Next week the NiCHE New Scholars Reading Group will be hosting a live Skype conference call to discuss a draft chapter from Dan Rueck’s dissertation. This chapter looks at land practices at Kahnawake to 1815. Reading Group members can now download the draft chapter from our group website and sign […]
Environmental History
173 posts
Episode 19 Metropolitanism and Canadian Environmental History: January 24, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past19.mp3][42:58] In 1954, Canadian historian James Maurice Stockford Careless published an influential article in the Canadian Historical Review, titled “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History” which offered a new approach for understanding the course of Canadian history and the development […]
This April, the Wilson Institute for Canadian History and the Network in Canadian History & Environment will host a three-day symposium called EH+: Writing the Next Chapter of Canadian Environmental History. The symposium is intended to assemble up to fifty scholars to discuss and debate future directions for the study […]
It is the start of a New Year and it is the start of a new round of the NiCHE New Scholars Reading Group. For the January Round we’ll be taking a look at the introduction to Dan Macfarlane’s recently completed dissertation “To the Heart of the Continent: Canada and […]
Environmental historians with an interest in oral history research should check out the special issue of Oral History Forum that was recently published. Guest editors Alan MacEachern and Ryan O’Connor have assembled a fine collection of articles that reflect upon the practice of oral history methodologies in environmental history research. […]
Episode 18 Local and Regional Parks: November 21, 2010 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past18.mp3][45:50] The provincial government of British Columbia describes Desolation Sound Marine Provincial Park as a “yachter’s paradise” located at the confluence of the Malaspina Inlet and Homfray Channel just north of the town of Power River. The calm, warm waters […]
Episode 17 Virtual Field Trips, Automobiles, and Global Commodity Chains: October 29, 2010 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past17.mp3][24:35] Over the summer, the NiCHE New Scholars group organized a virtual environmental history workshop that invited graduate students from around the world to participate in two days of discussion and review of working papers on […]
Preservation versus use. This, according to environmental historian Alan MacEachern, is the “unresolved problem at the heart of park history.” Last weekend I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit Muir Woods National Monument just north of San Francisco where I came face to face with this tension in […]
Episode 16 The Industrialization of Agriculture: September 28, 2010 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past16.mp3][44:24] From 1945 to the early 1970s, technological innovations helped to transform American agriculture. The introduction of industrial chemicals and new machinery to US farm operations in the decades after the Second World War ushered in, what some historians have […]
122 years ago, Vancouver’s Stanley Park officially opened to the public. I joined Joe Burima in studio at CJSW 90.9fm to discuss this day in Canadian history: [audio:http://cjsw.com/podcasts/tich/2010-09-27.mp3] Today in Canadian History, 27 September 2010 Toward the end of our interview, Joe asked me about last summer’s controversy over a […]
I recently published a review of Sharon Kirsch’s book, What Species of Creatures: Animal Relations from the New World on H-Net Reviews. You can download a PDF copy of the review here. In this book, Kirsch explores early European encounters with New World animals in northern North America. She provides […]
Late last month, the federal government surprised statisticians, businesses, economists, academics and many other Canadians by announcing an end to the issuing of a mandatory long census form. With little explanation and unsatisfactory justification, the government has proposed to very significantly diminish the quality of the national census. The outcry […]