Borealia
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Borealia is a group blog on early Canadian history, a forum for transnational thinking about northern North America in the Atlantic world to about 1870.
Borealia
2M ago
Nathan Ince On July 14, 1832, Jacob Sahkeconabe was shot and killed by Joseph Graverod. Both individuals involved in this tragedy were young, variously described as boys, youths, or young men, but otherwise they came from different backgrounds.[1] Sahkeconabe belonged to the Anishinaabe community of Mnjikaning, more often known to outsiders as Yellowhead’s village. For ..read more
Borealia
5M ago
Alan Taylor The editors invited me to respond to the review by Todd Webb of my book American Republics, which is the third in a series examining the emergence of the United States in a continental context. Webb’s review is so generous that I have no hairs to split with him. He aptly notes the ..read more
Borealia
5M ago
A Review of Alan Taylor’s American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021). Todd Webb This bleak and brilliant book offers a history of the antebellum United States in the wider context of its North American neighbours. That story, for Alan Taylor, was dominated by three processes: the ..read more
Borealia
5M ago
Women have been fundamentally affected by war and armed conflict, as victims and participants, throughout the long history of the lands that eventually became Canada. However, beyond the celebration of heroines like Laura Secord and Madeleine de Verchères (meant to be read as exceptional) they remain largely absent from our historical memory. To address this ..read more
Borealia
5M ago
Review of Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021) 502 pp. $35.00. Elizabeth Mancke and Adam Nadeau[1] In the conventional metanarrative of modernity, written constitutions symbolize progressive trends, political events that were considered “benevolent and normally acted as ..read more
Borealia
9M ago
Nathan Ince At 10 PM on the evening of July 11, 1835, a group of Mohawk launched a raft onto the waters of the Bay of Quinte. They had good reason to begin their journey under cover of dusk. The two hundred logs that made up their raft had been illegally cut down the previous ..read more
Borealia
10M ago
Mark R. Anderson The king’s face had been “smeared with tar, with a necklace of potatoes around the neck from which was suspended a wooden Cross with this inscription— VOILÁ LE PAPE DU CANADA ET LE SOT ANGLOIS [This is the Pope of Canada and the Fool of England].” On the morning of May 1 ..read more
Borealia
1y ago
Jonathan Szo On 7 December 1837, a force of 1,200 troops marched down Yonge Street in the city of Toronto under the command of Sir Francis Bond Head, the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. Their destination was a wayside inn known as Montgomery’s Tavern, the meeting place for hundreds of rebels who were angered by government ..read more
Borealia
1y ago
Misha Ewen Sugar, tobacco, porcelain, and cod. These worldly goods—that came to define early modern empires and networks of global trade—could all be found in the homes of Newfoundland women Sara Kirke and her sister Frances Hopkins. The Pool in Ferryland was their home throughout the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century. Their ..read more
Borealia
1y ago
Elizabeth Mancke and Sydney Crain In 1819, New Brunswick’s assembly passed its first legislation regulating just the herring fishery for the “Parishes of West-Isles, Campo-Bello, Pennfield, and Saint George” in Charlotte County; two years later, an amendment added the Island of Grand Manan.[1] Since its first sitting in 1786, the assembly had passed nine statutes ..read more