Canadian History Roundup – Week of May 5, 2019

Outport fisherman with St. John’s Water Dog in La Poile, Newfoundland.. October 1971. Thewellman [Public domain]

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: ‘Environmental,’ ‘Bees,’ and ‘History.’
• Daniel Mcfarlane spoke with Andrew Reeves, the author of Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, over on NiCHE this week.
• Krista McCracken wrote an absolutely lovely piece on Active History this week about trees as historical markers and holders of memory, and kindly included a shout out to my piece on the history of lilacs!
• Jessica DeWitt also released a new set of comps notes this week, on Harold Innis’ The Fur Trade in Canada.

Military History

• The Juno Beach Centre Association is in the process of mailing out postcards across the country to the former homes of soldiers who died during the D-Day Campaign, in honour of the 75^th anniversary of the campaign. Postcards will contain basic biographical information about the soldier, including when and where he died.
• The Regina Leader-Post spoke with Julie Mushnysky about the history of fall-out shelters during the Cold War.
• If this wasn’t so horrific, I would laugh.
• A list of twenty-four veterans from Oak Bay (a municipality in Victoria) from WW1 was discovered recently.

Archaeology

• Russell Potter is back with his Franklin Searcher of the Month series, profiling Frederick Schwatka.
• We had two new blog posts this week from Robyn Lacy!
  • The first was on the geological composition and weather of gravestones.
  • And the second is a look at all known octagonal dead houses in Ontario. This particular style of dead houses, used for storing the dead when winter makes digging impossible, are unique to the area.
• One of Bob Muckle’s students has created a blog for anyone who is interested in following along as their class excavates Japanese logging camps in the Seymour Valley this summer.
• Unist’ot’en house group of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation and hereditary chief Knedebeas has filed for a judicial review in the BC Supreme Court this week regarding the archaeological mitigation plan prepared by the Coastal Gaslink Project. This filing comes after the discovery of stone tools at the construction site back in February.
• The remains of a corduroy road may have been found in Waterloo.

History Education

• This week on the Learning and Teaching blog, Danielle Kinsey interviewed Anne Trépanier about her work teaching online courses.
• There is a new learning portal out from the Royal BC Museum, and the BC Archives on the Great Bear Rainforest. And there is some neat history!
• This week on Unwritten Histories, I talked about cultivating conscientious citational practices in the classroom.
• This week on NiCHE’s ongoing series about field trips and environmental history, Nancy Langston discussed the logistics of organizing these kinds of activities based on her extensive experience.

Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration History

• You may remember that I mentioned the work of Yucho Chow in a previous roundup. One of the families photographed by Chow was identified by a descendent this week! Joyce Chong recognized her grandparents, father, and uncle (Mr. and Mrs. Chong Fan Yow, Chong Buck Sun, and Chong Buck Shong) in the image, taken in Vancouver in 1920.
• This week’s new biography from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is of Jack Horowitz, a Jewish jeweller who was killed by another jeweller over Horowitz’ affair with the man’s wife. And I say this totally unironically: oy.
• Larry Enkin, the son of Tailor Project lead Max Enkin, is currently in search of the families descended from individuals who were helped as part of the Project. The Tailor Project, also known as the garment workers’ scheme, was an immigration program which brought roughly 2,000 displaced persons from WW2 to Canada to work in the clothing industry. More than half of the displaced persons were Jewish.

Indigenous History

• Sara Minogue reviewed the Quikiqtani Truth Commission Final Report, on the RCMP-led slaughter of sled dogs in order to force Inuit to settle into communities in the late 1990s. Content warning: descriptions (non-graphic) of settler violence.
• These pictures of Helen Konek (Inuit) are soooo cool.
• Innu Elder Elizabeth Penashue has just published a memoire of her life, called Nitinikiau Innusi: I Keep The Land Alive. The stories within the book range from 1987 to 2016, and include reflections on Innu land, politics, culture, and history, including Penashue’s activist activities protesting NATO low-level flights and bomb testing on Innu lands.
• Justin Trudeau will formally exonerate Chief Poundmaker/Pîhtokahanapiwiyin (Cree) on May 23, during a visit to Poundmaker Cree Nation.
• The UN Committee Against Torture has been investigating reports of forced/coerced sterilizations of Indigenous women from the 1970s forward. They released a report this week, including the recommendations calling on the government to investigate all accounts and provide redress, and adopt legislation to criminalize the procedure. Content warning: discussion of forced/coerced sterilization of Indigenous women.

