If you happened to read the unfortunately titled editorial “Birth of Nations” (an inexplicably racist allusion) in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday, you would have been treated to Leonard Stern’s confused opinions/fever dream about the “unremarkable” character of Canadian history. Based on his own close reading of one of the major […]
Yearly Archives: 2009
49 posts
As representatives from Canada and nearly 200 other nation-states meet in Copenhagen to negotiate the terms of a new international climate change and greenhouse gas emissions agreement, those of us with a predilection for a historical perspective might want to take a moment to reflect on our not too distant […]
Last month, Dr. Catherine Knight launched a new blog and web resource portal for New Zealand environmental history. Dr. Knight, whose research focuses on environmental history of Japan and New Zealand, has maintained a very active blog over the past month with several short stories and articles. Recently she wrote […]
I just saw this morning that H-Canada’s editors are adding “BLOG” as a new listserv tag. Ioana Teodorescu, the listserv editor, put out a call for short descriptions and links to blogs that are “useful for historians.” These don’t necessarily need to be related to Canadian history. I’ll post a […]
Over the summer, I posted a quick story about the need for historians to take part in the Canadian copyright reform consultations. The Canadian Historical Association did just this with an excellent submission to Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage that outlined many of the main concerns for […]
American journalist and host of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, was recently detained at the Canadian Peace Arch border crossing on her way to Vancouver for a speaking event at the downtown Vancouver Public Library. In her interview with CBC about the incident, Goodman said that Canadian Border Services questioned her […]
Episode 11 Animals, History, and Environment: November 22, 2009. [audio:http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past11.mp3][55:05] Environmental history is primarily concerned with the relationship between humans and non-human nature, but the study of non-human nature holds a different set of problems and poses a different set of questions when considering non-human animals. As environmental historians continue […]
Professor Liza Piper from the Department of History & Classics at the University of Alberta came to UBC for the Nature|History|Society fall event. Graduate students and faculty gathered for a special Q&A seminar on Dr. Piper’s new book The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada. The following day, Dr. Piper delivered […]
The Canadian Historical Association is in the process of re-designing its website and has announced a soft launch of the re-design. You can check out the new look for the website and vote in an online opinion poll about the site. Unfortunately, an online poll is a rather limited way […]
Good news in the world of environmental history podcasting. Jan Oosthoek’s long-running podcast, Exploring Environmental History, was recently nominated for a European Podcast Award. Many readers will already be familiar with Jan’s terrific work (featured in the last episode of Nature’s Past). Now you can support the Exploring Environmental History […]
This is a follow up on a previous post on e-book readers and the future of reading for historical researchers. Emerging digital reading technologies hold great potential to improve historical scholarship, but these developments should not be confused with developments in the consumer electronics industry. New electronic reading devices, including […]
As environmental historians, we do a lot of reading and writing. Readers of this blog (and many other scholars) are beginning to do more of their reading in a digital format. If we consider how much digital reading we do each day, including websites and email, it is obvious that […]