Alvin Finkel Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind is a publishing miracle. Published initially in Hebrew in 2011, it was translated into English in 2014 and has since been translated into about 50 other languages. By the end of 2018, it reportedly had sold over 11.5 million copies and today in Amazon Canada’s listing for all… Read more »
By Camille Robert Translated by Thomas Peace This review originally appeared in French on Artichaut magazine and HistoireEngagee.ca In many way, the image of Montreal in the 1960s is defined by the 1967 World’s Fair. Often celebrated as one of the key moments in the Quiet Revolution, official imagery of the city situated it as a centre-point in a modernized and… Read more »
As part of our partnership with the new early Canadian history blog Borealia, we’ll be posting highlights from that website here every Saturday in November. By Keith Grant Michael Eamon, Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). “Were I to name the most striking peculiarity of our neighbours in the… Read more »
by Joel D. Rudewicz Restrictions against the general public procuring powerful and often dangerous poisons, drugs, and remedies are a fairly recent development in history. A time once existed when children could smoke cigarettes, arsenic was supplied by your friendly neighbourhood pharmacist, and medication and healing were a mish-mash of druggists recommendations, physician’s advice, and longstanding home- cures. This system… Read more »
By Gordon E. Bannerman In the twenty-first century, the notion of colonial empires has a distinctly antiquarian feel. Yet the British Empire, one of the most successful, exists to this day albeit in a composite rump-like form. At its height, the global reach of the British Empire was equalled by the wide range of political culture within it, and this… Read more »
By Natalie Zacharewski In his work Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Daniel Macfarlane recounts the policy, negotiations and later impacts of the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The comprehensive detail of his research and depth of analysis sheds important light on Canada and its technological advancements in the twentieth century…. Read more »
By Kevin Plummer “When I was at that school,” Joseph Auguste (Augie) Merasty writes of his years at St. Therese Residential School, “it seemed always to be winter time” (Merasty, 41). It’s little surprise, then, that certain anecdotes from that season stand out in the memoir he’s written with David Carpenter, The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir…. Read more »
By C.S. Ogden What stake does historical research have in fictionalized cinematic productions? Does film offer another medium to convey this research effectively to new audiences? What role can the academic historian take within such endeavours? In his latest book Inside the Historical Film, Bruno Ramirez, a history professor and screenwriter at Université de Montréal, considers these issues by investigating the… Read more »
By Christine Moreland “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Can we then ever really understand who ‘they’ were and how they lived? In Testimonies and Secrets: the Story of a Nova Scotia Family 1844-1977, Robert M. Mennel invites the reader to explore the themes of family, work and community life in a very foreign place: Crousetown,… Read more »
By Phil Gold For Estonians, the twentieth century was a tug-of-war between political independence and social freedoms and repressive subjugation under the Soviet boot. Lynda Mannik’s book, Photography, Memory and Refugee Identity: The Voyage of The SS Walnut, 1948 provides a fascinating snapshot of one moment in that tumultuous history: the journey of the 347 Estonian refugees from Communism who… Read more »
