Canadian History Roundup – Week of July 7, 2019

Veterinarian Dr. John A. Roberts examines a cat with a dislocated paw. 1954. Rosemary Gilliat Eaton. Library and Archives Canada.

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

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

Environmental History

• The most commonly used words in #envhist last week, according to Jessica DeWitt, were: ‘University,’ ‘Professor,’ and ‘History.’
• The latest Flickr album from LAC contains images of Agnes Chamberlin’s botanical illustrations of Canadian flowers. See the images yourself here.

Military History

• The South Peace Regional Archive Soldier Spotlight this week was for James and Dorothy Eastman.
• This week on Active History, David Borys explained how the II Canadian Corps Civil Affairs helped the civilian population of Caen in 1944 after the war had moved on.
• Get your Kleenex: another long-lost WW2 love letter was found.
• In the latest edition of Findings/Trouvailles, Norman Hillmer wrote on O.D. Skelton’s diary entry following a meeting with Mackenzie King on the Munich Agreement.
• Adam Cuff is seeking the family of J.I. Andrews, a WW2 veteran, after discovering lost items that belong to him.
• The Last Post Fund has started a new initiative creating headstones for Indigenous veterans to include their traditional names. 

Archaeology

• Kristina Chomushen discovered a 6,000-year-old arrow point during an archaeological dig at Wanuskewin Heritage Park. The site, known as Wolf Willow, was occupied around this period, and the discovery of this arrow point confirms that the site was in use during the Gowen cultural period.
• Robyn Lacy was back again this week with her recap of week seven of her work at the Woodland Cemetery.
• Todd Kristensen has written a guest post for Retroactive this week, on the archaeology of gunflints in Alberta.
• Work is underway to raise a WW2 Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax bomber from where it crashed off the coast of Sweden.
• Archaeologist David Jones is calling on Halifax to establish an archaeological master plan.
• The latest Dig It column is by Pheobe Murphy on the creation of the Kamloops chapter of the Archaeological Society of British Columbia.
• The remains of 300 nuns will be exhumed from the Notre Dame Convent Cemetery, at Waterdown. The nuns of the Notre Dame Convent have sold the property, since they are no longer able to properly care for it. The remains will be moved to the nearby Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery.
• As Jason Jeandron noted, the CBC is endorsing illegal metal detecting after interviewing two “treasure hunters,” despite the fact that metal detection in New Brunswick requires a permit.

History Education

• The CHA Teaching and Learning Blog is calling on all historians to submit to the newly redesigned CHA Syllabi Central.
• Chelsea Vowel explained why white settler colonizer ignorance is so dangerous, and why asking Indigenous folks to tell them the entire history of colonization is wrong.
• Rhonda Hinther was back this week on Active History with part two of their ongoing series on teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference. Hinther discussed her experiences teaching the book in a second year course on western Canada since 1885.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration History

• Dillon Takata published an op-ed in the Times Colonist about why we need to rebuild the Japanese teahouse in Victoria’s Gorge Park.
• TVO shared the history of one of the greatest Canadian athletes, Fred Thomas.
• Cecil Foster was interviewed on TVO this week by Nam Kiwanuka about his book, They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada.
• Bashir Mohamed published a new piece on the prevalence of Black sex work in Edmonton in the early 1900s. Content warning: racism, descriptions of violence, historical racist terms.

Indigenous History

• Did you know that Jenna Lemay is working on an open-access e-book about the information found in the Shingwauk Principal Letter Books? This information documents the earliest years of the Shingwauk Residential School.
• You may remember that a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that ancestors were found during an archaeological excavation at West Victoria Street in Kamloops. This week, Joanne Hammond explained how Kamloops was built on Secwepemc unceded land and heritage.
• Bernie Syliboy (Mi’kmaq) is calling on the Nova Scotia government to provide resources to residential school survivors and their families to recover their ancestral names.
• The only known buffalo robe painted by Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull) (Hunkpapa Lakota) has been returned to Saskatchewan temporarily for an exhibit at the MacKenzie Art Gallery.
• This week, a developer offered to “give” the land that prompted the Oka Crisis back to the Kanienʼkehá꞉ka at Kanehsatà:ke. Sean Carleton explained what this does and does not mean in a new Twitter thread.
• Over on the Geolinguistics: Language on the Land blog, Rebekah Ingram explained some of the different ways in which Indigenous peoples understood the landscape.

New France/British North America

• This week, we launched a brand new summer series, organized by Stephanie Pettigrew, on the history of Acadia. The series will be cross-posted with Borealia and Acadiensis, and is being presented in collaboration with the Fredericton Regional Museum, the York Sunbury Historical Society, an Open Academy grant from the Royal Society, the UNB Departments of History and French, the New Brunswick College of Craft & Design, the Institut d’Études Acadiennes, and Historica Canada.
• The first post in the series also went live this week. It’s by Stephanie and looked at the history of the Acadian settlement of Pointe Sainte-Anne. Content warning: child death, violence.
• Stephanie also shared this really funny story about Robert Monckton on Twitter.
• Over on his blog this week, Patrick Lacroix shared the story of Robert Desty, a French Canadian man who fought in the Mexican-American War. This is the first post in a two-part series.
• Karin Wulf summed up several of the pieces that she has published recently on the value of the term “Vast Early America.” I don’t entirely agree, but this is an ongoing debate that also affects Canada.

Political History

• Tom Mitchell published a new piece on Active History this week about the Citizen’s Committee of One Thousand, responding to a bizarre article by Jenny Motkaluk about the supposed “romanticization” of the Winnipeg General Strikers.

