Canadian History Roundup – Week of January 1, 2017

“The Ice Castle, Montréal, Winter Carnival 1887” (1887), J. T. Henderson. Library and Archives Canada, e011074265 CC by 2.0

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

*As promised, this roundup includes everything from December 18th forwards. It’s three for the price of one! In an effort to keep this somewhat organized, I’ve separated each roundup by week, going from oldest to most recent.

Missed the last roundup? Check it out here.

Week of December 18, 2016

• Three of the editors of NiCHE posted recommendations of their favourite books to give or receive!
• Don’t miss this great blog post by Christopher Moore that asks the question: what does it mean when the most popular history books are written by journalists? I think we do indeed have a problem.
• On Histoire Engagée, Émilie Malenfant, asks: where are older women in the study of history? It’s not really a Canada-specific article, but well worth a read.
• Dennis Molinaro, writing for Active History, explores the impact of WW1 on the balance between state surveillance and civil rights. He focuses specifically on how a person’s political opinion can make them into a target, and how this becomes normalized.
• Over on Borealia, Aaron Willis discusses legal pluralism in Quebec (the curious mix of English and French legal systems that endures to this day) following the Conquest of 1763, and how this served as a model in other parts of the British Empire.
• The Champlain Society completed its 12 Days of Trouvailles! I just loved this series.
  • On Day 10, Travis Hay wrote about John Gwynn Swain’s unpleasant holiday experience in 1867, in which he was stuck in the countryside after getting arrested for a bar-room brawl.
  • On Day 11, Stacey Nation-Knapper told the story of how the fur traders at Spokane House celebrated New Years in 1823.
  • And finally, on Day 12, Patrice Dutil recounted William Lyon Mackenzie King’s last Christmas diary entry, on December 25^th, 1949.
• Chris Ryan was back this week with the Ottawa building permits for 1941!
• Here on Unwritten Histories, I reviewed the past year (ish) in the field of Canadian history. Lots of exciting stuff happened that I totally forgot about! I also got kind of sappy towards the end…
• Stacey Devlin seems to share my frustration with the recent Ancestry.com ads. In a post for Active History, she explored the problematic associations between DNA and Identity, which are romanticized in those ads.
• Steve Clifford discussed the Victoria War Memorial, established in 1925 just outside the legislative building in Victoria, BC. The post includes some lovely pictures of the building all lit up for the holidays.
• Krista McCracken reflected on her accomplishments over the past year, including a review of the work she has done in the field of Canadian history. Wow, I feel really lazy.
• Leah Grady, editor of the Atlantic Loyalists Connections blog, explored the authorship controversy over “The Night Before Christmas,” which is often attributed to Clement Clark Moore of NYC. However, the poem may have actually been written in New Brunswick by his god-father, Jonathan Odell.
• Normand Laplante, writing for LAC’s Discover Blog, wrote about the 125^th anniversary of the invention of basketball by Canadian James Naismith. He focuses specifically one some of the Canadian participants in the first ever basketball game.
• Krista McCracken also posted about a statement put out by the Archives Association of Ontario on their work in supporting the TRC’s calls-to-action.
• Christopher Dummitt launched his new website!
• Daniel Ross has helpfully created a short Twitter archive of Ian Mosby’s discussion of the destruction in the 1960s of government files relating to Indigenous peoples. Check it out here.
• Jessica DeWitt described her encounter with the introduction, by Selwyn Dewdney, to Audrey Saunders’ Algonquin Story, and how she will examine some of the questions he first raised about the park in the 1960s in her current research.
• The Canadian Museum of History posted some of their favourite Canadian holiday cards!
  • The UBC Digitizer’s blog also posted some lovely historical Christmas cards and photographs!
• The Retroactive blog discussed the announcement by the Archaeological Survey of Alberta’s of the re-establishment of their Occasional Paper Series, where they discuss new discoveries. You can read past and current issues (including the latest) here.
• Also on Histoire Engagée this week was an article by Vincent Lambert on the circular nature of Quebec history, particularly with respect to the Quiet Revolution.
• Bill Waiser told the story of Peter O. Fehr, who passed away in October. Fehr appeared as a babe-in-arms in one of Canada’s most famous photographs of an impoverished family standing in front of their car during the Depression. The image, and the story behind it, are quite striking.
• The DCB posted a new biography this week! The latest biography is of lawyer and politician, Napoléon-Antoine Belcourt, who promoted cooperation between English-Canadians and French-Canadians, and Protestants and Catholics in Quebec.
• Diane Tourville posted the latest instalment of The Bangle Files: murder mystery.
• The Royal Ontario Museum also posted their top blog posts of 2016, including a couple of history posts!
  • Ditto for Retroactive, which celebrated five years of blogging this year!
