Category Archives: Canadian history

History Feature in Newest Issue of Atlantic Books Today

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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 »

The Value of Historical Maps: Solving At Least Part of the Mystery of the Origins of the Acadians

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 »

A Big Fracking Deal

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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 »

Food for Thought

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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 »

Tracking Canada’s History of Oil Pipeline Spills

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By Sean Kheraj Last week, CBC News published a series of articles about energy pipeline safety on Canada’s federally-regulated system of oil and gas pipelines, revealing that between 2000 and 2011 Canada suffered 1,047 separate pipeline incidents. Its findings confirm my own earlier research on the history of oil pipeline spills on the network of interprovincial and international oil pipelines… Read more »

Reuben Gold Thwaites and The Jesuit Relations: 100 Years

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By Kathryn Magee Labelle Reuben Gold Thwaites died in 1913, the same year of the final publication of his seventy-two volume The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. One hundred years later they are still a valuable and widely circulated edited collection. These transcribed reports and letters from French Jesuit… Read more »

The Purpose of Higher Education: Three National Studies

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By Roberta Lexier In recent months (years, really) universities in Canada have come under sustained attack. Provincial governments, especially in Alberta and Ontario, have dramatically reduced financial support for higher education and have publicly demanded that universities solely contribute to economic growth and development through their utilitarian functions. These demands are based on a particularly narrow view of the role… Read more »

Yonge Love: Crowd-Sourcing the History of Toronto’s Main Drag

By Daniel Ross Every Torontonian has a story about Yonge Street. For nearly a century it was the city’s unquestioned commercial and entertainment hub, the place to go for everything from window-shopping and people-watching to a Saturday night out on the town. Even in today’s diverse, dispersed Toronto it remains our most iconic street. Love it or hate it, like… Read more »

Another Vision for the Canadian Senate

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By Jonathan McQuarrie Lately, the Senate has dominated political headlines in Canada. This must mean that it did something wrong, since the only time that the Senate attracts headlines is when things go wrong. And indeed, Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, and Patrick Brazeau have all disrupted the tightly controlled messaging of the Conservative Prime Minister’s Office emphasis on fiscal responsibility… Read more »

Dreaming of What Might Be: Introducing the Graphic History Project as a New Initiative for Radical History and Comics

By Sean Carleton Illustrate! Educate! Organize! The Graphic History Collective (GHC) is pleased to announce the launch of their new comic book about the Knights of Labor in Canada called Dreaming of What Might Be: The Knights of Labor in Canada 1880-1900. The comic book is now available for free on the GHC Website. Dreaming of What Might Be examines… Read more »