Is Canada great?
• What things do you think make a great country?
Small groups - vote and rank
• Is Canada a great country today? What evidence is there to support your
viewpoint?
• Would someone living in Canada in 1913 have the same list of criteria as
us? What would be different?
Historical Perspectives
Why could people experience and interpret the same event differently?
Historical Perspectives
● Was Canada a great country in 1913?
● Why might a Canadian in 1913 have a
different opinion from you?
Image from Historical Thinking Project Poster
Historical Perspective – poetry ;)
• In groups you are going to write a Bio-poem about being
either Canadian or American.
• One group will write using the Canadian perspective in
1913, one will use the modern Canadian perspective and
one will use the modern American perspective.
• Put your poem on chart paper.
• Look at our different poems - What common ideas are
present? What differences do you see?
“Presentism” – yup, it’s a word 
• Sometimes we take the values of today’s society and judge life and
decisions of the past using that perspective.
• i.e. “That was so backwards/wrong/naïve.”
• Now, just because it’s what “most people” believed in or did in the
past doesn’t mean it was right – ex. residential schools
BUT – we have to judge it through the lens of its time period, not the
lens of today’s knowledge and values.
• We will try very hard this semester NOT to be “present-ist”