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Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Adam, thank you so much for getting in touch with me. I know that this COVID period, you already would have been in quarantine because you are working on the last part of your manuscript, and so I’m really excited that we are talking really as we’re moving into the summer. Before we begin, do you want to introduce yourself?

Adam Bunch:        Sure. I’m Adam Bunch. I’ve been working sort of on a variety of different public history-related projects over the last decade or so. I started with creation of a project called The Toronto Dreams Project, which does interventions in public space with little fictional dreams I write about figures from Toronto’s history that I then print on little cards and leave in public places that are somehow related to that person’s true history.

Each one has a URL so people who find the cards can then look up the card and find more true information about that historical figure. And that’s led to a lot of other things. So I’ve written a lot for Spacing magazine. I wrote a book called The Toronto Book of the Dead, and have a new one coming out called The Toronto Book of Love. And also host a little ambitious Canadian history YouTube series called Canadiana, where we travel across the country sort of looking for interesting stories and generally just try to engage with as many people as we can to teach more about their history and get them interested and excited and more knowledgeable about the place they live.

And this year too, I’ve been teaching a little bit at George Brown about the history of Toronto. Just in time for the pandemic to hit and everything to change drastically just as I was finally starting to get a handle on it.

SC:        Well, I think even veteran educators also were just was like, “Oh, I’m 20 years into it. I was just getting a handle on it,” and then [inaudible 0:03:46.3]. So I wouldn’t feel too bad about that. I want to say a couple things after that introduction. One, there is drilling outside your apartment. So anyone watching, that extra sound is just like an extra sound of the city. So that’s fine.

The second thing, I want to link to Julian Chambliss’ video that I did in early June about Afrofuturisms and how like thinking about other ways to engage in the past can really help us think through these narratives for the future. And that’s why I’ve always really liked The Toronto Dreams Project because I think that bringing in imagination and bringing in creative nonfiction can really help us think through the histories we want, the futures we want, and those meld together. Although we didn’t really plan on talking about this, can you talk about how that started?

AB:        Yeah. So my background was in screenwriting coming out of school. So I’ve always been writing fictions since I was a kid, and I was working downtown in Toronto in what is the oldest neighborhood of the city down by the St. Lawrence market and St. James Cathedral and sort of just being more immersed in the history every day. Sort of being surrounded by plaques and older buildings than a lot of Toronto has.

And it was actually, yeah, 10 summers ago now when Banksy visited Toronto and was doing stenciled art around the city, which there was one on an old historic building on the Esplanade that I went to go see at lunch one day from my dreary nine to five job. And it was neat. Banksy is cool. He doesn’t need stuff. But it struck me that it looked so much like the same stuff he’d done in Melbourne like the month before. That there was no reason it needed to be in Toronto at all or on this particular historic building. And at the same time, I’ve been writing these absurdist little short stories that were sort of dreamlike.

It struck me that making them about historical figures would be a way to give them more meaning. And I always liked the idea of engaging with public places, but I am far too much of a coward to go paint on the side of a building. So making those dreams about historical figures in Toronto making them something with sort of placed-based meaning and being able to leave them somewhere so that somebody could engage with them in that place and sort of maybe interrupt their day a little bit and remind them that there’s this history happening.

And in a way, that’s hopefully interesting and engaging, and a little different, and sort of breaks that myth everyone always talks about about history being boring and being lists of dates and events. That by doing these sort of dreamlike short stories sort of highlight the fact that historical figures were human beings with passions and dreams quite literally, and nightmares just like us is hopefully, yeah, a way to hook people and interrupt their days and get them thinking more about the history of place in a city, in a country where so frequently people sort of forget that it has a history just like everywhere else. And yeah, hopefully, doing it in sort of a strange engaging way to then draw them in, follow those URLS, hopefully get interested in that person and their…

SC:        Oh, you paused. Could you say again get interested in that person and then whatever you said after that?

AB:        So hopefully, by finding the dreams, get interested in that historical figure and be more interested in learning the true stories sort of behind the dream and learn more about the place where they live.

