Fort de l’île Sainte-Hélène, Juin 1966, Archives de la ville de Montreal VM94-AD35-003. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.
Missed last week’s roundup? Check it out here.
Reminder: this roundup only covers up to Friday, since I will be travelling on Saturday. The following roundup will include the missing day.
- NiCHE started off the week with their annual BookLook, a roundup of all of the latest and upcoming works on Canadian environmental history.
- Zoe Todd has written a beautiful essay on the theme of Canada150.
- According to Jessica DeWitt, this past week’s most common words in #envhist articles were: “said,” “Komodo,” and “history.” And she is calling on all environmental historians to find synonyms to the word “said.” 😛
- Also from Jessica DeWitt this week is a post containing her editorial comments for the Summer 2017 issue of Folklore magazine, providing a short preview of this issue’s contents.
- Joanna Hammond has written a great and hard-hitting Twitter essay on colonialism and Victoria Day.
- Matthew Barlow has written a new blog post in honour of Journée nationale des Patriotes in Quebec, which is what we call Victoria Day in Quebec. In it, he discusses how Quebec mis-remembers the Patriotes.
- This week on Unwritten Histories, I hosted the first annual CHA Reads competition! This Canada Reads-style mini series featured the five books that have been shortlisted for the CHA’s Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for the best book in Canadian history. Here are the posts!
- Series Introduction
- Mary-Ellen Kelm defending The Vimy Trap, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War.
- Sean Carleton defending Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies.
- Samuel McLean defending Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World.
- Joanna Pearce defending A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Québec.
- Stephanie Pettigrew defending Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park.
- Group Discussion on the Sir John. A Macdonald Prize shortlist.
- In the latest episode of the Ben Franklin’s World Podcast, Liz Covart speaks with Julie Holcomb about her book, Moral Commerce: The Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy.
- This week, NICHE continued with its Congress-themed posts!
- LAC is continuing with its provincial/territorial Flickr albums this week, and has reached Ontario! Clearly, I need to review my alphabet. Check out the images themselves here.
- The latest column from Bill Waiser is now available! In this latest article, he talks about Stanley Mission’s Holy Trinity Church.
- Check out this super cool gentleman’s seat chest from the 18th century! Think Caboodles, but way classier.
- Joanne Hammond also has a hilarious and fascinating Twitter essay about BC’s short experiment with camels… No, I did not make that up.
- This week on Active History, Sean Graham is celebrating the 100th episode of the History Slam podcast! Check out some of his favourite moments, as well as interviews with Aaron Boyes and Megan Reilly-Boyes about digital history, the job market, and the origins of the podcast!
- Paula Dumas is back with another instalment of her series on Canadian webcams. This week, she’s reached BC!
- Leah Grandy has a new post on the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog! This latest post follows the history of the Vanderbeck family and their descendents from New Jersey, through the American Revolution, to New Brunswick.
- This week on Instantanés is a blog post that looks at some of their historical documents regarding the history of Montreal’s fortifications. The wall kind, not the alcoholic kind. 😉
- Adele Perry has a fantastic Twitter essay this week about how people talk about women’s suffrage in Canada, why saying that “white women” gained the vote is reductive and not accurate, and the need to be specific about who did and did not get the vote in 1918.
- In their final post about the Starr Manufacturing Company, the Dartmouth Heritage Museum blog talks about why they only manufactured the blade, and not the boot, of ice skates.
- In their latest post in the Who Do We Think We Are series, LAC speaks with guest curator Caroline Forcier-Holloway about RCMP records and media portrayals.
- Check out the CCWH-CCHF sponsored panels at Congress!
- The latest Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry is for Archibald McKellar MacMechan (wow, that is quite the name), an English professor at Dalhousie.
- Find out about the new Canadian history survey textbooks that are coming out from UofT Press. If you go by their booth at Congress this year, you can pick up your own copies, and a little bottle of maple syrup!
- In Heather Read’s latest post in her ongoing series for the ROM on the material history of Canada150, she profiles the red pottery of PEI.
