Canadian History Roundup – Week of February 5, 2017

“Valentine Greetings to a Good Little Boy I Know,” Greeting card, Valentine,
1900-1960, 20th century (Source: McCord Museum)

The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.

Missed last week’s roundup? Check it out here.

• Late this week, the Canadian historical community lost Danny Vickers. I met him only briefly a couple of years ago, but he seemed like a lovely person. Jerry Bannister, a former student of his, has written a lovely memorial in his honour.
• NiCHE kicked off the week with another new post in their “Seeds: New Research in Environmental History” series. This latest is by Laura Larsen, and examines efforts to modernize the grain handling and transportation systems on the prairies.
• This week on the Beyond Borders blog is a new post by Julien Mauduit, which asks the question: “is there anything more we can learn from the 1837-38 rebellions?” The answer is a resounding “yes,” particularly when we consider the rebellions in a transnational context.
• Borealia is back this week with yet another profile of a Ashinishaabeg warrior from the War of 1812. This week Alan Corbiere discusses Jean Baptiste Assiginack, also known as The Starling.
• Active History kicked off the week with a new post by Blake Brown on the right to bear arms in Canada, mostly in connection with arguments by John Robson that Canadians have a constitutional right to do so. Brown unpacks this argument, and shows why “just because things sound right does not mean that they are correct.” Wise words.
• Check out this absolutely gorgeous 19^th century valentine from the Canadian Museum of History. I’m in love (with the card! I am a respectable married woman after all. 😉 )
• The Canadian War Museum is holding a “Great Canadian Debate,” on the subject of whether or not Canada’s history is something to be ashamed of. I note this here not only because this is a ridiculous question, but also because the two debaters are both white men, one of whom isn’t even a historian. The historian that is present is Jack Granatstein, who, while very prominent in the public eye, actually holds views that are contrary to the consensus in the larger Canadian historical community. One of these days I’ll get around to writing my blog post on the History Wars, but if you are planning to attend this event, take what is said with a grain of salt.
• The CHA has officially endorsed the AHA Statement on the Travel Ban.
• The Archives of Ontario has posted some really adorable valentine’s day cards that you are free to use. They are available in both English and French, and are really funny.
• The University of Alberta is offering a new course, Indigenous Canada, which explores the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada as well as contemporary political and social issues. The course is available online to everyone, and is free to audit. I’ve already signed up. What are you waiting for?
• In light of the recent travel ban in the US, Laura Madokoro has written a new blog post for Active History on the dangers of refusing sanctuary to refugees. She uses the events around the Louis as an example, where nearly 950 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany sought entry into Cuba, the US, and Canada, and were denied. 254 passengers would go on to die in the Holocaust, when all of their lives could have been saved.
• This week on Acadiensis, Barry Cahill reviews James Muir’s Law, Debt, and Merchant Power: The Civil Courts of Eighteenth-Century Halifax.
• This week on Unwritten Histories, we had the second of two special guest posts. This one was written by Sarah Van Vugt, and explores the historical background of gendered WW2 images, like Rosie the Riveter and Ronnie the Bren Gun Girl (that’s the Canadian version).
• Paula Dumas explores how historians and archivists are crowdsourcing history.
• The Canadian Committee on Women’s History has officially joined Twitter!
• The latest Champlain Society Blog (Findings/Trouvailles) post is out! This latest one, by David A. Sutherland, tells the story of Martha Manter, the only American woman injured in the 1917 Halifax Explosion.
• So apparently I missed this last year, but the UBC Digitizer’s blog had a #colorourcollections event last year, where the public was invited to print out some of their images and colour them in. Well, they’re doing it again this year!
  • Also participating this year are the University of Manitoba Archives, McGill Libraries, the University of Waterloo, the University of Calgary, and Western University Archives (though only through their Twitter account, so far as I can tell). To see other collections from around the world, check out the original website!
• This week on the Resistance150 Twitter account, @RedIndianGirl, wrote a superb and important history of the Haudenosaunee people, which is the correct term for the Iroquois people. Terri Monture (@RedIndianGirl) has graciously given me permission to create a storify of her essay, which you can view here. This history, and the history of other Indigenous peoples in North America, is why so many are not in favour of the #Canada150 campaign.
• The latest Ben Franklin’s World Podcast episode looks at the history of Mail Order Brides in Early America, including New France!
• The Mlle Canadienne blog has posted a great explanation of the difference between bedgowns and jackets in the 18^th century. The post is available in English and in French.
• The Canadian Museum for Human Rights explores the history of legislation pertaining to refugees in Canada.
• Jessica DeWitt is back on NiCHE with another edition of #envhist worth reading! She has particularly awesome selections this month.
• Also on NiCHE this week is an update from Mica Jorgenson about the next few NiCHE new scholars digital meet-ups.
• The Alberta Culture and Tourism blog has posted some great information about some of the earliest Black Canadian settlers on the prairies.
