Beyond musty artifacts – Ottawa Citizen

Beyond musty artifacts

Museums should be hotbeds for lively debate, says a Carleton professor whose book has been nominated for the Donner Prize

By Peter Robb, Ottawa Citizen April 23, 2012

OTTAWA — In 1968, Ruth Phillips and her husband Mark were attending the University of California in Berkley. It was right in the middle of the white heat of protest over Vietnam on U.S. campuses and the two young Americans were definitely against the war.

So when Mark got his notice to take a physical as part of the preparation for military service, the couple packed up and headed to Canada, part of a flood of young people fleeing their homeland.

As Phillips tells it, she and Mark landed at a border crossing, said they wanted to become Canadian citizens, took a test and that was it. It was a very different time.

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