Canadian History Roundup – Week of April 15, 2018

A young boy holding lollipop. Gar Lunney. April 1961. Library and Archives Canada. Copyright: Expired

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

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

*We’re trying something different this week: thematic categories! I would love to know what you think: do you prefer this style or the usual one?

Environmental History

• This week’s most commonly used words in #envhist, according to Jessica DeWitt were: “Can,” “U.S.,” and “Grief.”
• This week on NiCHE
  • Frederick L. Brown reviewed Jim Ellis’ edited collection, Calgary: City of Animals.
  • And in the final post in their series with the Acadiensis blog, Soundings, Claire Campbell shared some thoughts on the series and the field of Atlantic Canadian environmental history itself.
• Darrin Qualman has put together 100 years of Canadian cattle prizes into a series of graphs.
• Check out this terrifying interactive map of thirty-seven years of oil spills in Alberta.
• Jessica DeWitt also shared her comps notes from Doug Owram’s Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900.

Military History

• Students in Vancouver learned about the history of Chinese-Canadian soldiers in WW2.
• One of the men who helped to kill the Red Baron, Arthur Roy Brown, is being honoured this week.

Archaeology

• Carmen Cadeau interviewed Ken Cassoy, the marine archaeologist who led the excavation of the HMS General Hunter, in honour of the new exhibit on the ship at the Welland Historical Museum.
• Stephanie Halmhofer reflected on her recent experience at the Society for American Archaeology annual conference.
• Retroactive examined the ancient history of farming in Alberta, with a particular emphasis on the geological, biological, and human forces that shaped it over the past 200 million years.
• The latest Dig It column looks at what archaeologists can learn from the wear and tear on stone tools.
• Robyn Lacy posted another installment in her Curious Canadian Cemeteries series. This time, she profiled the Belvedere Roman Catholic Cemetery, in St. John’s Newfoundland.

History Education

• This week on Active History
  • We had two new additions to the Beyond the Lecture series!
    • Thirstan Falconer and Zack MacDonald discussed how they have met the challenges of preparing history graduates for the job market through the use of briefing notes in a flipped environment.
    • And Geoff Read, Tom Peace, and Tim Compeau wrote about how they have tried to make course readings more meaningful to students, while also ensuring that students are more likely to actually read the readings. And don’t miss the comments!
• Mark Leier’s innovative teaching techniques were profiled by the SFU Teaching and Learning Centre, particularly his use of teaching portfolios.
• Find out about this new course for New Brunswick high school students on the history of the struggle for inclusion for Canadians with intellectual disabilities.
• Marilou Tanguay shared this really cool Canadian history exam from the Université de Montréal from the 1960s.
• Jennifer Tunnicliffe was profiled by McMaster University for her innovative teaching techniques in recreating the 1968 Canadian election. If only Tommy Douglas had won…
• Check out this really cool initiative by Spencer Greening to learn about the history of land use in this home community of the Gitga’at First Nation, from the land and Indigenous knowledge.

Transnational History

• Adam Chapnick reflected on Canadian diplomatic history as a field over the span of his twenty-year career, and what we can expect from future scholars.
• The shortlist for the Wilson Book Prize and the Viv Nelles Essay Prize have been announced! The winners will be announced at Congress.
• Kirk Niergarth continued his virtual tour through the Depression-era Soviet Union through the eyes of Canadian visitors. In this post, he focuses on baggage, both literal and figurative.
• The Canadian Pavilion in Venice has recently been restored. And of course the NFB made a film about it.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration History

• Jean Parolin has donated her collection of letters and photos from her friend Sumi Motosune, from the time when Mototsune and her family were forcibly relocated from the West Coast in 1942. Motosune herself passed away in 1999.
  • The official press release on these letters is here.
• Check out this fantastic list of books that challenge traditional narratives of Canadian history, particularly around the exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour and LGTBQ2S folks.
• Do you know the history of the Tailor Project?
• High school students are searching for lost African-Canadian cemeteries in Essex.
• Bashir Mohamed had a great Twitter essay on why he thinks that Daniel Knott, former Mayor of Edmonton, was in this 1931 photo of a KKK convention.

