Public debate and media coverage of the Shafia family murder trial has obscured and misrepresented patriarchal violence against women in Canada. Following the guilty verdict last month, lead Crown prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis mistakenly proclaimed that, “[t]his verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles […]
Canadian history
160 posts
It seems like oil spill history is playing an especially important role in the current debate over the Keystone XL pipeline and Northern Gateway pipeline projects. I recently wrote up a short piece on oil pipeline spills in Alberta’s history. This history of recent oil pipeline spills associated with Enbridge […]
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a public lecture at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History titled “Order and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Toronto”. This lecture is based on my current research project on the history of urban animals and it focuses on the regulation of domestic animals in […]
For those of you in Toronto next week, the Robarts Centre’s environmental history lecture series, Transforming Canada: Histories of Environmental Change, continues with its third speaker, Professor Graeme Wynn from the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Professor Wynn’s lecture, titled “Worlds in Motion: Migration and the […]
Episode 26 Environmental History as Public History: 29 November 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past26.mp3][33:50] Environmental historians have recently been thinking about future directions for their sub-discipline. Last year, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society co-sponsored a workshop held in Washington, D.C. to explore such future directions and published some of […]
The following is the text of an open letter to Toronto City Council from Canadian historians at Toronto’s universities regarding the proposal to close four city museums: As professors of Canadian History in Toronto’s three universities, we are deeply disturbed to learn that the city is contemplating closing four city […]
Tom Peace recently published a post on Active History calling attention to the emergence of another round of the History Wars, but the more pressing forthcoming history war may be one between the historical community and the politics of austerity. Budget cuts at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels of […]
Download episode In the third installment of this five-part series, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen explores the growth of the asbestos mining industry in Quebec during the Second World War and the post-war period. In particular, she unearths the history of the adverse health effects of exposure to asbestos and the […]
Download episode This week EHTV continues its five-part series on asbestos in Quebec with the second installation. In Part II of “A Town Called Asbestos”, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen continues her survey of the history of asbestos in Quebec by examining the first asbestos industry boom between 1914 and 1939. […]
Download episode This week EHTV launches the first part of an fascinating five-part series on the history of Quebec asbestos by Dr. Jessica Van Horssen. For more than one hundred years, Quebecers have mined this unique and dangerous mineral from the northern region of the Appalachian mountain range. This episode […]
Download episode In the second of our two-part look at Niagara Falls, Merle Massie explores two of the dimensions of the tourist landscape of the falls. On the one hand, Niagara is a natural wonder that has draw tourists to its sights for more than one hundred years. On the […]
Episode 24 Draining the Wet Prairie: September 20, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past24.mp3][34:17] Agricultural expansion is a central component of the history of the resettlement of the Canadian prairies in the nineteenth-century. Popularly, that history has been characterized by the challenges of aridity on a dry prairie landscape. The characterization of the […]