Yeah, sorry. And I’ve also sort of taken it around the world. Gone across Europe and the UK and other cities in Canada sort of helping to hopefully sort of bridge the geographical divide too. It’s easy to just focus on what happened in Toronto when you’re talking about Toronto history or in Canada when talking about Canadian history. And I think a lot of stories that happened somewhere else, but that had deep meaning to this place, especially this city and this country which is so much a collection of people from around the world that hopefully kind of uses new digital media to, yeah, be able to bring that history to people where they are and that history to people in Toronto realize that we’re connected to the history around the world.

SC:        Yeah. One of the things I like to talk about is the how important it is in Canada that we think of our histories as transnational histories? Like the more we just think of it as like the stories of this place, we are losing all of the connections across many nations like nations within this land in Canada, but also the many different places that so many people came from.

And it’s always been really cool because I know that you’ve done some traveling to be able to see those linkages. And, of course, I’ll put your website down below and links to all the stuff that you do so people can explore that. And it’s interesting because a few of the videos that I did like in the last week, we talked about geographies related to history. So it’s kind of a nice — I’m glad you’re here now. It’s like a nice kind of intersection between some of the conversations we’re having.

So let’s get started with the first question, which is have you thought about history any different because of this moment? And people’s responses to this have kind of shifted, but I think of those early days of lockdown and I had to leave my house and I’m walking in my neighborhood and I’m looking around at these buildings and thinking our histories never kind of pick up on these multi-layered emotions and anxieties that everyone is feeling. And so, how do we capture that in our teaching and learning? So it made me rethink or kind of solidify things I was already thinking about history. Have you thought of history any different because of this moment? Have there been any moments like that during this time that have caused you to think well differently?

AB:        Yeah, I think you’re right that it adds a lot of depth and opens up reminders. Like intellectually, of course, I’ve always known. And anybody who spends a lot of time thinking about history knows that it’s an ongoing process and something that’s always happening and that we’re living through it no matter what’s happening. Even the most privileged people in the world are part of historical processes and events, but usually, it’s not so viscerally obvious as it is right now. So that’s something that has strongly been striking me that like you cannot ignore the fact that we’re all part of a major historical event, or two, with the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. And, you know, we’ll see what happens over the next year or two that sort of reminds you a lot of things. It makes you viscerally and emotionally realize things that you might know intellectually and I think provides sort of a nearly universal touchdown in a way we haven’t had much of during our lifetimes.

That this is something that definitely the pandemic changes people in different ways depending on their circumstances and their privileges, but it’s certainly an event that we’ll all remember for the rest of our lives and can also provide a connection because of that to people who are maybe realizing that history is more relevant than they had been given to think up until this point. That so much of what I spent my time thinking about is how to reach people who aren’t history students, who aren’t history nerds like us who have grown up maybe not without the best history teachers who do think of it as something irrelevant to their daily lives. That dusty old books and lists of events and names, and maybe are new Canadians or thinking a lot of my students at George Brown or international students who don’t feel the same kind of ownership of Toronto history as people who have been here longer might, but this is an event that makes it clear that history is relevant and is an ongoing process.

So telling people a story about the Spanish Flu right now gets some a lot more engaged than it did a year ago because people can see that what we’re going through is something similar to past events, and that there are no relevant lessons to be learned. That don’t always translate exactly, but are clearly something that we can be learning from, and something that the Black Lives Matter protests drives home as well. That at the end of my course at George Brown, I sort of tried to — in fact, the whole way through the course showed that history was an ongoing process and that definitions are always changing. That [inaudible 0:13:47.2*thrown away] from being a place that was very specifically founded to be just the British and white and Protestant. But that over the last 200 years, people have broadened that definition of what it means to be Torontonian, what it means to be Canadian, and that that’s been a struggle that people in power haven’t just handed over more rights and more of an inclusive identity without having struggling. People in the streets, and rebellions, and protests.

And that’s something too that this particular moment in history makes viscerally more obvious when people can see what’s happening in the streets, and with police forces, and people in power, and debates that are happening at City Council. That it’s something that has been struggled for in a way that you can still see happening. That it becomes more obvious than ever within our lifetimes anyway. And at least within my own privileged position, that it is an ongoing process and that history is a communal undertaking that we’re all building all the time. And I think this moment sort of gives us an opportunity to connect with people who might not always have realized that themselves. That history is something that’s deeply important and happening all the time.