• The ROM blog also posted another Throwback Thursday post featuring the journal of Dorothy Burnham. This latest post was about the construction of exhibits.
• Kyle Falcon, writing for the Laurier Centre, discussed how WW1 soldiers celebrated Christmas in the Trenches and how the holiday was depicted in trench publications.
• Aaron Boyes and Sean Graham posted their fourth annual Year in Review on Active History! This is a bracket competition where they select the most important historical event of the year. The catch is that this is a review 100 years later, so this year’s competition centred around 1916.
• Whistorical remembered Christmas celebrations at Whistler in years past, including the musical, “Christmas at Rainbow Lodge.”
  • Find out about the kind of radio programming you would have heard around Christmas in 1935.
  • And how Captain Don Little of Beaverlodge celebrated Christmas for Dutch children during the war.
• Heritage Winnipeg traced the history of law courts in Manitoba from 1836 to today.
• Canadian History in the News
  • The Army Museum of Nova Scotia (at the Halifax Citadel) has set up an online voting process for members of the public to select which artefacts they’d like to see in their Canada 150 exhibition.
  • A new time capsule is being created for the 100^th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion next year. This new capsule will replace one placed in 1985, to be opened on the anniversary.
  • Sara Fraser, writing for the CBC, explored how WW1 soldiers would have decorated their Christmas trees. I think we all need to adopt the custom of using cotton batting from first-aid kits. 😉
  • A new documentary is in the works, focusing on the reunion of four siblings who were separated through the Sixties Scoop.
  • Colonial Barbie, anyone?
  • PBS interviewed photographer Daniella Zalcman on her series of portraits of residential school survivors. The portraits are really quite haunting, and have just been released as a book.
  • Montreal’s underground city has much to offer in terms of art and history.
  • Archaeologists are studying caribou fences created by the Sahtu Dene First Nation in NWT more than 100 years ago. These fences were used to trap large herds of caribou, their study may reveal much about the local Dene community, while also creating a tree-ring history dating back 500 years.
  • Vice has a great article about the use of “eskimo tags.” These tags listed a person’s identification number, and were created because it was “”too hard” to pronounce Inuit names. They had to be worn at all times, and the program lasted into the 1980s. Because pronouncing names like William Lyon Mackenzie King is just so easy.
  • Numéro Cinq featured an article by Karen Muljallen, who recounted her life’s story by remembering her clothing and books.
  • Researchers looking at the genetics of Inuit believe that they have found evidence that the Inuit were able to adapt to the cold climate of the Arctic and a seafood-based diet due to genetic contributions from extinct hominids.
  • Kennewick Man is finally on his way home.
  • CBC looks at the ongoing popularity of traditional Icelandic Christmas cakes (vinarterta) in Canada. The fun twist is that the cake is no longer common in Iceland.
  • Yves Hébert has a short history of the whimsically named seigneurie of Port-Joly (Port Jolly).
  • There is a fascinating new study out about the ancient wetlands-gardening site that was recently uncovered in BC. It dates back to at lest 1,800 B.C.E., and was constructed by the ancestors of the Katzie First Nation. This is the first evidence of the farming of wild places in the PNW! Too bad they paved over the site anyways…
    • Here is some more information about the kind of plant that was farmed –wapato (a type of potato).
  • Andrew Nikiforuk has a new series at The Tyee about Roderick Haig-Brown, fisherman and environmentalist, who spoke out against economic development at the expense of the environment back in the 1960s.
  • The government is trying to figure out what to do with the former U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. The building is apparently “cursed.” This article features an interview with University of Ottawa historian, Galen Perras.
  • The Vancouver Sun remembered the mass arrests in the Kwakwaka’wakw village of ‘Mimkwamlis (Village Island) that took place on Christmas day, following one of the largest potlatches in BC history.
  • Ottawa is now taking new nominations for UNCESO World Heritage sites.
  • There is some cool archaeology going on right now near Bell Island (in Newfoundland), looking at the WW2 shipwrecks located there. The area saw several naval battles between Allied and German forces.
  • CHEK news’s series, “This Week in History,” profiled the 2005 archaeological excavation of the Songhees Cistern on Vancouver Island.
  • Students at Concordia University learned how to cook historic recipes from 19^th century Grey Nuns cookbooks.
  • Find out about the new Black history in Nova Scotia course being offered at Dalhousie, the first in its nearly 200-year history.
  • I didn’t know this, but apparently Sooke (on Vancouver Island) was an important site for pilot training during WW2.
  • In response to Canada 150, some Quebec politicians are promising to disrupt the celebratory narrative with their project, Other 150. This project, created by historians and volunteers, will list 150 historical encounters between Quebec in Canada.
  • The Historicist remembers the first telegraph conversation to take place in Toronto, in 1846.

