This Month at Canada's History


Cover story at Canada's History this month features Marilyn Dickson on Eileen Vollick, first woman to earn a pilot's licence in Canada:
"I have never been afraid to go after anything I wanted and to stay until I got it," she wrote, so, "one day I ventured into the proprietor's den and asked him, 'Can a girl learn to fly?'"
Also, Ray Argyle on Solomon Sanderson, the Cree chief who created the term "First Nations" -- in 1980. Cynthia Levine-Rasky on the Roma in Canada. And Peter Blow on a Canadian freedom fighter executed by the Spanish in 19th century Cuba. And much more.

For my own column, I talked to Ian Milligan about Big Data and historians' plans to gain access to and control of what is being called "the infinite archives" -- the vast amounts of historical source material that lives online and only online.  Subscribe!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

History of Indigenous film and television

Image
I'm not an aficionado of the Toronto International Film Festival much, but the other day we did get to a showing of Edge of the Knife , or Sgaaway K'uuna , the first feature film made entirely in the Haida language. It is co-directed by Gwaii Edenshaw, who is Haida, and Helen Haig-Brown, who is Tsilhquo'tin, and they had the assistance of the film team that made the terrific Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.  There must be a good chance it will be seen this winter in major cities and specialty cinema venues. Edge of the Knife and Atanarjuat are powerful demonstrations why cultural appropriation is a problem.  Oh, says defenders of the practice, a good novelist (or film-maker) will grasp the truth of the culture, because that is what artists do, that is how an artist works. Watch  Edge of the Knife or (even more so) Atanarjuat and you quickly become sure no Euro-Canadian would have made it.  Worth the price for that alone. Edge of the Knife  presents a traditio...
Read more

Happy World Heritage Day

Image
Yeah, I didn't know it was World Heritage Day , either, but there you are.  Go see a monument. I googled Heritage Canada Foundation to see what it was doing today, and the first link was the National Trust for Canada , an evolution I still don't entirely understand, though Wikipedia says they are now the same thing .  But it's a pretty website. Today also, the Ontario Museum in Toronto announces that its new Daphne Cockwell Gallery of First Nations Art and Culture will be permanently open to the public free of charge. The ROM describes this as part of the Museum�s broader effort to foster greater appreciation of the Indigenous collections stewarded by the Museum, and to support the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. This is also one in a series of long term initiatives aimed at increasing public access to the Museum. Free public museums -- there's a heritage initiative I could get behind . Image : National Trust for Canada
Read more

Wisdom from the east (mostly)

Acadiensis ( the blog one, I mean) recently offered an essay connecting the Halifax Explosion to climate change . "What, then, does the story of the Halifax Explosion tell us about our contemporary moment of climate disaster?" Absolutely nothing, one is tempted to respond -- except maybe the author has a project underway on climate history. But in fact, author Jacob Remes, a student of disaster response, has quite a few interesting and ingenious comparisons and analogies to offer. Meanwhile, at  Borealia  Jerry Bannister has advice on how to get that bogged down thesis started .  For one thing, he says, you can take Christmas off. If you�re like 94.7% of the academic world, you will get precious little work done once the holidays are upon us. You can fight it and make yourself unproductive and miserable, or give into seasonal reality and be unproductive yet happy. Not from the east but:   Active History offers pointed and thoughtful public policy advice from a...
Read more