By Jenny Prior At the Archives of Ontario, we’re marking the World War I centenary with three connected exhibits – onsite, online, and travelling – as well as educational programming and other outreach and promotional activities. This post is first in a series giving a glimpse into our work to showcase our collections and shed light on Ontario’s stories from this… Read more »
By Kevin Plummer “Those Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted,” Lawrence Clarke wrote in 1880 of near-starvation Cree around Fort Carlton. “Should sickness break out among them in their present weakly state,” the… Read more »
By Jonathan Scotland Canadians, it seems, are increasingly interested in war. Our polymer currency has replaced peacekeeping imagery with the Vimy memorial. 2005 was the ‘Year of the Veteran’ and 2013 is the ‘Year of the Korean War Veteran.’ Highways, buildings, and other civic infrastructure have been proudly re-named in honour of the country’s fallen. Battles are widely celebrated as… Read more »
By Stacy Nation-Knapper, Andrew Watson, and Sean Kheraj Last year, Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, published a special series called, “Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues”. Each episode focused on a different contemporary environmental issue and featured interviews and discussions with historians whose research explains the context and background. Following up on that project, we are publishing six articles… Read more »
By Kaitlin Wainwright In November 2012, the Canadian government unveiled three plaques and a bronze statue of a dog in Ottawa’s Confederation Park, adjacent to the South African War Memorial. These were the first commemorative efforts in Canada in 75 years that foregrounded the role of animals in war. The environment is, at best, an emerging theme in Canadian military… Read more »
By Carolyn Podruchny Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, I suggest more questions to… Read more »
By Angela Mombourquette, Editor, Atlantic Books Today Three times a year, the Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association publishes a 48-page magazine dedicated to exploring the latest in Atlantic Canadian books. Today, we’re pleased to tell you that we’ve done something extra special with the newest issue of Atlantic Books Today. Thanks to support from the Canada Book Fund, we’ve added a 16-page… Read more »
By Gregory Kennedy One of the principal challenges of Acadian history is that we do not have conclusive proof of the origins of the first permanent colonists. The passenger lists, parish registers, tax records, or censuses that genealogists use for other groups and regions have not been found and may not exist. There are a few exceptions, and as early… Read more »
By Daniel Macfarlane The recent showdown between Native protestors and police over “fracking” in New Brunswick brought together several contentious issues that have simmering, and periodically boiling over, in Canadian society as of late (an interactive map of New Brunswick fracking can be found here). Obviously one of them, and probably the most prominent, is the Canadian state’s past and… Read more »
By Caroline Lieffers Last week a colleague showed me something that I found extraordinary: a round medallion, about the size of a milk cap, hanging from a long necklace chain. Set under the medallion’s plastic cover was a fragile square of loose-weave cotton, once white but now more of a cream colour, printed with a bright blue and yellow flower…. Read more »
