Canadian History Roundup – Week of October 30, 2016

Little girl outdoors feeding five swans, Kingsville (November 1954) / Chris Lund. Canada. National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque. Library and Archives Canada, e010949255 / CC by 2.0

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

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

• Mini Belated Halloween History in Canada Roundup:
  • 1966 Halloween Riot in North Vancouver.
  • Five Halloween Treasures from the Museum of Vancouver Collection
  • Canada’s Spookiest Place Names, from Canadian Geographic
• Kicking off the week was Beth Robertson’s latest article for Active History, an analysis of Stranger Things. She talks about the Cold War era’s preoccupation with all things paranormal and how the series reflects the culture and anxieties of the 1980s in Canada and the US. I’ve never seen the series, since I would totally get nightmares, but I hear it’s amazing.
• Royden Lowen reviewed Evangelia Tastsoglou, Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Barbara Cottrell — editors of The Warmth of the Welcome: Is Atlantic Canada a Home Away from Home for Immigrants? — for the Acadiensis blog this week.
• In a follow-up from last week’s post, Paula Dumas of the Isles Abroad blog talks about some of the information that is available in the Haldimand Papers, one of the microfilmed collections of Loyalist documents, making it a worthwhile source even if it is difficult to access. You can see the papers here.
• Josh MacFayden writes about his experiences using GIS to teach environmental history.. He talks about the experience of teaching historical geographic information systems (HGIS) online and the research projects his students completed during the course. As he argues, HGIS can be a great tool for historians to insert place histories into their course narratives. He also refers to an open-access website about how to use HGIS, called The Geospatial Historian. I know what I’ll be doing this weekend…
• Many of you are likely already familiar with Ann Little’s blog and her recent book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright . Each Tuesday, she post excerpts from her book on a range of topics. This week, her excerpt looks at Château Saint-Louis and the lives of upper-class men and women in Quebec City. Fun fact: my dad is from Quebec City.
• The Champlain Society’s blog, Findings/Trouvailles, is back this week with an article by Donald W. McLeod about the final days of Nicholas Melady Jr., a notorious mass-murderer who lived near Seaforth, Ontario. This article is based on a newly rediscovered manuscript by the turnkey at the jail where Melady was held.
• This week on Unwritten Histories, I compiled an absolutely massive list of online resource for teaching and learning about WW1 in Canada. I posted it now, rather than waiting for Remembrance Day, since this is usually when I hit WW1 when teaching my post-confederation survey.
• UPEI has created a new online collection of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s writing, called Kindred Spaces (of course). In addition to her work, you can also access articles and interviews with and by Montgomery. More content will be added over time, including memorabilia to be added in the winter. Check out the website here.
• The Journal of Canadian Studies is in the process of digitizing their back issues!
• Histoire Sociale has made Tina Adcock’s article on tourism in the North West Territories open access.
• Stephen Clifford talks about the Imperial War Service Gratuity, one of the new sources to be added to the LAC database on WW1. The gratuity was a pension that veterans received for their service, and applications (and accompanying documents) for the gratuity can provide some important information about the service of individual soldiers.
• The Manitoba government is honouring Canada’s first Silver Cross Mother with a plaque to be placed in Memorial Park in 2017.
• This week on the American Historical Association blog is a post by John Rosinbum about teaching with Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. While this isn’t explicitly Canadian, Canada was definitely implicated in the transatlantic slave trade. Check out the database here. This is a great example of how online resources can be used in history courses, and Rosinbum has helpfully included two lesson plans.
• Check out this fascinating image of a 1920s centralization plan for the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia.
• The UQAM history department is now on Twitter! Go add them!
• The Retroactive blog’s latest post looks at some of the discoveries that were made at McKinnon Flats after the 2013 Calgary flooding. 100 new archaeological sites were discovered, and new finds were made at 87 existing sites.
• The Canadian History Bits blog takes on the causes and the outbreak of the Seven Years War.
• Stephen Bocking is back with a blog post on the seventh class in his environmental history course. The subject: transforming landscapes. As always, the lecture slides are included.
• Anne Janhnuen, writing for Active History, talks about her experiences at the premiere of the film Colonization Road. The film encourages everyone to think about what colonization actually means, and Janhunen suggests we do so by looking at our local histories.
• Andrée Rivard writes about conflicts between pregnant women and doctors over the childbirth experience in Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s on Histoire Engagée this week. As she notes, there is much that we can learn about the resistance of Quebec mothers, not only in the sense of women’s history, but because we need to know our own history in order to make better decisions about the future.
• Harriet Matthews talks about her experiences working for LAC’s Project Naming, the archive’s effort to recover the names of Indigenous peoples whose photographs have ended up in their collection. She talks about why the project is so important and how it has helped to restores the voices of Indigenous peoples.
• Also on LAC’s blog this week is an guest post by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. In honour of the 20^th anniversary of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Federation and LAC have created a database of digitized documents from the RCAP’s six-year investigation. You can access the database itself here.
