George Colpitts Note: This is the third in a series on environmental history and early modern history cross-posted with NiCHE, the Network in Canadian History & Environment. 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… 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
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Stephen Hay When we think of Christmas in Newfoundland and Labrador, mumming comes to mind, the famous tradition of visiting in disguise.[1] Yet, this is just one of many Christmas customs that Newfoundlanders and Labradoreans enjoyed. Newfoundland and Labrador holiday customs during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century included burning the Yule log and… Continue Reading
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Jerry Bannister Starting a graduate thesis is hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, delusional, or one of those bizarre people who find it easy. December in Canada brings awful holiday specials on TV, complaints about freezing rain and, for those of us in universities, worries over what’s left undone from the Fall term.… Continue Reading
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Shirley Tillotson Editors’ note: This essay is jointly posted with our partners at ActiveHistory.ca, and appeared in an earlier version as a Letter to the Editor in the National Post (Oct. 26, 2017). Fundraisers love anniversaries. They’re like birthdays, right? Presents can’t be far behind. But when it’s the anniversary of a death, it’s not so… Continue Reading
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