• This week, Tina Adcock was featured on SFU’s faculty research profiles! Find out about her current research into colonialism, tourism, and sovereignty in the North.
• Craig Leslie Mantle reviews T. Robert Fowler’s Combat Mission Kandahar: The Canadian Experience in Afghanistan on the Laurier Centre blog this week.
• Tyler Owens has a posted a summary of a recent workshop on the history of Canadian foreign aid over at Canadian Network on Humanitarian History blog.
• Read this amazing letter by a UVic History student thanking her professors for teaching her how history helps us to better understand the present.
• Find out about the new datasets from federal government department studies being released by LAC as they are being moved from older computer systems and preserved.
• Over at the BAnQ (that’s the National Library and Archives of Quebec) blog this week is a new post about the curious relationship between hockey and the mill in a rural village. And no, Don Quixote is not involved. 😉
• In honour of New York Fashion Week, the Junto Blog has devoted this week to the history of fashion. Their first post is a bibliography on the history of fashion in North America, including the parts we now call Canada!
• LAC is back with another post in their series on Who Do We Think We Are. This post features guest curator Sara Chatfield, who talks about the census.
• The latest blog post from the Canadian Museum of History looks back at the history of time in Canada, particularly through an examination of one particular watch in their collection from the early 1900s.
• The Friends of the Loyalist Collection at Brock University were interviewed about the important role that refugees, in this case United Empire Loyalists, played in Canada’s history. Although I should point out that the use of the term “refugee” to refer to the Loyalists is both presentist, and disputed.
• Retroactive explores how the Rockies shaped the history of Alberta, both in ancient and more recent times.
• There is new research out this week about the relationship between forests and intertidal zones in BC 13,000 years ago, and how local Indigenous peoples used shell middens to enrich the forest.
  • As well as additional research into dating Indigenous clam gardens from 1000 to 1700 years ago.
• The DCB’s latest biography is of John Thomas Foster, a noted union activist.
• In yet another project honouring Canada 150, the McCord Museum in Montreal will be digitizing 36 sets of records and posting them online. These sets will highlight some of Quebec’s most noted families. See the collection itself, as well as a video about the first batch of sets here.
• The ROM’s TBT this week looks at the installation of more than 500 Canadian hand weaving pieces from 1971. As someone who has untangled her fair share of yarn skeins, this looks like a nightmare.
• The Toronto Public library remembers Sir Sandford Fleming, who I think I’ve mentioned in the past two roundups, so I won’t give his biography again here.
• The Nova Scotia Archives has digitized their collection of The Clarion!
• The University of Ottawa’s History Department’s graduate student journal has a new website!
• Learn the origins of the names of some of Queen’s most recognized buildings!
• The Canadian Centre for the Great War looks at body armour this week, created in response to new methods of fighting.
• Matthew Hayes has a fascinating new blog post this week for Active History, which looks at UFOs in Canada during the Cold War. Apparently there are 10,000 documents relating to UFOs at LAC. There are no words.
• BAnQ has digitized the archival collections of the first seven bishops of Montreal, covering the period between 1838 and 1967.
• The Virtual Museum of Canada has released their latest exhibit on paper mills in late 19^th century Sault Ste. Marie.
• The McGill Library’s digitization team has just completed uploading the diaries of Marie-Angélique Birranger, which describe the everyday life of a family in Quebec from 1843 to 1872.
• Listen to the amazing Chelsea Vowel speak about “Indigenization in the Time of Pipelines.”
• The Whistler Museum is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year!
• The Vancouver As It Was blog remember the work of VAncouver sculptor, George Norris.
• Eve Lazarus remembers the Seven Seas Restaurant in Vancouver. This was before I moved to BC, but it is a fascinating story! Of course, I might be biased, since I actually love taking the ferry.
• Karin Wulf discusses the history of families in the Early Modern Atlantic World, and shares her course syllabus on the subject. While not explicitly Canadian, it definitely has direct applications!
• It’s also not totally Canadian, but the Junto posted a fascinating post about studying the material history of  clothing with Kimberly Alexander. It’s yet another entry in their series on fashion.
• Read this poem by Afua Cooper, written from the perspective of Marie Joseph Angelique, a Black slave who was executed in Montreal for burning the city to the ground in 1734.
• Canadian History in the News
  • There is a new provincial initiative in Manitoba to restore Indigenous names to their rightful places in the landscape and on maps, and connecting these names and locations with their histories.
  • CBC spoke with several Indigenous artists about whether or not they are willing to participate in the Canada 150 celebrations.
  • This year is also Montreal’s 375^th anniversary, and CBC is marking the occasion with a series where Montreal archivists share some of the hidden treasures in their collections. This latest post is about a punch bowl and a department store. Check out previous articles on the left-hand side of the page in the Related Stories box. Kind of annoyed I missed this.
  • Curator Karen Bachmann reminds us that Canada’s history is as diverse as its present by discussing the impact that Middle Eastern immigrations had on the settlement of Northern Ontario in the early 1900s.
