George Colpitts Peter Fidler was going where few Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) traders had gone in the summer of 1800: the South Branch territories of present-day southern Saskatchewan and Alberta. He was to build Chesterfield House at the junction of the South Saskatchewan and Red Deer Rivers, deep in the drier, xeric grasslands of the… Continue Reading
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Anya Zilberstein Note: This is the second in a series on environmental history and early modern history cross-posted with NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment. Environmental historians of the 20th and 21st centuries should be early modernists. That’s because, just like present and presentism, the non-specialist definition of modern (not to say modernity, modernism, and their posterior… Continue Reading
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Jack Bouchard Note: This is the first in a series on environmental history and early modern history cross-posted with NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment. In the 1560s, if you were a European mariner in search of fish in the northwest Atlantic, you did not go to Newfoundland or Canada or New France. These were rarely… Continue Reading
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Claire Campbell Welcome to our series on the environmental history of the early modern period! A project of NiCHE, the series is cross-posted here at Borealia. The idea for a series featuring scholarship from the early modern period – and querying the larger temporal character of the field of environmental history – came out of this… Continue Reading
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Michael J. Davis “We are at present working on the establishment of New Orleans, thirty leagues above the entry of the Mississippi,” wrote the newly-commissioned commandant-général of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on June 12, 1718 to the Council of the Marine at Versailles.[1] Work on New Orleans, however, had been underway since the… Continue Reading
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Zachary A. Tingley Lighthouses, once a lifesaving beacon of hope for mariners facing the elements, are themselves now in need of rescue. In communities up and down the Atlantic coast, local communities have organized to preserve lighthouses that, while being in need of a great deal of repair because of federal neglect, remain iconic in… Continue Reading
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G. Patrick O’Brien Having spent an agreeable New Year’s Eve with her friends, nineteen-year-old Mary Robie paused to write in her diary before turning in for the night. “Which brings 1783 to a period,” she began, “I have made out to continue my journal for one year and now might make many observations upon the… Continue Reading
