Meredith J. Batt I have made an error. These are not words that come easily to a historian, when evidence is the backbone of our work. However, as Tim Lacy notes in his Society for U.S. Intellectual History blog post On the Failures of Historians, “There is no question that historians in their role as content experts experience failure. All humans are… Read more »
Warrant Officer Daniyal Elahi, 337 Queen’s York Rangers Royal Canadian Army Cadets Growing up, I often felt as though Muslim Canadians were a recent part of this country — as if our connection began only in 1965, when my grandfather immigrated from Pakistan. In school, the Canadian soldiers we learned about seemed to share the same background and the same… Read more »
Author Carol F. Lee explores the writings of her mother Mary Quan Lee, with a focus on her experiences in the 1930s and her sense of dual Canadian and Chinese identity in the 1940s. Lee notes that her mother’s identity was shaped in large part by openings and closings in opportunities and the structural realities of exclusion in Canada.
Thomas Schlich and Bruno J. Strasser Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is best known as a vaccination skeptic, but he is also skeptical about using masks for infection control. At the Libertarian National Convention in Washington, DC in May 2024, Kennedy Jr. recalled being asked during the pandemic whether he was scared of dying of COVID-19 since he wasn’t wearing a… Read more »
By Hailey Baldock With a black coffin strapped to the top of their van and a fiery determination to scrap Canada’s abortion laws, the women of the 1970 Abortion Caravan knew they had to make a scene. And they did. Over the course of two weeks, the Caravan moved across the country from Vancouver to Ottawa, rallying supporters and drawing… Read more »
June Chow This post is a sequel to The right to remember the past: Opening Chinese immigration records in Canada’s national archives published on March 27, 2025. It is adapted from a presentation made on June 11, 2025 at the Association of Canadian Archivists conference held at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) to an audience that included Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Leslie… Read more »
Daze Jefferies and Rhea Rollmann Editor’s note: the following work by Daze Jefferies and Rhea Rollmann is a piece of creative history. Transfeminine histories are often especially difficult to recount through traditional historical writing. By engaging with archival fragments, as well as oral histories completed by Rhea for her exceptional book A Queer History of Newfoundland, this article uses the… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse I like reading old newspapers and I know that is not out of place for an historian. In one way or another, media are history’s life blood, even if we don’t all make use of them in the same way. The range of media at which historians look is broad. It includes posters and recordings, maps and… Read more »
This is the final post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s. Raffaella Cerenzia 1930s McGill was a small, tight-knit place. Only 3,000 or so students roamed the university’s campus. They were taught by a short roster of professors; the Department of Economics and Political Science numbered just six in the early thirties. In this intimate… Read more »
By James Cullingham The cinema in downtown Nogojiwanong – Peterborough, Ontario – was almost packed for a noon screening of A Complete Unknown on the second day of its general release. That Bob Dylan fellow still pulls. The film is the latest cinematic effort to unravel the enigmatic genius of Bob Dylan. It has been greeted by generally favourable critical… Read more »