Indigenous Americans on European soil can be found throughout historical records, but historian Caroline Dodds Pennock says they have largely been ignored. In her book, On Savage Shores, she traces the history of Indigenous lives in Europe during the 1500s. The author told IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about her research collecting evidence of the widespread Indigenous presence in Portugal, Spain, France, and England in the 100 years before Britain attempted to establish its first North American colony. *This episode originally aired on April 5, 2023.

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In the early 1990s, “woke” was "politically correct," "DEI" was known as "affirmative action,” and the term “cancel culture” had yet to be coined. The language was different, but the controversies of today were just beginning. In a 1992 episode of IDEAS, journalist Linda Frum took on the issue of free speech on campus.

With notable guests like Dinesh D’Souza and Alan Borovoy, the episode tackled the issue of speech codes, tokenization, victimhood, and a culture of victimhood on Canadian campuses. We revisit this documentary, to see what’s changed, what’s the same, and whether the pendulum is swinging again.

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Ask yourself: can you? It is a question that George Eliot asks over and over through her characters in Middlemarch, a 19th-century novel that speaks to our own fractious age. Eliot highlights how important it is to see the world from the point of view of others — even characters we don’t like. *This is second episode in our two-part series. It originally aired on April 7, 2002.

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