New France/British North America

• In the latest blog post on the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog, Oriana Visser shared Edward Coats’s first hand account of the Siege of Quebec in 1759.

Political History

• Julien Maudit published a new piece in Le Devoir on rewriting the history of the Patriotes.
• This week on Active History, R. Blake Brown looked back at Canada’s first medical malpractice crisis.

Winnipeg General Strike

• The daughter of late writer Melina McCracken, Molly McCracken, will be publishing her novel on a young girl who sold newspapers during the Winnipeg General Strike, Papergirl. The novel was thought lost for forty years.
• Tom Jokinen explained what the Winnipeg General Strike still has to teach us about class, capitalism, and greed.
• The Winnipeg Free Press profiled this week’s conference at the University of Winnipeg, “Building a Better World: 1919-2019,” on the strike.
• Christo Aivalis published two videos on the strike recently.
  • One is about the new book, Winnipeg 1919: The Strikers’ Own History of the General Strike, including an introduction written by Aivalis.
  • And the second is a recording of a recent talk of his on the strike and why it remains so important.

Social History

• John Willis has written a new blog post for the Canadian Museum of History, on a pair of driver’s boots that were made in Eastern Quebec in the late 1930s, and the story that they tell. I find myself wondering whether any of the young people will get the title reference though.
• There is a new Flickr album from LAC this week, with images of railway stations. See the pictures themselves here.
• Kesia Kvill is back with another historical recipe recreation. This week she decided to try out some of the recipes from the May 1918 edition of Everywoman’s World to create a luncheon. That’s history for lunch.
• Canadian Geographic looked back at the 1919 Stanley Cup playoffs, which happened right in the middle of the Spanish Flu Epidemic.
• This piece isn’t strictly Canadian history, but I still think everyone should read it.
• In honour of the new royal baby, LAC put together a Twitter thread of parenting advice from its collection.
• This week CBC profiled John Nzipo, a Zulu man who spend three years at the Shingwauk Residential School.
• The Montreal Gazette looked back this week at the history of religion and religious controversies in Quebec.

Nursing History (It was National Nursing Week this week)

• This article is behind a paywall, but Kathryn McPherson’s Bedside Matters: The Transformations of Canadian Nursing, 1900-1990, was profiled in The Star this week, as part of an interview with the first Chinese-Canadian nurse (Agnes Chan), the First Indigenous nurse (Mabel Jones (Cape Crocker Reserve)), and the first Black nurse (Agnes Clinton) to graduate from the Women’s College Hospital of Nursing.
• CBC profiled Edith Anderson Monture (Kanyen’kehà:ka from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory), the first Indigenous woman from the land we currently call Canada to become a registered nurse.
• The Canadian Museum of History published a really cool selection of images from their collection of nursing uniforms!
• The St. Catharines Museum honoured the occasion by looking at 1953 edition of the Mack Training School for Nurses yearbook. 

The History of Gender and Sexuality

• Moose Jaw Pride will be celebrated this year with a brand new mural on the LGTBQ history of the city.

Local History

• If you ever wanted to know what Canada’s Wonderland looked like in the 1980s, here’s your chance.
• These images chronicle floods in the Outaouais since the 1920s.
• Historic Nova Scotia released several new entries this week on:
  • Whitman (Tully) House Residence, the only remaining all-female residence at Acadia University, by Laura Sharp and the Esther Clark Wright Archives.
  • Morse’s Teas Building by Cora-Lynne Munroe.
  • The Mulgrave Park Experiment, by Imogene Broberg-Hull.
  • The Uniacke Square Redevelopment Project, also by Imogene Broberg-Hull.
  • And Parrsboro’s Connection to the Handley Page ‘Atlantic,’ by Gale Boland and the Ottawa House Museum.
• This is an old-fashioned murder mystery about “the Woman in the Well,” an unidentified woman who was killed at the Sutherland Shore Hotel is Saskatoon in the early 1900s, who was discovered in 2006. Content warning: descriptions of violence.
• The Vancouver As It Was blog looked back at seventy years of First Baptist Church organists.
• This is a pretty cool story.
• Whistorical looked back at the history of the Alpine Lodges at Garibaldi Townsite.
• This week LAC looked at Ottawa’s Fancy Dress Balls and Skating Carnivals from 1876 to 1896.
• The Toronto Public Library looked back at digitized images from various Toronto design competitions.
• The York Memorial Collegiate Institute burned this week, so there were a number of pieces explaining its importance to Toronto.
• Do you know what happened in May 1919 in Trespassey, Newfoundland?
• The New Westminster Record spoke with Georgia Twiss about her upcoming research project on the history of May Day and the role of the May Queen in settler colonialism in BC.