SC:        Yeah, thanks for that. There’s a couple things there that I really just want to like highlight. And one is what you said kind of early on about like we may have intellectually known something, but like this moment of crisis or these crises have allowed us to kind of think through these more viscerally? And I think that’s just like a really nice thing to pull up about like the different ways we come to know things and then like the different ways we come to know history.

Like I remember talking to one of the teachers, and I was like, sometimes you’re just sitting in a classroom as a student, and you’re like, this doesn’t feel right. You might not have like the words for it because you don’t know the history, but you know the feeling. And so when you know it intellectually, but are coming to know the feeling, I think that’s kind of like an interesting kind of articulation and articulating it in relation to the work that you do about these like these dreams and this creative nonfiction related to history kind of tapped into why engage in with stories of the past are important on these different levels because it does help you get to know on different levels.

AB:        Yeah. I think once you realize sort of viscerally and emotionally, that you’re a historical figure —

SC:        Mm.

AB:        — and like in 100 years, people are going to be talking about this moment the way that we talk about things that happened 100 years ago where the Spanish Flu and things like that. And they help highlight the fact that people in the past might not have lived in the same world as us or been identical to the way we think, but that they were rounded real human beings who had feelings, and passions, and emotions which is something I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few months as I finish up The Toronto Book of Love, which talks about romance, and marriage, and scandal through Toronto’s history as a way, hopefully, of highlighting that exact thing. That people are and always have been these passionate, loving, hating emotional beings.

And that one way to get people more interested and more engaged with history is by highlighting that back and reminding them that people from the past weren’t entirely different than us. It wasn’t just a bunch of stodgy old white dudes who just passed legislation or went off to war and fought. Well laid out diagrammed battles. It’s all messy and in a similar way to this moment. They didn’t know what was going to happen next just like we don’t. They had feelings and emotions about everything that was happening, more passionately invested in those historical events.

And then if you can sort of tease up some of that emotion, whether it’s by telling love stories or talking about what kind of dreams they might have had, then hopefully, you’re able to, yeah, hook people who might not otherwise get hooked.

SC:        Yeah. Julian Chambliss, as I mentioned before who was talking about Afrofuturisms, he was like, when we bring in narratives, he’s like, “I like comic books, but like maybe you like romance. Like you can do that with that type of narrative too.” And so I think that’s like an interesting way. I’m excited for your next book because I think it is nice to be able to bring in those very affective, those very emotional narratives.

The other thing I want to say about your first answer is when you’re like, when you said it’s always been a struggle to define Toronto and define who and what Toronto is, and that struggle never ended, right? It’s an ongoing struggle. And I think that was just kind of a nice way to articulate something that a lot of people have talked about in the series that it will help young people in particular understand themselves as historical actors, but also within historical continuum. And I really like the way you articulated that, so I just wanted to like highlight that. Thank you.

AB:        Great.

SC:        Great.

AB:        [inaudible 0:19:31.6*I bet it would.]

SC:        So first, I just want to say that there’s like a half-naked man across my balcony, so I’d look up and I was like, oh, that’s — all right, just city living. I will edit this part out obviously.

So this makes me think then about my second question about do you think we will teach history differently after this moment? Do you think maybe becoming more aware of different layers of history or different histories that we might find kind of relevant or educators who already helped people think about their sense of being in a historical moment, of being historical actor? Do you think those will translate into the ways we teach and learn history? And I mean that in both formal like classrooms, but also informal settings like the public history work that you do, the Dreams Project, the documentary series. Any sort of way to ‘mobilize’ the past? Do you think we’re going to do that any different after this moment?

AB:        Sorry, you are breaking.

SC:        Which part?

AB:        Sorry, you are breaking up so I didn’t get most of that.

SC:        Oh, you didn’t get most of that. Okay. I mean, the question is —

AB:        [inaudible 0:20:50.0] you may want to repeat the whole.

