Canadian History Roundup – Week of October 21, 2018

A jolly Halloween. 1909. English. Toronto Public Library. Public Domain.

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

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

Environmental History

• The most commonly-used words in #envhist last week, according to Jessica DeWitt, were: “Forcings,” “Warming,” and “Will.”
• Jessica was also back this week on NiCHE with her list of the best articles in #envhist from the last month!
• The latest LAC Flickr album featured images from the steel industry. Check the images out themselves here.
• There is a new exhibition called “Stories Beneath the Surface,” telling the history of the communities who were forced to leave when their homes were flooded in the building of the Hugh Keenleyside Dam in the 1960s, on the Columbia River between Revelstoke and Castlegar.
• I am sure you will be shocked to learn that Indigenous peoples across North America had been managing forest fires successfully for thousands of years, until settlers came along and messed things up.

Military History

• The Beyond the Spectacle blog has begun a new mini-series documenting the experiences of Indigenous soldiers in Britain during WW1. The first one, by Kate Rennard, followed her search for the identities of a group of eleven First Nations men who were part of the Canadian Forestry Corps who visited Rochdale in January 1918. Content warning: residential schools. Errata warning: they get the definition of non-status Indian wrong.
• The Dutch Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, visited Parliament to thank Canada for the role Canadian soldiers played in the liberation of the Netherlands in WW2. He specifically thanked one veteran who was present, Don White.
• Canadian Cemeteries History brought us the story of Hamiltonian, John Spiers, who died in 1856 from wounds suffered fighting Napoleon forty-three years earlier.
• Wendy Robicheau has started an Adopt-A-Soldier project at Acadia University, hoping to draw attention to the war memorials on campus.
• Find out about the new exhibit at the Canadian War Museum on the last 100 Days of WW1.

Archaeology

• Robyn Lacy published a new blog post, a continuation of a previous post on the “death’s head” design (which she calls “one common skull”), a common motif on gravestones in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. In this post, she focused specifically on the popularity of this motif, which originated in Massachusetts, in Atlantic Canada.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia has updated their entry for Erik the Red.
• Spoopy cemetery scandal, anyone?
• How about a spoopy abandoned ship on l’île d’Anticosti?
  • (Ed. note: Apparently ‘spoopy’ is what the kids are saying these days.)

History Education

• Joanne Hammond shared her experiences teaching a Secwepemc archaeology class for adult learnings, and why it matters how little settlers know about the history of land theft, smallpox, and the Indian Act.
• This week on Active History, we republished a blog post from the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History as part of the Beyond the Lecture series. The post, by Andrew Davis, is all about using Zotero in the classroom. And of course, don’t forget that we are still seeking contributions, and that inquiries, proposals, and submissions can be sent to the editors (myself and Krista McCracken) via unwrittenhistories [at]gmail[dot]com.

Transnational History

• The Canadian International History Committee has released a new digital briefing book and accompanying blog post (written by Andrew Zhao) on the plan of action developed by the Canadian government in anticipation of a possible nuclear strike, between 1957 and 1963.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration History

• Find out about this new exhibit, “Refuge Canada,”currently on at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21.
• Alyson Blaquière has written a new blog post for Histoire Engagée on the role that the first Congès Mondial acadien has played in the development of a transnational Acadian identity.
• Also on Histoire Engagée this week was a review by Pierre Cras of Robyn Maynard’s Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.
• Sonya de Laat’s new post on Active History, about using historical photographs to study the history of refugees, is a must-read.

Indigenous History

• I think we need to applaud Miles Brewster, an Inuk student in Iqualuit, who remained seated during the Canadian anthem at his school, to call for more education on Indigenous history, specifically with respect to residential schools.
• This week, the UofA Faculty of Law blog began a new series, exploring how racism has impacted Indigenous peoples. Here are the subjects they covered:
  • The history of tuberculosis in Inuit Nunangat
  • Indigenous homelessness
  • The horrors of the Charles Camsell (Indian) Hospital in Edmonton.
  • Jeffrey Amherst and biological warfare
• Sean Carleton’s latest for Active History focused on Adele Perry’s concept, “histories we remember,” specifically with respect to colonialism, residential schools, and Chanie Wenjack. Sean focused on a previous attempt to share Wenjack’s stories, by a group of journalists and musicians, in 1967.
• This week’s Acadiensis blog post was a review by Yale Belanger of Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan’s Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State.
• Also on Active History this week was a longer version of the piece by Paige Raibmon, discussing relations between Indigenous Peoples and Europeans, that was originally published on The Tyee.
• The president of Nunavut Tunngavik, Aluki Kotierk, announced that the federal government will soon apologize for the treatment of Inuit who were removed from their communities and taken to sanatoriums in southern Canada for treatment for tuberculosis.
• The Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has begun development on a memorial register of children who died while attending residential schools.
• The Native Communications Society has just donated 200,000 Native Press images to the Northwest Territories archives.  And many of these will be digitized!

New France/British North America

• First up on Borealia this week was Greg Kennedy’s review of Alan Greer’s book, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America.
• And later in the week they published part five of their series on Cartography and Empire. This blog post was written by Alban Berson, and deals with the appearance of several “îlesaux Démons,” or Demon Islands, on early French maps of the North Atlantic.
• Isobelle Goguen wrote a new blog post for the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog, part one of a look at the case of the betrayal of Zimri Armstrong.
• A number of Victorian clairvoyants claimed to have knowledge of what happened to the Franklin expedition.
• Roland Paris wrote a lament for the historic portage along the Ottawa River.

