read, “I don’t know if anyone is ever going to read this.” In his letter, Bill Pineo described the experience of being a young soldier in 1940, waiting for his ship to depart from Pier 21 and to take him overseas to join the war effort. While the anxious soldiers were counting down to what might be their last glimpse of Canada, another vessel came alongside and suddenly there was music.

History is often seen by the public as the study of dates, names, places, and events. As a discipline, history is much more diverse and multilayered than many individuals realize. The discipline of history can be viewed as a complex interplay between continuity and change. Using our 2012 temporary exhibit, Shaping Canada: Exploring Our Cultural Landscapes as an example, this blog explains how identifying continuity and change is used in research to support exhibit development.

What sorts of sources do historians encounter when they research and write about history? In conducting research for a project, historians use primary and secondary sources. This blog explains what are primary sources and how they differ from secondary sources. Using our 2012 temporary exhibit, Shaping Canada: Exploring Our Cultural Landscapes as an example, we can see how primary sources are used in research to support exhibit development.

Figuring out what is significant in the past is an essential exercise for historians. In our temporary exhibition, Shaping Canada, we considered the case of Chinese Canadian veterans campaigning to overcome discrimination after the Second World War. Their activism gives us an opportunity to “test” for significance, and to affirm that their fight is an event of enduring national importance.

The temporary exhibit, Shaping Canada, presented museum historians with an opportunity to share with the public some of our process in thinking about and creating interpretations of the past. This post introduces a series of six further posts based on the Historical Thinking concepts, drawing on case studies in the exhibition as examples of how those key principles are realized in our work.