Digital and Public History

• A new plaque has been unveiled in Victoria this week honouring Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, the first Black person elected to public office in BC.
• New Westminster has voted to remove a statue of Matthew Begbie (the so-called Hanging Judge) outside the provincial courthouse.
• The UBC Digitizer’s blog was all about developing the UBC web archive collection.
• The City of Vancouver Archives released more than 1,000 Planning Department library reports this week.
• A new and unusual statue of James Wolfe has just been unveiled in Calgary this week.
• The Grimsby Independent from 1885 to 1949 in now digitized and online!

Doing History

• This week was the BC Studies conference! Maddie Knickerbocker live-tweeted her experiences, including several panels!
  • Follow along with the official hashtag, #BCStudies2019.
• Award short-lists were released this week!
  • The Wilson released the short-lists for their two prizes, the Wilson Book Prize and the Viv Nelles Essay Prize.
  • The CHA released the short lists for the CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History and the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize.
    • And definitely read this thread by Allan Downey on the lack of diversity in the CHA and the Best Scholarly Book Prize in particular.
    • And this thread by Kristine Alexander on the issue of transnational history and Canadian history.
• If you research Indigenous history, you need to read this piece by John Little on the whitewashing of history.
• Go behind the scenes this week at the City of Richmond Archives!
• This week was the 2019 Archives Association of Ontario Conference.
  • Catch up on the conference with the #AAO19conf hashtag
  • You can see the slides from the presentation that Krista McCracken gave with Karyne Homes (Anishinaabe/Metis) on “Access and Digital Indigenous Archives.”
  • Krista McCracken also did a fantastic job live-tweeting the event, so check out their account!
• Patrick Lacroix posted part two of his recent experiences at Rassemblement.
• You may remember that in a previous roundup I mentioned that a letter from Stephen Hawking was found in a book at UVic. This piece in the Times Colonist profiled the letter recipient, physicist Werner Israel, known as “the Canadian Father of Black Holes.”

Miscellaneous

• Religious-themed historical cartoons, anyone?

Podcasts

• Know History was back with another podcast episode this week, featuring an interview with Sara Wilmshurst on the history of the Massey Foundation and charity in Canada more generally.
• There were actually a couple of podcast episodes that briefly mentioned Canadian history this week, including:
  • Gastropod published The Great Gastropod Pudding Off, which mentioned the Canadian origins of sticky toffee pudding. Thanks to Kesia Kvill for mentioning that on Twitter.
  • And the 99PI podcast did an episode on the eastern grey squirrels, which were introduced to North American cities, including Vancouver, deliberately. ::head desk::
• Eve Lazarus published episode five of her podcast, Blood, Sweat, and Fear, on the death of Doris Gravlin. Content warning: descriptions of violence.
• The latest Living Heritage Podcast is all about the first transatlantic air race, including an interview with museum manager, Sarah Wade, who is organizing an exhibit on the event.
• Krista McCracken was interviewed on the Gettin’ Air with Terry Green Podcast, where they talked about their work at the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre, Active History, open education, and Beyond the Lecture!
• The latest episode of the Secret Life of Canada is a shout-out to Oronhyatekha/Burning Cloud (Kanyen’kehà:ka), one of the first Indigenous doctors in Canada.
• There was a new episode of the Champlain Society podcast this week on the Treaty of Versailles, including an interview with Norman Hillmer.

The first week of my course went pretty well, and I am reminded again of how brilliant and generous my colleagues are. I’ll talk about the course more in a future blog post, so stay tuned for that! That’s all for this week! 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 a special blog post kicking off a month of CHA-Annual-Meeting-related content! See you then!

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