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Joe's Cafe is a landmark on Vancouver's Commercial Drive, not least because of an infamous political protest that broke out there in 1990. When the owner ejected two lesbian patrons for openly kissing on the premises, he touched off a boycott of the cafe by supporters of gay rights. The protest lasted several months until the owner apologized.

What brings this to mind is that the incident is included in a new online "digital storymap" about Vancouver produced by a group of history...

One Christmas present I very much appreciated was Jonathan Raban's last book, Father and Son.

I've admired Raban's writing for many years, ever since reading Coasting, his wonderful account of sailing around Great Britain in 1982, also a meditation on the damage that Margaret Thatcher was doing to his native country. When I read it I was in a sailboat myself, cruising through...

In the November issue of the Literary Review of Canada, under the guise of revisiting Jack Granatstein's 1998 polemic, Who Killed Canadian History, Patrice Dutil writes a lament about the state of Canadian history today.

I didn't like Granatstein's book when it appeared 25 years ago and I don't much like Dutil's recycling of some of the same arguments. But instead of going on about it myself I...

Last week I was down to the regular meeting of the Vancouver Historical Society. The speaker was Jason Colby, professor of environmental history at the University of Victoria.

Jason was talking about his book Orca: How We Came to Know and...