Week of December 25, 2016

• Adam Gaudry posted a great Twitter essay on “Playing Indian” in the postwar period, in the wake of the Joseph Boyden controversy.
• Russell Potter profiles an historic Franklin Expedition searcher: Francis Kennedy Pease.
• Claire Kreuger has a fascinating blog post about her self-awakening as a settler. It is also a meditation on the meaning of the term “settler” and how it allows non-Indigenous people to examine their own identity and relationship to the colonial project. It’s an absolute must read for all settlers.
• Canadian History in the News
  • The historic Banff hotel caught on fire this week.
  • The Royal Canadian Regiment Museum will be tweeting out its history in honour of Canada 150 and their 129^th anniversary.
  • The Royal BC Museum is asking Indigenous peoples to submit stories about artefacts in their collection.
  • The Royal BC Museum is also under renovation, building a new gallery devoted to Emily Carr, a new Pacific Worlds Gallery about First Nations cultural history, and an upgrade to the First Peoples displays (first created in the 1970s).
  • It might be hard for the young people to remember this, but calling long-distance used to be a really big deal. This was still the case when I first moved to BC in 2006, when my parents would freak out over phone bills.
  • The new North Vancouver Museum is planning to include Indigneous stories throughout the museum, rather than in an individual section. This effort was the result of consultation with representatives of the Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, who will also assist with the exhibit planning.
  • Check out this neat history of postal service in Whistler.
  • The Vancouver Sun also looked at the history of Vancouver’s postal service, this time focusing on the “posties,” the first mail carriers in the city. Holy facial hair.
  • CBC posted some adorable archival video of past Christmas celebrations.
  • Apparently museums, libraries, and archives are more popular than ever! I think that’s the first good history news I’ve read in months.
  • Check out this adorable video from the Surrey Archives about the city in the 1960s. Insert obligatory “groovy baby” reference here.
  • The city of Montreal is still arguing about what to do with the historic greystones in the Plateau. The buildings are beautiful, but derelict.
  • Some fascinating new archaeological discoveries are being made on an island in the Exploits River (in Newfoundland). At least three different Indigenous groups lived on the Island — the Gross Water Paleo-Eskimo, The Maritime Archaic Indians, and the Beothuk — all over the course of 5,000 years.
  • There are more archaeological findings being made in the North West Territories, near Yellowknife, using the new technique of ice patch archaeology. The research is being conducted with the Shúhtagot’ine (Mountain Dene) Indigenous community of Tulita.
  • Honest Ed’s is dead. The Toronto Public Library has its obituary.
  • The Historicist remembers how Toronto celebrated New Years Eve, 1966.
  • Find out about the fascinating history of Jewish fur traders in Michilimackinac in the late 18^th century. There was even an incident involving a duck….
  • The New York Times looks at Canadian hockey players who entered the military in WW1, the resulting hockey team — The Northern Fusiliers (aka Soldiers) — and how this formed the basis for the NHL.
  • Asbestos was finally banned! Find out a little about its history here.
  • Archivists have rediscovered a collection of materials belonging to Jack McQuesten, who is sometimes described as “The Father of the Yukon.” The items, believed lost in a fire, turned out to be under someone’s stairs…
    • There is some more info from the CBC here.
  • Find out about a Canadian plane crash just outside of Montreal in 1963.
  • An artist is looking for stories about Canadian internment camps from WW1. Some of the stories will be transformed into paintings as part of a traveling exhibit that will draw attention to the experiences of Ukrainian and Eastern European internees.
  • It’s been 20 years since the “Punch-Up in Piestany,” a fight between the Canadian and Soviet hockey teams at the World Juniors in 1987.
  • The CBC profiles Jack Cann, who helped to establish Students Help, a help line at the University of Alberta in 1969. This was one of the first help lines established in Canada.

