A book or lecture can teach students about history, but a primary source can bring history to life.
Mount Royal University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian Peter Houston wants more faculty and students to take advantage of MRU's archival collections.
"I'm really trying to develop the archives instruction program here. I want to get classes in to use our amazing collections," Houston says. "This is an opportunity to allow undergraduate students to do some archival research with primary sources. When I did my history degree at UBC, in four years of an undergrad, we never went to an archives. It was always just in the classroom."
To that end, Houston has been working with faculty to bring classes to the Archives and Special Collections. Historian Joe Anderson, PhD, and associate dean of the Faculty of Arts, for example, worked with Houston to incorporate the Archives into his History 1100 classes.
During four sessions in the fall and winter terms of 2017/2018, Houston took students through the Archives' Canadian Cold War Pamphlet Collection.
"Joe and I developed an in-class exercise where students get into the Archives and work with historical sources," Houston says. "It's a way to get students doing hands-on work with records from the Cold War years when there was all the nuclear tension between the United States and the Soviet Union."
"They look at some of the documents produced at the time that spoke to popular fears about the bomb and how Canadians felt."
The Canadian Cold War Pamphlet Collection contains publications, many produced by the Canadian Government's civil defence program, to prepare civilians for the possibility of an atomic bombing, instructing them on how to stay calm, evacuate cities, or hunker down in bomb shelters.
"A lot of people were skeptical and asked, is this really going to protect us? But the government really tried, so we've got a number of pamphlets produced by different levels of government."
One published in Calgary in 1962 called If War Should Come instructs Calgarians on how to evacuate from the city if a nuclear attack was imminent.
Houston said some students were surprised Calgary was considered a target of long-range nuclear missiles. One student realized that in the event of an attack, Calgarians would have been evacuated to an area near her family farm.
As with any primary source, using the pamphlets requires some perspective and even a dose of skepticism as it differs from a book where a historian provides context and different points of views. However, the immediacy of the sources provides a direct link a book can't.
"Primary sources such as the civil defence pamphlets really help students connect with the time periods we study," Anderson says. "Students can recover the immediacy of historical events, to see things as people in the past saw them rather than from our vantage point in which we know how things turned out. The civil defence pamphlets reveal a lot about the past. We learn that government planners faced a nearly impossible task; how could they prepare people for the possibility of something as unthinkable and horrible as a nuclear attack without undermining the social and political order of things?"
