My current research on the history of animals in Canadian cities has been motivated, in part, by my interest in examining overlooked aspects of the past. If nineteenth-century North American cities were replete with horses, pigs, chickens, and cattle, why do they seem so absent from urban history? This week […]
The second episode of EHTV: Live from the Field is now online, featuring a look at local food and butchery. On this episode of the series, a group of new scholars in environmental history gather to learn how to butcher a lamb as part of an effort to understand historical […]
This week Lauren Wheeler and I launched a new video series for the Network in Canadian History and Environment called EHTV: Live from the Field. NiCHE director, Alan MacEachern, kick-started the idea a couple of months ago with a proposal to get video cameras into the hands of environmental history […]
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 […]
Episode 22 A Century of Parks Canada: May 16, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past22.mp3][33:16] On May 19, 2011, Parks Canada celebrates its 100th anniversary, commemorating its founding in 1911 as the world’s first national parks service. Preceding the creation of the National Park Service in the United States by more than five […]
On Friday, 29 April 2011, Plains Midstream Canada quietly issued a press release, informing the public of a crude oil spill from the Rainbow Pipeline east of the Peace River in northern Alberta near Little Buffalo, AB. Four days later, following the Canadian federal election, Alberta’s Energy Resources Conservation Board […]
The news media narrative in the 2011 federal general election, by May 2nd, was clear: what began as another boring election surprised everyone when it actually got interesting. Leaving aside the troubling notion that anyone would characterize a democratic election as “boring” or “unnecessary,” the narrative came to focus on […]
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 […]
Episode 21 Migratory Birds on the Pacific Flyway: March 31, 2011 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past21.mp3][36:07] Migratory birds, by the nature of their behavior, cross boundaries. They are transcontinental species whose habitat in North America ranges from the Canadian arctic to Mexico. As such, the human conservation of these species has historically been […]