Peter H. Russell’s Canada’s Odyssey is a sweeping reconsideration of the foundations of Canada’s constitutional order that has garnered considerable attention and praise. This essay is the first in a three-part series assessing the book’s significance. Elizabeth Mancke Upon first inspection of Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests, I recoiled. The main title… Continue Reading
Latest in: Canadian History
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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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Bradley Miller The Supreme Court declined this month to radically change the way that Canada works. In R v Comeau, lawyers for a New Brunswick man ticketed for bringing too many bottles of beer into the province from Quebec urged the justices to use the history of the Canadian federation to improve its future, at… 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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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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Scott Berthelette Throughout the 1730s and 1740s, the French established a series of forts northwest of Lake Superior in present-day Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Minnesota, and North Dakota. French colonial officials hoped that these postes de l’Ouest, or Western Posts, would secure New France’s pick of prime northern furs, which would undermine the English dominance… Continue Reading
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Christopher C. Jones Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016). The lone Canadian student enrolled in my course on “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa and the Atlantic World” this semester expressed some surprise last week when I mentioned that the class would cover the history… Continue Reading
