Download episode On this episode of EHTV, Daniel Macfarlane, a SSHRC post-doctoral research fellow from the Department of History at Carleton University, takes us on a tour of the hydro-electric landscape of Niagara Falls. Both the site of mass nature tourism and mass power generation, the manufactured waterscape of Niagara […]
Canadian studies
Download episode This month, EHTV takes us to Atlantic Canada alongside two environmental history graduate students as they explore historical sites and archives in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in a superb video shot and produced by Sinead Earley, featuring Kirsten Greer. You can read a full account of their […]
A couple of days ago, the Ottawa Citizen published a perplexing article about Lt.-Col. John McCrae, author of the famous poem “In Flanders Fields,” claiming that the director of development for the Bytown Museum alleges that “the famed poet was gay.” The article appears to be a very late response […]
This is amazing. This afternoon, I read a 1854 petition written by William Lyon Mackenzie to the Legislative Assembly of Canada demanding £500 compensation for travel expenses incurred during his tenure as a government director for the Welland Canal Company. I read this bizarre and fascinating 157 year old historical […]
Dean Bavington recently posted a link to a broadcast on Al Jazeera that focused on Canada’s tar sands industry in northern Alberta. Broken into two parts, the documentary, “To the Last Drop”, succinctly surveys the numerous adverse environmental effects of tar sands development, especially the infusion of carcinogenic toxins into […]
Episode 23 The Next Chapter of Canadian Environmental History: May 26, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past23.mp3][29:33] At the end of April 2011, a group of more than 40 researchers in the fields of Canadian environmental history and historical geography met for an extraordinary workshop in Burlington, Ontario called EH Plus: Writing the […]
Andrew Smith published a terrific blog post yesterday about the Higher Education Academy guide to digital history newspaper research. The guide argued that Canada lags behind the UK, United States, Australia, and New Zealand in the digitization of historical newspapers because “[u]nfortunately so far Canada has not funded a national […]
Environmental history is often characterized by the interdisciplinary character of its research. Since its earliest iteration in the 1970s, some of the leading scholars in field stressed the importance of integrating interdisciplinary insights into the study of the historical interrelationship between nature and society. In his 1990 article on the […]
The NiCHE New Scholars Reading Group, a monthly online environmental history graduate workshop, will be holding a live conference call to discuss a chapter from Cheryl Williams’s M.A. thesis titled “The Banff Winter Olympics: Sport, Tourism, and the National Parks.” This chapter looks at the efforts of Calgary business interests […]
Nature’s Past, the Canadian environmental history podcast, will be recording a live round-table discussion with Claire Campbell and some of the contributors to a new edited collection called, A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011, on Monday, April 11th at the University of Calgary (MLT 909, 12pm to 2pm). This event […]
The Network in Canadian History & Environment has launched a new blog called Nature’s Chroniclers. Taking the lead from Active History, this new group blog has started with a weekly schedule of posts from leading researchers in the field of Canadian environmental history. Thus far, the blog has featured posts […]
Episode 20 The 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic in Winnipeg: February 27, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past20.mp3][46:04] Toward the end of the Great War, Canadians were struck by the most devastating influenza epidemic in the young country’s history. More than 50,000 Canadians succumbed to this virulent strain of influenza that swept the globe in […]