- May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada. In honour of this, the latest Retroactive blog post looks at the history of the Raymond Buddhist Church in Alberta.
- The latest virtual exhibit from the Virtual Museum of History is out, and features Bytown (in Ottawa) and the Rideau Canal, from 1826 to 1855. There is even a mobile app so that you can take a walking tour all by yourself! The app includes a Forgotten Worker Quest, where you choose your own adventure by going to secret locations and find hidden artefacts. Omg, this sounds like so much fun!
- Check out this recording of Tim Cook’s lecture, Why Vimy Matters.
- Mica Jorgenson posted a picture of this amazing recipe for bread from a Manitoba prospector’s diary. The bread is baked in a gasoline can. Because that’s a brilliant idea.
- Anyone up for hide-and-seek with the German Army in WW1?
- This week Dennis Molinaro has been all over the news for learning just how many Canadian government documents still haven’t been sent to the archives! As Daniel Rück (@danrueck) noted on Twitter, while there is a distinction between a government conspiracy and underfunding, the underfunding of archives is absolutely political.
- Check out his post on Active History.
- CBC news coverage of the story
- And then go here to read a Twitter essay by Danielle Ganza about the chronic underfunding of Canada’s archives.
- This week’s #tbt from the ROM is all about mending gauze on a wedding dress.
- BAnQ is in the process of digitizing the publications of the Association francophone pour le savoir from the last 85 years.
- The City of Montreal Archives looks back at the controversy surrounding the Expo 67 logo. No one ever seems to be happy with logos…
- Charmaine Nelson has been appointed to the 2017-2018 William Lyon Mackenzie King Chair for Canadian Studies at Harvard! Find out about some of her amazing work here.
- Check out this interview with SFU Canadian history professor, Mark Leier!
- This week the CCGW remembers the Canadian casualties of the Spanish Influenza Epidemic of 1918. My grandfather’s sister Esther was one of these victims. She died in his arms, at age 18.
- The UBC Digitizer’s blog has an update on their work digitizing BC’s historical newspapers!
- Remember how last week I mentioned the trouble that the United Irish Societies of Montreal was having in establishing a memorial for the victims of the Irish famine? Mathew Barlow examines this subject in more detail, and explores why Montreal is the only major Irish diaspora city not to have such a memorial.
- Check out this neat microhistory of a group of men from Victoria who left to fight in WW1 together.
- In her latest blog post for Spade and the Grave, Robyn Lacy explores gravestone carving versus importation in Newfoundland.
- What’s this I see? A Beginner’s Guide to the CHA, by moi, on the CHA website, fully updated for 2017? You don’t say! 😉
- Canadian History in the News
- This week, rabble.ca spoke with Krista McCracken and Skylee-Storm Hogan about their work at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre and the important role that archives can play in activism.
- Roger Tassé, one of the main authors of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms passed away on Saturday.
- Grand Chief Derek Nepinak (from the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs) is walking 120 km next month from the site of the residential school his mother attended to his home community of Pine Creek First Nation, to celebrate the resilience of Indigenous peoples since Confederation.
- Rick Hansen is donating the gloves he used during his Man in Motion tour to the Canadian Museum of History.
- Remember those history kiosks in Ottawa I mentioned from last week? Find out some more information about them here!
- Fire has destroyed a 142-year-old church near Calgary.
- Model boats are helping archaeologists to find unknown shipwrecks of wooden schooners in Newfoundland.
- Ehaab D. Abdou has written a great editorial for the Montreal Gazette about why the Quebec curriculum on ancient history badly needs an update.
- A new Thunderbird Bear totem pole has been raised at the Museum at Campbell River in BC.
- Pope Francis has officially apologized for crimes committed by the Catholic Church against Indigenous peoples on the American continents during colonization.
- BlogTo takes a look at what highway traffic looked like in Toronto during the 1960s and 1970s. Try not to feel too resentful. 😉
- More than 50,000 artefacts recovered from the southwest coast of Alaska are being returned, after being preserved by archaeologists at the University of Aberdeen. This is fantastic and a great example of doing socially-responsible archaeology.