Indigenous History

• As you may remember from a previous roundup, the Pope refused to apologize to the Indigenous peoples of Canada. There has been quite a bit of all out this week.
  • One residential school survivor, Bernice Daigneault (from Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan), wrote an open letter in response.
  • And then the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops held a news conference to try to explain his decision.
    • Here is the news conference, including questions from reporters.
    • APTN provided some background here.
    • And here is the response from the NDP, including Charlie Angus and Romeo Saganash.
    • More from CBC here.
    • And here from APTN.
    • Joanne Hammond was not impressed.
• The survivors of Ontario’s Indian Hospital are still fighting to be heard and receive financial compensation.
• Hakai magazine profiled one of the staples of the traditional Pacific Northwest Indigenous diet, camas bulbs. Fun fact: one of the local colleges in Victoria, Camosun, is named for the plant.
• Santa Ono, president of UBC, wrote about the involvement of academia in residential schools.
• The Royal BC Museum has launched a $500,000 grant to help First Nations repatriate artifacts and ancestral remains from all over the world.
• This week on the Canadian Museum of History Blog, Sylvain Raymond had a new post about a fur trade pendant, given by the HBC to an Indigenous leader 200 years ago.
• There is some really fascinating discussion on this tweet from Joanne Hammond on the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
• And then later in the week, the Canadian Museum of History shared an image of a North West Company token.

Pre-Confederation History (open to suggestions on a better heading!)

• The Junto is relaunching! While primarily devoted to American history, it does also cover subjects of interest to Canadian historians.
  • This was quickly followed by their first post, on childhood in the Revolutionary Era, by Julia M. Gossard.
• Joseph Gagné reviewed an episode of a French animated show that portrayed the Siege of Quebec.
• As AMC’s The Terror continues, Russell Potter profiled one of the sailors, Stephen Samuel Stanley. That picture is too much.
  • And Potter and Stephen Smith also reviewed episode 5 of the show.
• In the latest post from the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog, Christine Lovelace explored the first slander case in New Brunswick, which involved none other than Benedict Arnold. Does anyone else often mix up his name with Benedict Anderson? Or am I just strange? On second thought… maybe don’t answer that.
• There is a brand new blog from Patrick Lacroix, Query the Past. The first post is already up, a tribute to historian Mason Wade.

The History of Gender and Sexuality

• The family of Everett Klippert has donated his remaining papers to the Calgary Gay History Project! Check out some of the amazing documents included.
• Tom Hopper has written a really fantastic piece on the gay community of Toronto, and how it has been both over-policed and under-protected for decades.
• Check out these really cool street banners highlighting the history of LGTBQ folks in Guelph.
• Gary Kinsman was on Power and Politics this week, discussing the government’s apology to LGTBQ Canadians, and discussing the flaws of the bill of expunging criminal records for same-sex consensual encounters.

Local History

• It was a busy week at the Toronto Public Library blog
  • First up was an overview of their digital photos from Stratford Ontario.
  • Next they remembered the Great Fire of Toronto, which occurred on April 19, 1904.
    • Which was also the subject of this week’s post from the Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto.
  • And finally, they commemorated Record Store Day.
• In their latest post, Instantanés looked back on the end of an engagement in Chicoutimi in 1938, and the court case that followed.
• Whistorical shared some videos of mountain biking from the 1980s and 1990s.
  • And of course included its look back on the week in years past.
• Eve Lazarus looks back at the history of Mount Pleasant’s Coulter House.
• The Centre d’archives de la Grande zone argileuse has just acquired the collection of Alain Bussières.
• The City of Vancouver Archives continues its hunt for 2116 Maple Street, this time using city directories.
• Camille Robert was featured on the podcast, Plus on est de fous, plus on lit!, discussing Martin Petitclerc’s recent book, Grève et paix. Une histoire des lois spéciales au Québec.
• Radio Canada remembers the history of the Cinémathèque Québécoise, on its fifty-fifth anniversary.
  • And it also profiled Jean Grimaldi, the so-called father of burlesque history in Quebec.
• Edmonton’s historian laureate, Marlene Wyman, is looking for primary sources for a new project on the history of everyday lives of Edmontonians.
• Find out the history of the Pop Shoppe.
• When heritage gets a bad name….
• CFL fans will want to check out this story about a 1937 Grey Cup bomber jacket.
• In 1971, Vancouver played host to its first, but not its last, pot protest.
• The dead of the Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital Cemetery are being remembered.
• New renaming controversy alert: the name of Sir John Colborne will be removed from a street and park in Chambly.
• Harold Bérubé was profiled by the Université de Sherbrooke about his work on suburban advertising in 1950s and 1960s Montreal!