Week of January 1, 2017

• Christopher Moore is going on tour!
• The Toronto Public Library remembers the abolishment of toll gates in Toronto in 1896. I think it’s a historical truism that everyone hates toll gates.
• The Vancouver As It Was blog tries to track down a vacant lot in Vancouver depicted in an 1889 photograph. The result is a historical tour of Hastings Street.
• Krista McCracken discusses the “Who Killed Alberta Williams” podcast, by Connie Walker, and its potential use as a teaching tool to talk about MMIW, residential schools, and colonialism.
• Historica Canada has a new online exhibit about the birth of the NHL and the establishment of the Stanley Cup!
• Check out the updated list of Canadian archaeological field schools for 2017.
• In NiCHE’s first blog post after the break, Robert C.H. Sweeny discusses the Montréal, l’avenir du passé (MAP) project, the oldest historical GIS research project in Canada. Don’t miss it! I totally want to play with the databases at the CHA when they’re released.
• Travis Hay has a wonderful article for Active History this week about the establishment of Thunder Bay and the settler colonial dispossession of the Fort William First Nation (FWFN) that facilitated this. He focuses on the 1905 forced relocation of the FWFN (before, during, and after), and does a superb job of showing how colonialism continues to inform racist ideologies towards the FWFN.
• Unwritten Histories returned from a holiday break with another installment in the Historians’ Histories series! This time, I profiled Sarah Van Vugt and her work as an historian.
• Ann Little is back with another Teaser Tuesday. This week, she discussed some of the political intrigue surrounding Esther Wheelwright, and the political power that religious women wielded. There is also a potential spy in the story!
• Bill Waiser writes about how a heavy-equipment operator at as Saskatoon landfill accidentally discovered a significant archaeological site, dating to 5,000 to 7,500 years ago. He did this twice.
• The DCB is back with another new biography! This latest entry is for Hormisdas Magnan, writer, civil servant, and renaissance man.
  • They also posted a second new biography this week. The second is of Margaret Eleanor Theodora Addison, the first dean of women at Victoria College.
• The South Peace Regional Archives has a short and adorable story about what happens when a bear gets trapped in a log cabin belonging to a trapper.
  • They also have a story about the time some city-folk recommended that farmers use wide-benched sleighs to keep the streets clear of snow for cars.
• Jennifer Evans has kindly posted her Prezi presentation for her paper at the AHA on sound and queer history.
• Stephen Bocking muses about the history of Canadian ecology.
• The Canadian Museum of History talks about some of the acoustic challenges of building the Canadian history hall.
• Retroactive is also back from the holiday break, and they are launching a new series called “Ask an Expert.”
• Sean Kheraj posted a list of the top five NiCHE posts from 2016!
• The ROM blog has a new Throwback Thursday featuring Dorothy Burnham’s journal entries. This one features textile studies.
• LAC introduced a new guest curator blog series in honour of Canada 150. This series will feature individual items from their collection.
  • LAC has also published it’s third issue of Signatures, its in-house journal featuring documents from their collection.
    • Included in this issue are discussions of food history, architecture, French-Canadian soldiers in the British secret service, the Virtual Gramophone, and more.
• Krista McCracken profiles the new digital exhibition, “Performing Archive: Edward S. Curtis + “the vanishing race” in her latest blog post. While she commends the curators for their work, she does note that, as of yet, there has been little participation with the Indigenous communities depicted in the photographs.
• Jake Clifford discusses the recent digitization of Canadian trench newspapers by LAC.
• Diane Tourville has yet another installment in her Bangles File series, about the murder of Private Michael Flynn.
• The Vancouver as It Was blog takes a look at the Vancouver Vagabonds, a men’s club that was in operation from 1914 to 1928.
• The Museum of Vancouver is hosting a new exhibition featuring the collection of Neil Whaley, who has a massive collection of vintage Vancouver aretefacts and documents. You can see a short video on the collection on the blog post.
• The Nova Scotia Archives is also back with their latest blog post: a look at New Year Levees!
• Mike Commito has published his latest paper in the Thunder Bay Museum’s publication, Papers and Records. This latest article looks at the Mississagi fire of 1948.
• The Maple Stars and Stripes podcast looks at the life of one specific Fille du Roi, Jeanne Chevalier.
• BC Studies has relaunched the Archive Matters blog series with Angie Bain, of the Lower Nicola Indian Band. In this first post, she explores why archives matter, her research on James Teit, and how her community has worked together with researchers and archivists. I’m excited to see what she does with this space!
