Many Canadians were shocked by the images of riot police chasing and beating citizens in the streets of Toronto this past weekend during the G20 summit. The police violence and the limited acts of vandalism were inexcusable, but not at all unprecedented in Toronto’s history. In all of the reporting […]
Canadian history
160 posts
Digital technologies are changing the way we read history. With the popularization of consumer electronic e-readers like Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo, and (yes) iPad, many textbook publishers are trying to take advantage of this opportunity to reach digital reading audiences. Unfortunately, the Kindle DX digital textbook pilot program at Princeton […]
You can now listen to Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, on the radio (in Prince George)! The kind folks at CFUR 88.7, the campus radio station at the University of Northern British Columbia will be broadcasting the full series of Nature’s Past this summer. This will be the […]
Episode 15 Forestry Education in Canada: May 26, 2010 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/natures-past15.mp3][43:04] In 1907, the University of Toronto opened Canada’s first forestry school to undergraduate students. This was the beginning of formal forestry education in Canada and great step forward for the profession. However, the history of the Faculty of Forestry […]
The Stanley Park Ecological Society (SPES) has released its 2010 State of the Park Report for the Ecological Integrity of Stanley Park. This project emerged following the 2006-07 windstorms. As the Park Board and other community stakeholders began to sort out how to respond to the freshly wind-torn landscape, they […]
Unusual urban animal sightings abound in Canada this month. Last week I wrote about the grey whale that visited Vancouver’s False Creek, the first to be seen in the vicinity of the city in living memory. Canada’s increasingly complicated relationship with wild animals in urban environments continues this week in […]
David Brownstein from the Department of Geography at UBC has posted an excellent interview with Jill Delaney from the Library and Archives of Canada about the use of historical photography in scholarly research. Dr. Delaney is involved in the Mountain Legacy Project, an interdisciplinary repeat photography and archival research project […]
Episode 14 Management of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse: April 20, 2010. [audio:http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past14.mp3][42:40] North American environmental history is punctuated by notorious episodes of species extinctions, most notably the cases of the passenger pigeon and the bison. In both cases, humans exhausted what they believed were unlimited resources in the absence of […]
To wrap up the post-war years on my course in Western Canadian history since 1885, I’ve decided to focus on the impact of northern mining on the economies and societies of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Since the 1940s, both provinces transitioned from agricultural-based economies with predominantly rural populations to more diversified […]
Next week the Nature|History|Society group at UBC will be hosting another special event in environmental history. This term’s event features Dr. Dean Bavington from Nipissing University. On Monday, March 22nd Dr. Bavington will be giving a public lecture about the history of cod fishery management in Newfoundland based on his […]
The American Society for Environmental History Annual Meeting kicks off today and runs until March 13th. I’ll be down in Portland for the meeting for a couple of days, presenting on a panel about new directions in urban environmental history on Friday morning (10:30am, Round-table 6-A, Alexanders 23rd floor). While […]
Episode 13 New Directions in Urban Environmental History & Abandoned Mines: March 3, 2010. [audio:http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past13.mp3][49:59] Next week the American Society for Environmental History will hold its annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. Environmental historians will gather from March 10-13 to share new research and ideas, roughly surrounding the theme of “Currents […]