- Creighton Barrett, an archivist at Dalhousie, talks with CBC about the challenges of preserving digital information, and what archivists can do with those old floppy disks. I totally still have some of those flopping about… hehehe
- Over the course of the summer, seven artists will be creating chalk drawings on Toronto sidewalks, depicting actual historical events in each specific location.
- The Montreal Gazette has republished an article this week about the Montreal election of 1832. There’s drama, scandal, and murder!
- A moose has eaten the Canada150 Tulip Garden in Newfoundland. I’m not laughing, I swear…
- This summer, tour guides at the BC Legislature will portray prominent figures from BC’s history! Which is great, but seriously, we need to stop with the “history brought to life” headlines. Ugh.
- Get a special preview and a 360 degree tour of the new Canadian History Hall at the Canadian Museum of History, and find out just how much work they have done to make sure the history that is represented therein in inclusive and representative. I think it looks fabulous, and am disappointed that I can’t go to Ottawa to see it myself!
- The Supreme Court is currently deciding what happens to the testimony of residential school survivors.
- Now Toronto has a new article profiling six prominent members of the Black liberation movement in Toronto, including Len and Gwen Johnston, Roosevelt Bernard Douglas, Marlene Green, and more!
- Check out this interview with Michael Greyeyes about his new dance-opera called Bearing, where he “doesn’t want people to just think about the weight of the history Canada has with Indigenous people – he wants you to feel ”
- The Senate is trying to push through amendments to the Indian Act that would give more than 2 million more Indigenous people Indian Status, restoring status to status women who married non-status men and their descendants. The government is pushing back.
- The two surviving Dionne quintuplets, Annette and Cecile, speak out about preserving their childhood home.
- The latest exhibit from the McCord Museum is all about the history and art of magic! Check out this behind-the-scenes look!
- A new memorial to Allied airmen who died in WW2 has just been unveiled at the Patricia Bay Air Station in Victoria.
- Hakai magazine has a new article this week about Joe Fortes, the first official lifeguard of Vancouver, who saved countless lives.
- Someone’s been digging mysterious holes at the Granite Creek Cemetery, presumably looking for gold in the graves of Chinese miners.
- Don’t miss the latest issue of Policy Alternatives, all about Canada150!
- CBC interviewed former Canadian soldier and artist, Jessica Lynn Wiebe, who performed an art piece this past week to honour the memory of Nova Scotian soliders in WW1 and WW2.
- In a new University Affairs article, Frances Bula speaks with members of the UBC History department about their innovative approach to teaching Canadian history. This article focuses on their “Moments that Matter” course, which is team-taught by several members of the department!
- Indigenous leaders are working to ensure the return of the remains of two Beothuk people that are being held in the National Museum of Scotland. The Museum is arguing that there are no living Beothuk descendants, so they don’t need to return the remains.
- Better Late Than Never
- I missed this one by hours! The Vancouver As It Was blog has a new post about Yoshio Hinatsu, the illustrator of a pamphlet produced for Vancouver’s Golden Jubillee. This blog post explains the author’s attempts to find out more about Hinatsu and his life.
- Last week on the Resistance150 Twitter account (@Resistance150), Christi Belcourt and another scholar who’s name I can’t seem to find (please let me know if you know!) posted a must-read essay on the vandalism of Indigenous sacred sites in Ontario, and elsewhere in Canada.
- Susan Clairmont has found an 125-year-old copy of the Canadian Criminal Code, and talks about what she learned from looking at it.
- Laurie LeClair has a fascinating article with Anishanabek News about the history of Mnjikaning Fish Weirs
- Calls for Papers
- The CFP for the Canadian Journal of History special issue on the Material Realities of Energy has been extended to June 5th!
That’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup. If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to come back tomorrow to find out about my top picks for this year’s CHA! See you then!
Leave a Reply