SC:        Okay, repeat the whole thing.

AB:        Not only the second half.

SC:        It might be just easier for editing if I repeat the whole first half too. So do you think the ways that we might teach history might change after this moment? Do you think being maybe more aware of how we are historical actors or the ways that we are more attuned to wanting to hear certain histories like the Spanish Flu, do you think the ways that we’re going to teach history might change after this moment? And I do mean that in a very like broad way. It’s like it could be formal like a K-12 history classroom or university classroom, but it could also mean informal like the documentary series that you work on, or the Dreams Project. Anyways that we ‘mobilize’ the past, do you think we’re going to do that differently after this moment? Do you think we should?

AB:        I think it has highlighted, hopefully, that idea of history as a process and something that continues all along. And so I’ve been thinking a lot more about that and what that will mean to people who are alive right now. That it’s sort of more obvious to more people that that’s what happens. And I have seen some great examples.

I can’t remember who it was, but someone on Twitter was talking about having their students sort of talk about what historical artifacts would sum up this time for people in the future like beyond masks or placards sort of what things in the world right now would tell that story for the future and thinking through things like that. Like how is this moment being made into history? Whose stories are going to get told about this moment into the future? All those kind of processes are laid bare right now that you can sort of see the inner workings of history and how like that’s made in a way that isn’t as obvious to everyone all the time that hopefully opens up some new possibilities for sort of teaching people about historiography and getting them engaged even if they’re not hardcore history people or history students.

And I think, two, it creates that visceral connection that is an opportunity to reach people who might not have been reached before in ways they might not have been reached. It makes it kind of obvious which examples. Like the story of the Spanish Flu is so much more relevant to people now, and use that as a way into telling other stories and use it as an example of certain processes and that kind of thing.

And on a practical level, we’re all being forced to reach our students or audiences in different ways since we can’t physically be with them. So certainly, I think there are a lot of drawbacks of that and a lot of negatives to being forced online against our wills, but hopefully gives us a chance to learn some things that once we’ve returned to being able to reach people directly, we’ll have more tools in our toolbox than we might have had otherwise once we return to something closer to normal.

I think about one of my students, after we moved online at the very end of term, just mentioned that she found online discussion for her to — since a lot of my students are new Canadians or international students, speaking out loud in front of the group is something that was harder for her than being able to type on an online discussion board, which was a reminder both to do a better job always of making people feel more comfortable in person, but also the idea of opening up as many different avenues for people to engage with history. That some methods will reach some people and engage them better than other methods.

So that, hopefully, online is something that can engage some people rather than just a focus on in-person. That would be able to sort of give people more ways of choosing how they’re going to engage with material. And that’s really something that with the Dreams Project, and the Canadiana, the documentary series that I’ve been doing for a while trying to leverage new media to talk about old stories that even now, I’m going to have to rethink now the books and I’m finally going to get to go back to telling current stories and working on Twitter and Facebook and trying to reach people that way in new ways.

So I think this moment is just going to kind of force us to teach in different ways and develop some new skills and methods. And hopefully, we have to probably be careful that that becomes a positive thing and something that adds to the ways of teaching instead of moving everything online and seeing it as a cheaper, faster, more explorative way of doing things, but that there are real opportunities there to reach people in new ways now that we’re sort of being forced to learn them.

SC:        John Heckman, the Tattooed Historian, I did a talk with him and he was like — it’s hard to kind of explain like who he is. He’s like a brand. Like a history brand, but he wouldn’t call himself a public historian, although I would. And he said that like this could be a real creative boom during this time for public history in particular and like he really hopes it’s not a bubble that it will burst after this.

And when I talked to Kat Akerfeldt from the Toronto’s First Post Office, when I talked to Joe McGill from the Slave Dwelling Project, they both were like, like this is a moment that can change the narratives of a lot of like public history spaces. And Joe McGill from the from the Slave Dwelling Project, he was saying too that like — so he goes to different slave dwellings and he sleeps there, and he does interpretation about the lives of those who are enslaved in those spaces, and he said that some African-Americans, some Black audience members would not go to those events because they didn’t want to be in those spaces, but the online interpretation can allow them to learn from and do some healing with the interpretation of those spaces they’ll having to go.

