By Merle Massie The University of Saskatchewan has been front and center in national and international news this past spring, owing to the public fallout of an ugly internal battle regarding the university’s past and future directions. And historians have been active generals and foot soldiers on all sides of the battle. Because when you’re talking about shaping past and… Read more »
By Ian Mosby When I first heard Alvin Dixon’s voice I was driving along Dupont Avenue in Toronto with my partner, Laural, and our three-month-old son, Oscar. Dixon was talking to Rick MacInnes-Rae, who was filling in as the co-host of the CBC Radio show As It Happens. The interview was about Dixon’s experience at the Alberni Indian residential school (AIRS)… Read more »
By Laura Larsen Few Canadians missed the news stories of grain piling up on the prairies and denunciations of the system’s failures. The Federal government’s recent announcement of financial penalties for the railways is the latest act in a long running problem facing western Canadian grain farmers: how to economically get their grain to market when long stretches of prairie and… Read more »
By Jonathan Weier Those who regularly read the British press have been exposed, over the past three months, to a vitriolic war of words over the legacy and meaning of the First World War in Britain. This controversy has become increasingly acrimonious as representatives of the Conservative government and their sympathizers have sought to paint a number of British historians… Read more »
By Ian Milligan “Thirty goons break into your office and confiscate your computers, your hard drives, your files.. and with them, a big chunk of your institutional memory. Who you gonna call?” These were the words Bob Garfield used in a recent episode of On the Media, to address the storming of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. On Saturday, March… Read more »
By Eric Wright Disclaimer: I am an athlete and sports fan, despite what this article may lead you to believe. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics has been embroiled in controversy from the start. The games will be the most corrupt in history based on dollar value, with an estimated one third of the games’ $51 billion price tag attributable to… Read more »
Nature’s Past is a regular audio podcast series produced by Sean Kheraj on the environmental history research community in Canada. It is published by the Network in Canadian History and Environment. The show features interviews, round table discussions, and lectures on a wide range of topics in environmental history, including climate change, urbanization, natural resource development, conservation, and food production. 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 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 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 »
