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The Call is Coming from Across the Border: The University of Toronto in Black Christmas (1974) and Black Christmas (2019)

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  [image: Mental Floss ] Filmed at the University of Toronto, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas (1974), has important connections to Canadian politics and feminist history. While we’re often reminded that Roe v. Wade, a significant US legal decision, coincided with the year of the film’s release, the Morgentaler   trials were the more relevant and timely news event in Canada — where the film was made and initially released — and crucial to the development of that country’s federal abortion laws. These trials occurred after Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau (who would become a two-time PM and father of the current PM) successfully passed a bill decriminalizing abortion, contraception, and homosexuality (for more information, see this helpful description courtesy of The University of Toronto). Focusing on the visceral horror of forced birth rather than “medical privacy,” the Morgentaler trials secured abortion rights in Canada (although abortion access remains a problem in many regio...
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About This Blog

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Image: British History Online This blog is about two things: the ways that history stays with us in the present, and the ways that history is represented and discussed in popular culture. It is is inspired by two figures from literature that remind us that the past is always with us. Who is Anne*? Anne of Oxford Street appears in Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater . According to De Quincey, she was a real woman—so young, that today she would be called a teenager —he befriends after leaving boarding school for London. Having never known her last name, in its place he gives us the street where they spent time as impoverished youths. Anne is a woman of the streets, a kind-hearted prostitute who cares for the author. He vows to return to her and repay her kindness, but on returning to London, is unable to find her. With only her common Christian name, he wanders hopelessly through the streets of London in search of her. He imagines her coming to so...
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“History Lives in Us Whether We Learn it or Not,” Part 3: What Happens When You Don’t Learn it

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Popular culture presents history as a series of technological improvements and corporate powers as heroic improvers of society. The stories historians tell are often less simplistic, but also, strangely, less likely to be believed. Education occupies an uneasy place in North American culture, and this is why history itself, as an academic discipline, is a central preoccupation of Severance. In episode 1, at the anti-dinner party hosted by his sister and brother-in-law, we learn that the protagonist is himself a historian of WW1 and a former professor. This scene is a painful reminder of our collective lack of historical sense, and of the reduction of general education in history to rote facts and interesting anecdotes with no real value to our current moment except to amuse ourselves. (image from Metawitches ) Upon learning of Mark’s area of expertise, a guest attempts to starts a conversation about it. Guest: Oh, okay. Well, I got one for you. I was just reading this think piec...
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