And like it’s kind of interesting the possibilities, like the things coming up in the cracks of these things. Like, sure, we’re rushing and we’re doing it and it doesn’t seem comfortable and it seems like, sure, let’s just do it faster, cheaper, but like there’s some really kind of interesting possibilities that are coming from this moment, these creative possibilities, which is pretty exciting.

AB:        And it’s something a lot of my work is centered around physical locations and geography, and psychogeography, and going to the place and sort of trying to function as [inaudible 0:28:32.2] a portal for people online who can’t necessarily get to that place now and people are stuck at home so much, but like I’d go live a dream. One of my cards in a physical location. Mostly around Toronto, but as I said, I’ve gone across the UK and Europe last summer. Going to those physical locations and then using the moment I drop the dream as a way of reaching an audience that isn’t in that physical location with the story of that location.

So when I leave a dream somewhere, the person who finds it in that place hopefully engages with the story and goes and follows the URL. But in some ways, even more important than that is the fact that I’m posting it on Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram and, therefore, able to reach thousands of people. One person might find the dream, but thousands of people who follow on social media get connected to that place whether it’s a dream I leave at Fork York in Toronto, which is an obvious historical site or an obscure like a graveyard in Rome where Toronto historical figures, talents are buried. And you can tell the story of how their time in Rome ended up influencing their work in Toronto and how Lauren Harris’s house built by a woman who is a modernist architect who basically only ever got to build one building and it’s Lauren Harris’s house.

Because she was a woman and a modernist before her time, learned data architectural study in Rome and being able to tie people to that location and that place in a way they might not get to do themselves and sort of unite the digital world and physical locations, which is something that’s exciting about this moment, which is so unexciting in so many ways is that it does sort of open that up and make that more important and more something everybody’s sort of dealing with and figuring out ways to do like something where you might have only done it in person for a small audience because its location-based may be forced to stream online, reach a wider audience that might dig up some lessons and some ways of reaching broader audiences and finding new ways of telling stories that will hopefully be useful tools in the future.

SC:        I said this earlier that a theme that’s been becoming up in these later talks is a focus on like geographies and space. And I’m here, I’m talking about history not so much geography, but like it’s really that was just going to like do another series for the next month. I would want to like think about place related to this moment. Like how can we — like connection to spaces, and places are important. And I think your work really demonstrates that. So when we can’t do that, when we are located in this space someplace, how can we still revere another space and place? And like those are historical questions. And so, like thank you for contributing to that kind of meta-conversation that some of the series have had.

AB:        Yeah, it is a particularly challenging moment for that. To be able to connect with our histories so frequently involves being in the place where something happened or seeing the artifact with our own eyes. But I think you can sort of create that kind of connection online if you do it well, and it’s something I think we’re all sort of being forced to learn right now.

SC:        Well, and sometimes there is a real argument for still engaging in spaces and places during this time. Like I talked to — I mean, again, I’m going to mention Julian Chambliss’ talk because I feel like there are some really nice connections. We were talking about Juneteenth, which is a holiday in the States, and about how like people going out right now to protest for Black Lives Matter really echoes a lot of the celebrations for Juneteenth throughout the last 150 or so years because it is a way of marking your presence in public places and spaces. And so it’s kind of interesting the way space and geography are working in this moment related to history in ways that, like I said, didn’t really come up at the beginning part of the series.

I also just want to highlight that you’re the first person to say the word historiography on this series. But like, when we think about teaching history, you’re right. This is a moment to teach historiography. And I think that’s a really kind of interesting point. So thanks for being the first.

AB:        Yeah, it does sort of lay bare the workings of historiography. It makes it sort of clearer to everyone. They might not be seeing it themselves, but it’s an opportunity for people who are already thinking of it all the time to point it out and how these things are made. And you’re right too. Like this moment highlights maybe even more how much place is important, and that we can use the digital world to highlight those places and point out how important it is for us to be out and about and taking to the streets and physically being somewhere demanding change and engaging with those places, which is something it’s really easy to forget in Toronto in particular, which is a city that’s earned its reputation for not really valuing its history where so much of our built heritage and archeological heritage has been destroyed and can feel like a blank canvas so often.

