Tag Archives: place names

Changing Place Names – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham Changing Place Names | RSS.comLauren Beck, author of Canada’s Place Names & How to Change Them, joins the show to talk about the debate over changing names. The discussion ranges from how Canada’s places got their names, colonial naming practices, and the cultural significance of place names. The conversation also touches on Indigenous naming customs, the politics of… Read more »

What’s in a Place Name: Adelaide Hoodless and Mona Parsons

By Thomas Peace Over the past week, ActiveHistory.ca has run a couple of posts about the politics of naming and local commemoration. These essays reminded me of a debate that Paul Bennett and I had a couple of years ago over the merits of renaming schools as the Halifax school board decided that the name Cornwallis was no longer an… Read more »

What’s in a Name? Place Names, History, and Colonialism

By Kaleigh Bradley But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen – to use an image you’ll understand – it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape…of fact. Brian Friel, Translations  Brian Friel’s play Translations takes place in 1833, in the Irish-speaking village of… Read more »