Political History

• Find out how a group of Manitobans fought to eliminate property requirements for voting in Winnipeg in 1940.
• This week on the LAC blog is a guide to searching for King’s and Queen’s Counsel appointments in Canada.

Social History

• Anyone up for caribou steaks or wolf stroganoff?
• You may never have heard of Thelma Pepper, but her work as a photographer documenting the experiences of rural women in Saskatchewan is invaluable.
• This blog post on Nursing Clio, by Alicia Kerfoot, is a beautiful and haunting narrative about grief, memorializing, embroidery, and miscarriage. It is well worth a read just for that. But is also featured a discussion about infant loss in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne’s House of Dreams. Content warning: miscarriage.
• Find out about Linda Mahood’s latest book, on hitchhiking culture in Canada in the 1970s.
• I am nerdily excited that Kesia Kvill has a new blog post! In it, we follow along as she attempts to make Mocha Cake from the Cooking Made Easy cookbook. She received her copy from her grandmother, who used it in her domestic science class.
• Last week I mentioned the sinking of the SS Princess Sophia episode of the Stuff You Missed in History podcast. This week, CBC has done a special news interactive feature on it.
• Joanne Hammond explained how the land in the Thompson valley was settled: a smallpox epidemic over the fall of 1862 and winter of 1863. 
• One of the new entries on The Canadian Encyclopedia this week is for the Cowichan sweater!

The History of Gender and Sexuality

• The Canadian Encyclopedia published several new entries this week, including:
  • A new entry on the Cold War purge of LGTBQ+ government employees.
  • One for Elsie Knott, an Objiwe activist from Curve Lake First Nation who was the first elected female First Nations chief in Canada.
  • And one for journalist and feminist Colette Beauchamp. 
• Only seven people have applied for the Expungement of Historically Unjust Convictions program, which formally erases criminal records for homosexual activities.

Local History

• Did you know it is possible to lose a twenty-foot-long painting?
• This week Heritage Winnipeg celebrated the Inglis Building.
• Find out about a new plaque initiative celebrating Edmonton’s Westmount district architectural heritage.
• RIP Molson Brewery.

Digital and Public History

• Find out about the history of the City of Winnipeg Archives’ digital records program. This is so meta.
• David Lester created a short film about his contribution to the Graphic History Collective’s Drawn to Change, on the Battle of Ballantyne Pier.
• Algoma University Archives has just digitized the minute books of the Indian Homes Committee, associated with the Shingwauk Residential School, for 1893-1914 and 1915-1922.
• Do you know the story of the Quilt of Belonging?

Doing History

• Katie Biittner responded to a recent review in the National Post of the Royal Alberta Museum with this fantastic blog post, and an overview of how museum exhibits are created.
• Find out about a new digitization project at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre at Algoma University. This is an excellent example of how Krista McCracken’s Twitter presentation from last week works in real life!
• The Edmonton Journal is now fully searchable online, back to 1903!
• The Hugh Pickett fonds are now available from the City of Vancouver Archives.
• Alan MacEachern put together a list of his top ten websites for researching Canadian history, including Unwritten Histories! Aww, shucks.
• The Fall/Winter 2018 edition of Signatures, LAC’s magazine, is out!
• Vancouver Island University is updating their archives, digitizing maps and texts from 1732 to 1944, and integrating Indigenous voices.
• The Ontario Council of University Libraries has released over seventy years of historical public opinion polls, and a guide to consulting them.
• This week on Unwritten Histories, I profiled my favourite new articles in Canadian history from August and September 2018!

Miscellaneous

• In the latest blog post from the Canadian Museum of History, Jennifer Millar discussed the acquisition of a very rare and mysterious stamp design.
• Check out this picture from the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library. Just trust me on this.
• CBC put together twelve historical images of weed in New Brunswick.
• I love this clock.
• The latest biography from The Dictionary of Canadian Biography is for businessman and union activist, William Ford Coaker. 

Podcasts

• Erika Dyck was interviewed by the Synchronicity podcast about her research on women, psychedelics, and eugenics in the postwar period!
• The latest History Chats episode features a talk by Julie Gilmour on “William Lyon Mackenzie King, Reason, Race, and the 1907 Vancouver Riots.”

Better Late Than Never

• The Toronto Ward Museum collaborated with the Trinity College Archives to create a new online exhibit called “Finding Myself in the Archive.”

Calls for Papers

• Are you a graduate student? Do you live on the West Coast? The 2019 Qualicum conference is now accepting submissions! The deadline to submit is November 15^th.
• The British Association for Canadian Studies has issued a CFP for their upcoming annual conference. This year’s theme is on The State and Canada. Proposals are due November 30^th.
• The Canadian Historical Association, the Canadian Political Science Association, the Canadian Sociological Association, and the Society for Socialist Studies are co-organizing an interdisciplinary workshop on Teaching and Learning after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.Paper proposals are due November 5.
• Colin Coates has posted this CFP for the he 8^th Congress of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies 2019 conference on “Canadian (Re)Visions: Futures, Changes, Revolutions.” However, I can’t seem to find any additional details.

Does anyone have any fun historical plans for Halloween? There will be pumpkin carving here at the Unwritten Histories household. More specifically, Mr. Unwritten Histories will carve the pumpkins and then make me the seeds. 😀 I hope you enjoyed this week’s Canadian history roundup! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Tuesday for Stephanie’s now annual Halloween Special! See you then!

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