Digital and Public History

• Check out this neat new online exhibit about May Day from the city of Coquitlam.
• Megan Blair put together this fantastic online exhibit on the Miss 1970 Canadian University Beauty Pageant and the women’s liberation movement protest, using material from the Wilfrid Laurier University Archives. This is so awesome.
• For some reason, CBC and Radio Canada are planning on destroying the physical negatives once they have completed digitizing their broadcast archives. This will not end well.
• Shawn Graham shared this really cool public history project, restoring life to the Lebreton Flats in Ottawa.
• And don’t miss this other Ottawa public history project, focusing on Ottawa’s Chinatown.
• The Walrus looked at the process of making Heritage Minutes, with a behind the scenes look at the upcoming Minute for Terry Fox. I’m sorry, Jenny!
• New on Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology is a piece from Kim Martin on her work on the Interactive Mapping of Archaeological Sites in Victoria project.
• The ROM has this really cool initiative using Minecraft in museum exhibits.
• Lindsay Gibson had a great Twitter thread on the history of massacres in Canada, particularly in the Kelowna area, and why we need a mapping project on the subject.
• On April 21^st, the Google Doodle honoured Jennie Trout’s 177^th birthday!

Doing History

• You may remember that last week, I reported on the digitization of some annual reports from the Shingwauk Residential School. Krista McCracken, who did much of the work, reflects on her experiences, and the challenge of working with documents related to historical trauma
• You may also remember a previous report on the final Bulletin du Regroupement des chercheurs-chercheures en histoire des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec. Benoit Marsan interviewed Jacques Rouillard about the history of the organization, and the end of the bulletin.
• LAC has just introduced a new service, Co-Lab, to facilitate crowdsourcing in historical research.
• This week on Unwritten Histories, I posted my monthly list of my favourite new scholarly articles!
• And Stephanie Pettigrew compiled a monster list of upcoming publications in Canadian history!
• It’s not strictly Canadian, but Carla Cevasco’s piece on The Junto on teaching history with an eye on the present will be of interest to historians no matter their field.
• There were also several updates from the McGill University Library Matters blog, including
  • A blog post on new insights from their recent exhibition on John Peters Humphrey, the one of the authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
  • A look at their newly acquired Jean Drapeau collection, mentioned in a previous roundup.
  • And an artistic perspective on their new acquisitions to the Osler Library, including samples of prosthetic eyes.

Miscellaneous

• The Canadian Museum for Human Rights blog profiled three brave women activists this week, Thérèse Casgrain, Carrie Best, and Ellen Gabriel.
• Tea sets, pots, and cups: oh my!
• Josh McCabe reviewed Shirley Tillotston’s newest book, Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy.
• Now we know why the National Gallery of Canada wanted to buy a Jacques-Louis David painting.
• And boy is this raising some controversy.
• The founder of the first general hospital in Ottawa, Élisabeth Bruyère, was declared a “Venerable Servant of God” by the Vatican this week. This is part of the process of assessing and granting saint status.
• On the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, City News shared the story of Francis Dyke, who help recover some of the bodies.
• Do you know about the sinking of the SS Atlantic?
• Debra Parkes put together this great Twitter essay on the limits of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom, on its thirty-sixth anniversary.
• Once upon a time, there was proposed legislation to require Ontario bars to sell milk.
• The latest Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry is for Charlotte Smithers, social reformer and activist.

Podcasts

• A special mid-week History Chats featured Brad Miller’s talk, “British North America and International Law in the 1860s.”
• On the latest episode of the Witness to Yesterday Podcast, Greg Marchildon spoke with Erika Dyck about her recent book, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transportion of Psychiatric Care in Canada!
• The latest The Way of Improvement Leads  Home Podcast explores the history of the eighteenth century Atlantic world, and features John Fea’s interview of Timony Shannon on his new book, Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain.

Better Late Than Never

• Neville Ellis and Ashlee Cunsolo discussed ecological grief in the Anthropocene.
• Last week, APTN Investigates looked at the history of St. Anne’s Residential School.
• A map of the Saint Lawrence has recently been “rediscovered” at BAnQ.