ActiveHistory.ca is slowing down our publication schedule this summer, but we’ll be back with more new posts in September. In the meantime, we’re featuring posts from our archive. Thanks as always to our writers and readers! The following post was originally featured on April 9, 2021. As Canadians hike and camp their way through the summer, Erin Isaac and Elisabeth… Read more »
By Erin Isaac I first reached out to Dr. Amy Scott (University of New Brunswick) about visiting her in Cape Breton in February 2020, after attending a public lecture she gave at New Brunswick’s Provincial Archives. In her talk, Dr. Scott told us about the things her team was learning about 18th-century disease, injury, and lifeways from the grave goods… Read more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
By Erin Isaac I remember being intrigued and a bit confused after my first reading of Richard White’s classic work The Middle Ground, which had been assigned for a fourth-year history seminar on French colonial history. My peers, likewise, found the ideas proposed interesting but a bit idealistic. Coming back to this text as a PhD student, the questions that… Read more »
By Laura Oland and Erin Isaac When Ministers Island (known to the Passamaquoddy for centuries as Consquamcook, before the “Minister,” Reverend Samuel Andrews, took up residence there in the 1790s) became a National Historic Site in 1996, the designating body’s main interest was in the island’s association with Sir William Van Horne. Van Horne, the Canadian Pacific Railway president who… Read more »
By Erin Isaac Roads, hiking trails, rivers, train tracks, or any manner of routes we use to travel often feel like historically benign spaces (at least to me). For myself, driving along the 401 between Kingston and Toronto has inspired more frustration about traffic and “Ontario Drivers” than curiosity about the road’s history. It feels like a space that exists… Read more »
By Erin Isaac 2021 has been a long year. It’s only June, but I’m calling it—2021 has been a year to endure or make the most of rather than one rife with opportunities. At least, that’s been my experience. My YouTube project, Historia Nostra, has pushed through it and, I hope, given viewers a chance to “visit” places they couldn’t physically… Read more »
By Erin Isaac I visited the Notre Dame basilica in Old Montréal for the first time in 2018. Having recently had the opportunity to visit the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, I was excited to see how the basilica’s architects were inspired by, or deviated from, the 13th century chapel built in the Gothic Rayonnant style. Sainte Chapelle’s stained glass windows… Read more »