• Canadian History in the News
  • The Canada 150 deluge has started. Doug Saunders, writing for The Globe and Mail, looks back at the Centennial. He argues that 1967 was a pivotal moment for Canadian history, the first “good” year where we started to confront some of the problems of our society, and the emergence of multiculturalism. I’m still not sure what I think of this article.
  • Christa Couture has an excellent article ripping the whole Canada 150 thing to shreds. It’s a definite must-read.
  • Artist Gu Xiong is using artefacts from Chinese Canadian sites all over BC as part of his latest art project. The photographs of artefacts and sites in this article are just spectacular.
  • Want to buy a 19^th century village in Quebec?
  • Len Flett, with Nicole Letourneau, has written an editorial arguing that restoring Indigenous peoples to their rightful and central place in Canadian history must be central to the process of healing Indigenous communities.
  • There is new information about how the first humans migrated across North America that blows the Clovis theory completely out of the water. New evidence suggests that rather than there being an ice-free corridor that allowed migration inland, there were likely multiple waves of peoples that arrived along both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.
  • The Current spoke with Beth Greenhorn, manager of Project Naming at LAC, about her work and its significance. Project Naming has sent photographs of Indigenous peoples that are not identified all across the country and online, hoping that friends and relatives will recognize the people in the images and restore their names.
  • This is mostly just for fun, but check out VICE’s guide to Canadian Universities for American students. And they do not pull any punches…
  • Read Arthur Bear Chief’s residential school memoir for free here.
  • Colonization Road will air on the CBC on January 26^th! Set your DVRs!
  • The Vancouver Sun posted some interesting public domain images from Christmases past.
  • Students at the Toronto Catholic Board participated in a blanket exercise.
  • It’s been more than 100 years since the start of WW1, but the remains of soldiers are still being unearthed. The Department of National Defense continues to work to identify remains and provide them with respectful burials.
  • Can you believe it’s been 19 years since the 1998 Ice Storm? I can’t.
  • Find out what you remember from Canadian Heritage Minutes with this quiz. Can anyone say click-bait?
  • The largest independent gay and lesbian archive (located in Toronto) is being upgraded to make it more accessible.
  • Wallis Snowdown, writing for the CBC, looks at the fur trade at the time of Confederation. However, as Adele Perry recently noted, the fur trade is still part of the Canadian economy.
  • The University of Calgary has digitized some materials from their Sir John Franklin collection.
  • Charles Bronfman, who participated in the creation of the Heritage Minute program, has just published a memoir.
  • CBC looks back at the deadliest fire in Halifax History, at the Halifax Poor House in 1882. Roughly 30 people died, trapped within the building as it burned.
  • Speaking of fires, here are five things you didn’t know about the 1886 Great Vancouver Fire, which completely destroyed the city within 25 to 45 minutes.
  • You can learn about the history of Treaty 4 by looking at the pictograph depicting the events and aftermath made by Chief Paskwa, of the Pasqua First Nation. Such an amazing and important document.
    • Here’s another take.
  • A PEI heritage trust is trying to save a heritage building with a Buy a Brick campaign.
  • Do you know the legend of Tiny Seymour’s rum jug?
  • Colonel John McCrae is being transformed into a comic book hero!
  • Saturday’s Google Doogle was of Sir Sanford Fleming, the Canadian who invited standard time zones!
    • You can see the Virtual Museum of Canada’s exhibit on him here, and the DCB’s entry on him here.
  • The Living Toronto blog talked with Eric Plato, who recently learned that he was descended from a man who escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad.  Plato shares some stories about his ancestor and why he was so remarkable.
  • Robert Everett-Green discusses a new exhibit about Confederation that flips the narrative on its head. Artist Kent Monkman (Cree) used traditional European painting techniques to create subversive representations of Canadian national myths and Indigenous history.  If you can’t make it to Toronto to see the paintings yourself, you can see some of the images in the article! I just love this.

Can I go back on vacation now? That was a long one… Anyways, we’ll be back on Tuesday with our monthly look at the best new articles from the field of Canadian history. See you then!

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