June 2013
Some thirty years ago while I was researching the history of whaling for my book on the subject (The Great Chase, Penguin Canada, 1990) I had the pleasure of chatting with Selma Barkham about her work in the Basque archives.
Last Saturday I thought of our conversation as UNESCO declared that Red Bay, Labrador, located on the north shore of the Strait of Belle Isle, would be Canada's newest World Heritage Site. Almost 500 years ago, the tiny settlement was one of the whaling...
Recently I’ve been researching the history of prohibition during the 1920s, in Canada and in the borderlands with the US as well. As so often happens, echoes of one’s own research can be heard in the political issues of the present day, specifically in the recent revelations of massive electronic eavesdropping by the American government on its own citizens.
Watchers of Ken Burns’s television series “Prohibition” that showed last year on PBS will recall the story of Roy Olmstead, the...
Or in this case, viewing. When I was a kid spending my summers on Bowen Island we used to while away rainy afternoons at the community hall watching movies. I've never forgotten being engrossed in the 1955 war adventure, "The Dam Busters," starring Richard Todd, about British planes dropping "the bouncing bomb". The blog at History Today has a short video describing the actual operation...
Stanley Park, Vancouver's jewel of an urban green space, celebrates its 125th anniversary this summer and last week I thought it might be fun to acknowledge the event by tagging along on a walking tour of the park.
Our very knowledgeable tour leader, Jolene Cumming, of the Stanley Park History Group,...
If you are interested in following the latest skirmishes in the so-called history wars, Pete Anderson has compiled a list of links at his "History Applied" blog that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.
Attention was paid in the press last week to a conference of orca experts taking place on Saturna Island, one of the southern Gulf Islands on the British Columbia coast. The conference was a commemoration of sorts of the first-ever live capture of a killer whale on July 16, 1964, at East Point on Saturna. (Details of the capture and the conference are...