  • Mark Holtze found footage of a road trip his great-grandmother and great-grandfather took to PEI and Nova Scotia in 1965. You need to watch the footage, it’s adorable.
  • After being gone for more than a century, bison have just been rereleased into Banff National Park.
  • A group of 18 year-old engineering students have solved the problem of water seepage at the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book library. And what have you done with your life lately?
  • The CBC interviewed Lianne Charlie!!
  • The Pioneer Village Museum in Beausejour, Manitoba, is asking the public for help identifying a number of individuals in one of their newest photograph collections. The images are absolutely charming.
  • Find out the history of Black History Month in Canada!
  • One again, the federal government is trying to avoid having to take responsibility for their actions during the Sixties Scoop.
  • Just for fun: the original Twitter was a Nova Scotian clown. Trigger warning: clowns.
  • Metro Vancouver interviewed archaeologist Joanne Hammond about her efforts to have many of BC’s “historical stops of interest” signs be changed to more accurately reflect the problematic history of the area, rather than just celebrating the achievements of early settlers. To read many of them, you’d never known that there were Indigenous people here first.
  • The CBC spoke with Tony Colaiacovo about the segregation of Black Nova Scotians in cemeteries, a practice which continued until about 50 years ago. The graves of Black Nova Scotians were either relegated to the edges of cemeteries, or not permitted inside at all.
  • Radio Canada looks at the Aroostook “War” of 1839, which was really more of a pissing contest between Maine and New Brunswick over lumber and settlers. What a glorious history.
  • The Saskatoon Star Phoenix is also doing the Canada 150 thing, profiling important Saskatchewanians. Some of their selections are questionable though, so fair warning (did they have to include Grey Owl? Seriously?)
  • The Nova Scotia Archives is asking the public to help them find copies of The Clarion, the first newspaper in the province from the Black Nova Scotian community. Established by Carrie Best, this is the newspaper that originally reported on Viola Desmond. The goal is to add to their existing online collection.
  • CBC ShortDocs has a new documentary called Deeply Rooted, about the Downey-Collins family, a Black Canadian family that has lived in Nova Scotia since the 1600s.
  • This link comes courtesy of my husband, about the impact of state racism on the Chinese-Canadian community from the perspective of William Ging Wee Dere. Dere’s father and grandfather were both forced to pay the Head Tax when they came to Canada.
  • The Vancouver Sun remembers the building of the New Temple of Thespis from 1891, the Vancouver Opera House.
  • duna’nuna’nanananananananan, Ghost Sign! (Sorry! I had to!)
  • Khari Wendell McClelland relied on the Nova Scotia Archives to create his latest documentary theatre piece about his family’s history, fleeing slavery through the Underground Railroad.
  • The framing of this article from The Globe and Mail and its history of marriage in Canada are terrible, but there are some interesting stories hidden within.
  • The CBC interviewed Ryan DeCaire about his work revitalizing the Mohawk language through the University of Toronto’s Centre for Indigenous Studies. The article does a great job of pointing out that the reasons why many Indigenous peoples no longer speak their languages include residential schools and deliberate government policies to eradicate them.
  • The Montreal Gazette has a must-read article about the long history of slavery in Quebec. Most people aren’t aware of this, but between 1629 and 1833, more than 4,000 slaves, largely of Black backgrounds but also Indigenous, lived in the province.
  • The Historicist remembers the opening of the Eaton Centre.
  • Apparently, the Ottawa Citizen is doing the Canada 150 profiles of important people thing too.
  • Yet another Toronto building is slated for demolition, and heritage advocates are furious.
• Better Late than Never
  • There is a new documentary out about the history of Black Canadians in Alberta. The documentary is by Cheryl Foogo, and is called Secret Alberta: The Former Life of Amber Valley.
  • Vintage Everyday posted this adorable photo of the inventor of basketball, Canadian Dr. James Naismith, playing with his wife.
  • An Alberta schoolhouse with a reputation for appearances from child-sized ghosts has just received official historic status.
  • Read all about the history of cycling in Montreal. Also known as “a very unpleasant way to die.”
  • BAnQ remembered Quebec City’s nightwatchmen from the early 1800s.
  • Believe it or not, there is an exhibition going on right now celebrating 400 years of pork in Quebec.
  • The Quebec City Archives looked back at Mardi Gras, in Quebec! Sorry, no bare breast shots, since this happens in winter.
  • There is a new documentary out called All Our Father’s Relations about the Grant family. With a Chinese father, a Musqueam mother, and four children, the Grant family was forced to navigate between discriminatory government policies and attitudes towards both Chinese immigrants and Indigenous peoples. Most people aren’t aware of it, but there is a long history of cooperation between Chinese-Canadian and Indigenous communities in BC.
  • Find out about the restoration of the Ross Bay Villa, in Victoria, BC.

A roundup that is on time? What insanity is this? 😉 We’re back to our regular schedule for the foreseeable future! I hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup. If you enjoyed reading this post, please consider sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media platform. And don’t forget to check back on Tuesday for our monthly review of new Canadian history journal articles! See you then!

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