But by sort of engaging with it digitally by digging up archival images and highlighting the fact that these are, even if the house has been destroyed, it’s still a place, that corner, still holds that history. That our street names still bear our colonial past in a lot of cases. And that by talking about those physical locations online, you can sort of highlight how important that physical built and archaeological heritage is and sort of engage with people, teach them about it so that when they’re returning to those places around their pandemic walks, they can be more aware of it than they might otherwise be.

SC:        I feel like this is a good moment to go to my third question, which isn’t a smooth segue, but I think this is a good moment to kind of shift because my last question is about imagining a new ‘we’. Do you think that this moment will allow us to imagine a new we? And the reason why I think this is kind of a good moment to like shift to that is because wes are imagined in a lot of different ways, but also into our proximity to spaces and places.

So do you think that we will get a chance to kind of have greater circles of inclusion of who we understand to be part of a we and that we can shift our notion of we and inclusion to be more inclusive?

AB:        Yeah, and especially in just the question right now because I think that answer is maybe shifted over the last few weeks. That it’s not just about the pandemic now. This moment in history is more than just that with the Black Lives Matter protest and the fact that everyone is having to confront sort of the past in ways they might not have had to before and very specifically in terms of that we end up becoming a more inclusive we.

That when you talk about the history of Toronto particular, in Canada in general, that process of that widening of we speak so directly to the history of this place over the last few 100 years through colonialism and that this place in this city especially was built to be a very, very narrow we that only British white protestants were going to be part of that we and that people have fought to expand that definition. And in Toronto, it’s broader than it is in a lot of places and across Canada too. And this moment made it clear that it’s not nearly wide enough and that we need to keep fighting to expand that definition. And that I think already is broader than it was last week or two weeks ago that people are having to confront that and having to redefine it. And even people who felt like their we was all-encompassing or realizing they still have work to do and that the way we tell our stories needs to keep evolving. That you don’t get to a point where you’re just like, oh, yeah. Now my stories that I’m telling are broad enough and inclusive enough —

SC:        We did it!

AB:        Yeah. No matter how far you’ve gone, you need to keep going and keep learning, listening and keep talking, and keep doing your best and ever-evolving best. And that, yeah, there haven’t been many moments in our lifetimes where that’s been more obvious than it is right now and that needs to keep changing. And that history is a way of highlighting that. That a lot of people I think, like people who are not history people, old high school friends and other friends have been talking about this dawning on them now how important history is.

And if we want to understand what’s happening now, how things have ended up this way, and how we can change them most importantly, then it’s really important to be telling stories of how it all got to be this way and those stories of the past. And that people are realizing things about Canada and Toronto that they haven’t necessarily realized before, that this is a place that was built in part on slave labor. Hopefully, giving opportunities to talk about that, talk about how that definition of we has changed over time so that people understand better how to keep changing it and hopefully accelerate that change, and hopefully bring up our colonial past, and genocide, and nation-to-nation relationships, and all those things that people might not have felt in their day-to-day lives was as viscerally important to them in their privileged space as it feels now. Now that we’ve got a moment where it’s in the news all the time and feeling Twitter feeds. And that people, when they’re not running around after their kids and trying to work and childrear all at the same time, aren’t just spending their time in bars or in theaters or wherever else they are. That this is a moment where more people maybe are having a chance to reflect on that and learn more about the place where they live and how it’s come to be the way it is.

And once you start seeing those repeating historical patterns, that this isn’t, oh, just something that once Canada abolished slavery, everything was good. That you can see that these struggles have been going on and are continuing that hopefully wakes people up to the reality of what it means to be Canadian in ways that aren’t just patting yourself on the back for peacekeeping and multicultural policies and realizing that it is a struggle that we all need to be a part of.