• The Dictionary of Canadian Biography has a new entry for Louis-Alphonse Venne, an architect responsible for several prominent Montreal buildings, including the St. Joseph’s Oratory.
• Also from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is a new online exibit on George-Étienne Cartier, in honour of the 150^th anniversary of Confederation. The exhibit is also available in French.
• Another new Community Stories exhibit from Virtual Museums Canada premiered this week: The Légaré mill.
• Episode 9 of the Camps series about Canadian Internment camps in now available on Youtube. This episode focuses on Mt. Revelstoke Internment Camp in BC.
• This week on the UBC Digitization Centre blog is a look at the Archibald Murchie Collection. Mmmm, Murchie’s… anyone else ever have their cream puffs with chocolate strawberries? Ooops, wrong Murchie… This Murchie (the brother of the tea guy), was a minister who documented life around the Okanagan Valley in the late 1800s to the early 1900s.
• Heritage Winnipeg takes a look at the Ukrainian Labour Temple this week.
• The Idea of Popular Schooling in Upper Canada by Anthony Di Mascio has won the Canadian History of Education Association’s English-Language Book prize! Congrats! Not sure who the other winners are yet.
• The Landscapes of Injustice Research Associate Committee launched a new website this week, called Scholarship and Activism. The website is  intended to be a forum for dialogue about the relationship between scholarship and activism. There are already two blog posts up. The first, an interview with Jordan Stanger-Ross, looks at doing history as a means of fighting for social justice, and the second is an interview with Monique Flores Ulysses about social media activism.
• Stephen Bocking also has another post this week, the first in a series that will introduce some of the themes in his upcoming edited collection, Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History. This particular post contains excerpts from the introduction and conclusion to the collection.
• Read about Kathleen Ogilvie’s experiences during her first month working as a intern at the Fort St. John North Peace Museum. Her schedule is insane.
• Canadian History in the News
  • Discovery Canada is premiering a new dramatic series today (November 6), called Frontiers, about the fur trade. While Jason Momoa has a starring role, and he’s gorgeous, I would still rate this series “watch at your own risk,” especially with the series described as a “dramatic story of revenge and riches, betrayal and brutality.”
    • You can read an interview with one of the actors, Allan Hawco, here.
  • This week is Treaties Week, an event that is intended to draw attention to the importance of treaties between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada. Hayden King, writing for TVO, talks about the history of treaties. As he writes, “[t]reaty is a practice. A practice that endures over time. That is: a custom.” The Canadian government’s failure to abide by the intent of treaties both past and present had led to ongoing disputes about land ownership, particularly in an era of resource development.
  • TVO also held a panel on the show The Agenda, in honour of the 20^th anniversary of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, about RCAP’s legacy and impact.
  • The Africville Heritage Trust is embarking on a new effort to honour the history of Africville. They are trying to locate the sites of original buildings, and mark these locations with signs to literally map out the lost community.
  • Along similar lines, efforts are ongoing to map WW2 crash sites in Gander, NL, and create hiking trails to make these locations accessible to tourists.
  • CBC celebrated 80 years of broadcasting this week! One of the clips they posted in honour of the occasion was this short history of CBC radio.
  • The Canadian War Museum has announced that it has acquired the medals and memorial plaque of Private George Lawrence Price, the last Canadian soldier who died in WW1, two minutes before armistice.
  • A British Home Child, WW1 soldier, and Victoria Cross winner, Stephen Sargent Claude Nunney, has had a Blue Plaque placed in his hometown in his honour. Nunney even has his own Wikipedia page, where you can learn more about his life and death.
  • I missed this a few weeks ago, but Maclean’s has an article about the Trump family history in Canada.
  • Canadian Geographic and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society have premiered the second part of their documentary series on Canadian aviators of WW1. Watch it on Youtube yourself here. Also available is a map and lesson plans for educators, which you can access here.
  • The Bell of Batoche went missing. Again. And was found. Again.
  • The Alberta government has declared that September 7^th will now be Ukrainian-Canadian Heritage Day.
  • On November 1, 1959, Habs goalie Jacques Plante put on a mask.
  • The Tyee reviews two books on Vancouver in the 1970s: The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang, by Aaron Chapman, and ,Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos from a Decade That Changed a City, by Kate Bird.
  • The CBC takes a look at the infamous Fruit Machine, which was used by the government during the Cold War to identify individuals who were gay. The Fruit Machine is the subject of an upcoming class-action lawsuit by LGTBQ+ who lost their jobs as a result of this machine.
  • The Tk’emlups Indian Band is trying to find partners to protect its archaeological sites from ongoing development.
  • This amazing eleven-year-old artist, Austan Najmi-Beauchamp, has painted 21 canvases depicting scenes from residential schools.
  • A new poll says that most Canadians agree that fallen soldiers should be honoured all year long, not just on Remembrance Day.
  • The Military Communications and Electronics Museum in Kingston has used GIS and 3-D mapping to create a new exhibit about Vimy Ridge.
  • The Royal Canadian Navy might have found a lost nuclear bomb from the Cold War off the northern coast of BC. It apparently went missing after a US bomber crashed in the area in 1950. Thankfully, it’s was a dummy and not radioactive.

Is it just me or has it been a little quiet lately in the online world of Canadian history? In any case, I hope you enjoyed this week’s roundup. Don’t forget to check back on Tuesday for another edition of Best New Articles, featuring the latest CHR, Historical Studies in Education, and Topia issues and more!

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