Category Archives: Public History

“To Remedy the Damage”: The Montpelier Foundation and American Public History

By Andrew Nurse On May 16, a Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) press release announced that “The Montpelier Foundation’s board of directors voted to welcome eleven new members from a list […] advanced by the […] MDC.” The release described the decision as “momentous.” This decision reversed a short-lived but important controversy in American public history. The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) administers… Read more »

Learning About Residential Schools At The Shingwauk Site 

Gallery space in an exhibition with red text and image panels on left and right walls. Door at far end of hallway.

Krista McCracken  The Shingwauk Residential School operated in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario from 1874 to 1970. In 1971, Algoma University College – today known as Algoma University – moved onto the Shingwauk Site. Since 2010, I’ve been part of the staff at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre (SRSC) that seeks to promote sharing, healing, and learning in relation to the… Read more »

Does a Single Building Matter? A Case for the Fugitive Slave Chapel

By Thomas Peace There is a small house in downtown London, Ontario that looks ready for the wrecking ball. If you walk by, it would stand out only for its state of disrepair. A security fence surrounds it. About a year ago, the London and Middlesex Heritage Museum – of which I am currently the Board Chair – received a… Read more »

Historia Nostra: Hear, Here Underrepresented History

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Katrina Bjornstad and Erin Isaac Hear, Here is a postmodern heritage project that began in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 2015 with the aim to make hidden histories visible in public space. Based in part on Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, and Gabe Sawhney’s [murmur] project, the concept behind Hear, Here is simple: within a particular community, project organizers post an orange sign… Read more »

Family Story, a Heritage Home, and Munsee-Delaware Histories

In the early 1970s, a one and a half story log structure was relocated from the Munsee-Delaware Nation to Ska-Nah-Doht or Longwoods Conservation Area. By this time, the building was well over one hundred and twenty years old and had provided a home for many generations of two families of the Munsee-Delaware community. The Logan home, built in the mid-1800s,… Read more »

Historia Nostra & Off-Campus History visit the Diefenbunker

By Louis Reed-Wood and Erin Isaac In October 2021, three former University of Saskatchewan history nerds met up in Ottawa, Ontario to answer the call of destiny (or something like it…). We’d come to the outskirts of Ottawa to sleuth around the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum — a museum we three (Hannah Cooley, Louis Reed-Wood, and Erin Isaac, now… Read more »

Historia Nostra: Myth, Memory, and Misconception at the Plains of Abraham

By Erin Isaac The Battle on the Plains of Abraham, on 13 September 1759, is heavily commemorated on Québec’s physical landscape. From the streets, buildings, and shops named for the French and British military men who fought that day, to the monuments that dot the city’s historic neighbourhoods, and commemorative panels or plaques at the Plains of Abraham, it’s hard… Read more »

Inequality: Only for Academics? A Self-Publishing Saga

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Eric W. Sager I have always believed in the mission of public history. I have given public talks, written op-eds, and published books and articles intended for non-academic readers. I have even won awards for “public dissemination.” Although I have had some successes, I have also met with failures. Recently, failure is winning. How could this be? Have I lost… Read more »

Who Counts? The Data We Use to Prove the Points We Make

by Carly Ciufo Although I doubt the book will make it into my dissertation, the comps text that’s unexpectedly stayed with me is Bruce Curtis’ The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840-1875. With my last post, I talked about the local positionality of national museums. I cited some studies of surveyed data around museums… Read more »

Food First, Then Archives: Precarity and Community Memory

This post by Lilian Radovac and Simon Vickers is part of the “(In)Security in the Time of COVID-19” series. Read the rest of the series here. Alternative Toronto is a DIY digital archive and exhibition space that documents the history of alternative communities in the Greater Toronto Area from 1980 to 1999. As archive director and volunteer coordinator for Alternative… Read more »