SC:        Well, and as I’m sure you know, Canada didn’t abolish slavery, right? Like the British Empire abolished slavery, and Canada was just like part of [inaudible 0:41:22.8]. Like we need to be aware of like how our country was designed to be a country for White Protestants as a way to help rebuild a narrative that makes sense of the white supremacy and the racism built into so much of the politics and structures of the world that we live in. And that some people, people like myself and like you who identify as white aren’t as aware of as other people who are racialized, right?

AB:        Yeah. And it’s a past — especially in public discourse and with people who aren’t paying not much attention to history is just ridiculously white-washed. That story of the underground railroad gets told. People mention on Simcoe Day in Toronto and parts of Ontario that he abolished slavery, which is not the story at all because he filled his parliament with people who enslaved other people and who forced compromise and had it gradually phased out over time instead of abolished. And, yeah, that it didn’t get abolished till 40 years later when the British Empire abolished it. That Johnny MacDonald got reparations for his father-in-law’s slavery being taken away from him and given freedom to people who have been enslaved is not something that gets talked about. And a lot of the stories of how that continued.

I’m working on a Twitter thread right now about how Toronto and other cities in Canada became [inaudible 0:43:13.6] of support for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, which is 30 years after slavery was ended here. But [inaudible 0:43:20.6] who supported it. Still, people who fought for the south and who upheld the idea of slavery even decades after it ended here and those people were leading figures in the city. Most Canadian newspapers were on the side of the south. There are still streets and schools named after them to this day, which is something I think most Canadians haven’t realized and is hopefully beginning to change a little bit.

And so this is a moment where we can reach wider audiences with those stories and hopefully, help change people’s perspectives of Canada because I think a lot of people think of it as a finished product that we’re more much cultural than other places. So great for us and well done. And if anybody has any complaints about that, then they’re just dredging up old stories that aren’t relevant till today and is just viscerally and obviously untrue. And hopefully people are realizing that more through those stories of how it continued. And that, yeah, it was tweeted last week about the fact that Canada had slavery for like 29 years less than the United States did, which is not something most Canadians understand at all, and that’s just one example among many of obviously our disturbing past that people who have been engaging with the material know, of course, and people in the wider world don’t seem to understand nearly enough.

SC:        Well, and of course, I’ll make sure that there’s a link to your Twitter account below the video, and that perhaps that thread will have been published by the time this video goes up and so people can read that. That’s so interesting. I’m looking forward to reading that thread myself.

Thank you so much, Adam, for this really great talk. I just want to like pull together a couple things that you said, especially because this is kind of the end of this series for the summer and I think these are kind of nice ideas to kind of pull together to think about like teaching history after this moment as a historiography of the ways a struggle for we, a ‘we’ has become — like the ways that there has constantly been a struggle for we I think can be a really interesting way to kind of explore a lot of these ideas because a lot of educators don’t know these histories and what I’ve always said is like, that’s okay. Just be like, let’s learn it together, right?

And so thinking of your classroom or your other like history spaces as learning with your students, the historiography, like how stories get constructed, and therefore, what gets left out thinking about how a ‘we’ gets imagined through various discourses I think is really powerful. So thank you so much for bringing all of that to this conversation.

AB:        Yeah. I think they’re fascinating, interesting stories and that has been a central thread in the history of Toronto in Canada. Something I’ve been learning a lot about with Toronto Book of Love. Stories I didn’t necessarily know about. The first bill ever introduced in upper Canadian history was to expand the definition of marriage because it was such a narrow protestant institution in the beginning. You can follow that fed for 200 years of people fighting for the right to love and marry who they wanted and that those are ongoing processes in so many different parts of our lives and everyone’s lives.

SC:        And remind us when The Book of Love will be out.

AB:        It’ll be out in January, pandemic allowing. Just in time for Valentine’s Day next year.

SC:        And, of course, as The Book of the Dead is already out and that people can get that.

AB:        Yup, it’s out to all the bookstores and the online shops too.

SC:        All right. Well, thank you so much, Adam. This was really great and, well, I’ll make sure to connect with all your projects for everyone that is interested, and hopefully, we stay connected.

AB:        Great. Thanks so much for having me.

SC:        All right, see you later.

AB:        Bye.

SC:        Bye. That was great.