I think in any history class, it’s pretty much impossible to not relate the events that took place to aspects of your life, or just the world in the present day in general.

During my weekly reading logs, I tried to compare at least one aspect of the past to the present. Below is an excerpt of a reading log in which I did so:

“While customs did begin to change and people saw things differently for the better, for example, marrying girls that are under the age of 18,  interracial marriages were something that Canadians did in fact have a problem with, something that today is seen as no big deal. Canadians today may even consider the idea that Canada was never a racist country at all. The charivaris are a reminder that history can be insensitive – no matter how liberal and accepting a country is in the present day.”

I think in the topic of Canadian history, it is helpful to compare the present to the past, especially since we live here. I find it more simple to write about the topics when I am connected to how they affect my current life.

During my document analysis and my research project, I easily drew comparisons to today based on the topics I wrote about. In my document analysis, I wrote about how the youth were heavily discriminated against and judged for acting a certain way. Today, this is a parallel idea surrounding the “laziness” opinion that the public tends to carry around millennials.

Same sex relationships, which I studied in my research paper, were brought to court and punished with severe consequences. While not as serious in Canada today, we can still see discrimination in North America towards LGBTQ+ groups, (ahem, Donald Trump) and severe punishment in other parts of the world.

Although I was familiar with comparisons from the past to the present before, this class helped emphasize my ability to apply objectivity to my work. Other classes I have taken in the past usually focused on one thing: what is the document trying to say? Yes, this was prominent in this class as well, but other experiences in history classes I had before never clearly asked or emphasized: what aspects of this document could be biased?

In a way though, I think that coming across work that is biased or ignorant can help historical research as well. This allows us to draw examples of opinions that could be considered invalid and apply our own thinking to discuss why a biased opinion is not always good.

This is why I think that now it is so important to compare the past to the present. Comparing the two time periods allows for perspective and makes research more plausible. I have found that not every historical journal is a reliable source to use in a research project – just because a historian wrote it does not mean there isn’t a biased opinion or ignorant stance on the issue at hand.