“Vancouver has been profoundly changed,” according to local talk radio host and former BC cabinet minister Christy Clark. We’re just over halfway through the 2010 Winter Olympic Games here in Vancouver, British Columbia and Clark’s comments will not be the only ones proclaiming a new era for the city. In […]
Canadian history
160 posts
As a follow up to my previous post about the Public Domain Manifesto, I wanted to direct readers to the controversy over the release of Canada’s intelligence file on Tommy Douglas. Douglas, as many Canadians will remember, was a prominent social democratic politician, former premier of Saskatchewan, long-time Member of […]
This week, my course on the history of the Canadian West since 1885 is looking at the 1919 general strike in Winnipeg. We spent a lot of time going into the various factors that led to such discontent among Winnipeg’s working class, especially those related to wartime conditions between 1914 […]
After months and months of hype, the long-awaited Apple tablet – the iPad – has arrived. It’s actually a real thing. Perhaps I too have just been caught up in the media spectacle that is an Apple product launch, but since I wrote a post back in November about the […]
Episode 12 Industrialization in Subarctic Environments: January 19, 2010. [audio:http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past12.mp3][24:30] Between 1920 and 1960, Canada’s northwest subarctic region experienced late-stage rapid industrialization along its large lakes. These included Lake Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake. Powered by high-energy fossil fuels, the natural resources of the northwest […]
If you’re a historical researcher, the Library and Archives of Canada wants to hear from you. LAC recently released a survey on the relationship between historians and the archives that focuses particularly on the digitization of archival materials. Unfortunately, it seems that LAC is under pressure to use digitization as […]
Had John A. Macdonald not passed away at the age of 86, he would be 195 years old today. Canada’s first (and third) Prime Minister and co-conspirator in the confederacy of the remaining British North American colonies was born on January 11, 1815 in Glasgow, Scotland. He later resettled in […]
This week my course on the history of the Canadian West since 1885 kicked off with a look at the trial of Louis Riel. This November 16th will mark the 125th anniversary of his execution as the first and only person to be tried and convicted for high treason in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]