• The American Gaze: Adam Gopnik’s Canada

    Jerry Bannister Adam Gopnik’s recent article, “We could all have been Canadians,” published in the May 15th issue of the New Yorker, has attracted considerable attention on social media among Canadian historians.[1] I’ve already chimed in with a short comment on Christopher Moore’s blog.[2]   With the sun shining hopefully on my back deck this morning,… Continue Reading

  • Refugees Fit for Rescue: Loyalists, Maroons, and Mi’kmaq

    Ruma Chopra How does Canada’s more open, even welcoming policy towards Syrian refugees fit with other refugees, black loyalists and Maroons who entered the Maritimes over 200 years ago when the colonies were peripheral regions within a larger British Empire? Part of the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is sheer… Continue Reading

  • Canadian Exceptionalism is about Land and Resources

    Rachel Bryant Canadian exceptionalism has emerged (or re-emerged) in the Trump/Brexit/Canada 150 era as a useful concept for scholars and journalists seeking to understand how Canadians and their institutions are (or are not) unique in hemispheric and global contexts. But exceptionalism is about more than the ways in which vast geopolitical entities relate to one… Continue Reading

  • British Honour – Anishinaabeg in the War of 1812, Part 5

    Alan Corbiere The Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potowatomi) have always revered the island of Michilimackinac. So much so that at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Odawa tried to keep it in their possession. The Odawa suggested that the British negotiators offer the Americans a greater quantity of Anishinaabe land on the mainland in… Continue Reading

  • Danny Vickers: Gentle Iconoclast

    Isaac Land Perhaps you’ve heard the one about Reviewer 2? Danny Vickers had one of those stories. As a young scholar, he got a response back from (of course) an anonymous peer reviewer who dismissed his submission on these grounds: “This article reads as if it was written in a third-rate university library.” This story… Continue Reading