Social History

• Historical convertible tartan Victorian-era dress from Montreal? Yes please!
• Why doesn’t Laura Secord still make these?
• The BC Food History blog took a look at the development of cookstoves in the 1800s.
• I watched Passe-Partout all the time when I was a kid.
• This year is the 50^th anniversary of the first moon landing. In honour of the occasion, CBC looked back at Canada’s contributions to the Apollo Program. LOL at Sudbury standing in for the moon surface though.
• Steven High wrote a new piece for The Conversation about the historical injustices perpetrated by the elite Anglophones of Montreal on working-class French Canadian factory workers, and the need for English Montrealers to reckon with this past.

Local History

• Joan Champ looked back at the 1915 fire at the Sovereign Hotel, and the resulting arson investigation.
• The Toronto Public Library blog shared images this week documenting the queer history of Toronto. Content warning: historical homophobia.
• I’ve never understood the attraction to abandoned buildings.
• CBC looked back at the history of the Old Chubby’s Roadhouse restaurant on PEI.
• This week Whistorical looked back at the history of the craft beer industry along the Sea to Sky.
• The Nova Scotia Archives shared a neat Twitter thread about the history of George Brown, who was crowned the Champion Oarsman of the World in 1874.
• The latest biography from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is for Quebec veterinarian François-Théodule Daubigny.
• Over on the Chilliwack Museum and Archives, Tristan Evans looked back at the history of the local Party in the Park.
• Heritage Winnipeg shared the surprisingly exciting history of the Olympic/Marlborough Hotel. Content warning: descriptions of homicide.
• Eve Lazarus shared the story of the women who has been immortalized in a mosaic at the Canada Post Building on West Georgia, Beatrice Mary Hayes.

Digital and Public History

• The Mountain Legacy Project explained why they are hoping to develop a viewshed feature for the Mountainy Legacy Explorer website.
• The ENRICH project launched a two new storymaps that tell the story Africville, environmental racism, and the impact of climate change on the current site. The first one, called the “Africville Story Map”, was developed by Caitlin Hinton. The second, “Environmental Racism in Nova Scotia,” was developed by Laura Fraser.
• Donovan King is calling on the city of Montreal to reconsider their colonialist monuments.
• You may remember back in May, I reported that the New Westminster city council had voted to remove the state of Judge Begbie outside the courthouse. Well, it’s gone!
• Meanwhile, Orillia city council is asking Parks Canada to return a monument of Samuel de Champlain to the city’s waterfront. Content warning: “people learn our history from statues” trope.
  • I prefer Douglas Hunter’s take.
• Alan MacEachern published the latest post in Active History’s new Historians at the Movies series, reviewing Patriot Games(1992). I’ve never seen the movie, but this post is just hilarious.
• There is a new Virtual Museum of Canada exhibit featuring images from the Gaspésie.
• The City of Coquitlam has a new online exhibit about the Westwood Racing Circuit.
• The crucifix has been removed from Quebec’s National Assembly.
• The City of Surrey has voted to rename 75A Avenue in honour of the victims of the Komagata Maru.
• There is a new virtual reality tour showcasing the events at Juno Beach. And you can use it with your phone or computer if you don’t have those special goggles.
• Footprints – A Walk Through Generations is currently on display at the Canadian Museum of History. The exhibit was created by the Aanischaaukamikw Cree Cultural Institute (ACCI) museum in Ouje-Bougoumou, Que. CBC spoke with two curators, Natasia Mukash, (Cree/Abenaki artist from the northernmost Cree community of Whapmagoostui) and Paula Menarick (registered nurse from the Cree community of Chisasibi, Quebec) about the exhibit, which is the first at the museum that is entirely curated by an Indigenous team.
• Rosemary Counter explained for Maclean’s what the impact of climate change could be for landmarks across the country.
• A new monument has been unveiled at Pier 21 for the British Home Children.

Doing History

• There were two pieces published this week about the problem of academic flying.
  • Jaymie Heilman discussed the subject over on Active History, and why academics need to consider the harm they cause each time they fly.
  • And over on NiCHE, Alan MacEachern argued that we need to move to more virtual conferencing. Hear hear.
• Also on NiCHE this week, Petra Dolata discussed how digital photography has changed archival research, and allowed for a much deeper consideration of archival sources.
• Gail Dever reports that the 1741 Montreal census is now available on Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH).
• This week the UBC Digitizer’s blog shared dictionaries and directories related to BC history.
• The LAC blog profiled the work of English photographer, Charles Gimpel this week. Kimpel worked for the HBC between 1958 and 1968 in the Arctic. Content warning: images of ancestors, mild white saviour complex.
• Flooding has destroyed part of the Vancouver Chamber Choir music archive.
• Find out about the work that Queen’s University Archives is doing to preserve Kingston’s LGTBQ2S+ history.
• Madalena Kozachuk is using a very scary-looking machine to reveal images from daguerreotypes that have been tarnished or damaged.
• I snuck in an extra blog post on Unwritten Histories this week, looking at the best new articles published in May and June 2019.
• Check out this great look at the historical pulp fiction in McMaster’s Willian Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections that were recently donated by Nelson Ball.

Miscellaneous

• I don’t know if this counts as history, but it’s pretty cool: Randy Pitman has been driving a 1927 Ford Model T for the last seventy years.

Podcasts

• This week’s shoutout from the Secret Life of Canada podcast is for Inuk Elder and Knowledge Keeper Atuat Akittirq.
• The latest episode of the Living Heritage Podcast profiled the Adler’s Chocolate Factory in Bay Roberts.
• Kent Monkman (Cree) spoke with Hyperallergic about his work decentring the colonial museum, and why this is so important to telling the true history of Canada.

I was trying to think of thinking witty to end the roundup with, and I got nothing. :S I hope you enjoyed this week’s Canadian history roundup! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Tuesday for Anne Marie Lane Jonah’s post, “Reconciling Chignecto: The Many Stories of Siknikt.” See you then!

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