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 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 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 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 »
Join in this series of participatory talks on topics that highlight how perspectives on movie monsters, war and product pitching in Toronto have evolved from the 1920s to today. All talks are Tuesdays from 7 to 9 pm at Spadina Museum, 285 Spadina Road, Toronto, 416-392-6910. Tickets are $8/talk (students $5) or $20 for all three. Taxes not included. … 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 Lachlan MacKinnon Two weeks ago, David Zylberberg wrote on ActiveHistory of the political responses to deindustrialization in Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. In expressing the relatively divergent implementation of industrial policy in these areas, he concludes that these examples “should serve as a warning against [policies of austerity] in Europe and beyond.” Today, with a new Liberal government… Read more »
By Dagomar Degroot (this post originally appeared on Degroot’s personal website) Established in 1988 by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific body that periodically summarizes the scholarly understanding of the world’s climate. In 2007, the panel’s fourth assessment report outlined in stark terms the likelihood of anthropogenic global warming. Since then,… Read more »
