• A Conversation about History Blogging in Canada

    Keith Grant At this year’s Canadian Historical Association, we’re going to have a face-to-face conversation about history blogging in Canada. If you’ll be in Calgary for Congress 2016, you’re invited to join us on Monday morning, 8:30 – 10:00, for CHA session 9 in Science B-142. Sharing their thoughts will be the editors of five… Continue Reading

  • Early Canadian Environmental History: A Forum

    Editor’s note: This is the final post in a joint series of posts on early Canadian environmental history by The Otter~La loutre and Borealia. The entire series is available here. After providing posts for the early Canadian environmental history series, the three participants – Colin Coates, Jason Hall, and Anya Zilberstein – sat down at… Continue Reading

  • Who was the King of the Beasts in New France?

    Colin M. Coates Some species are better to “think” with than others. Environmental activists often draw attention to their causes through reference to “flagship” or “charismatic” species. Invocations of the threatened habitat of the marbled murrelet helped galvanize opposition to logging in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, just as the Kermode bear subspecies has… Continue Reading

  • Early Canadian Environmental History Series: Introduction & Essential Reading

    Sean Kheraj and Denis McKim Welcome to a series on early Canadian environmental history, jointly hosted by Borealia and The Otter ~ La Loutre, the blog of The Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). This joint series provides environmental historians of Canada the opportunity to reflect upon the state of so-called “pre-Confederation” history in the field. As was evident… Continue Reading

  • Empire by Collaboration: A Collaborative Review

    Robert Englebert Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). I recently had an opportunity to discuss Robert Michael Morrissey’s new book Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country with my senior level seminar on French-Indigenous relations in colonial… Continue Reading

  • Settler Colonialism and the Future of Canadian History

    Jerry Bannister In March I had the pleasure of attending the Pierre Savard conference[1] at the University of Ottawa. I was asked to give a talk on the future of Canadian history, particularly the ongoing debate over transnational versus national perspectives. I never did get around to asking why they invited me to speak. Perhaps… Continue Reading

  • White Tribism: Viking Explorations and Indigenous Erasures

    Douglas Hunter The Vikings are back in North America, athough in truth they’ve been with us since at least the eighteenth century, when the Vinland sagas began to fuel speculation about the lands Leif Eiriksson and his compatriots tried to colonize around 1000 AD. Their latest sighting is at Point Rosee in southwestern Newfoundland, where… Continue Reading