Blog

If you live in Vancouver, your morning commute on the Skytrain (the city's light rail transit system if you don't) last Friday may have been interrupted by...the birds. Or to be more precise, a bird's nest. Apparently one was set alight by a spark and started a fire that burned out a major electrical cable, shutting down the trains for several hours.

Being an historian, my mind naturally wanders to precedents and believe it or not, there is one: the infamous "woodpecker election" of...

Today is the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the British passenger liner Lusitania, torpedoed by a German submarine on May 7, 1915. The death toll was 1,198 passengers and crew, including almost one hundred children.

The sinking violated the unwritten rules of war that said that civilian ships were immune from attack. It quickly came to epitomize the perfidy of the German enemy and was exploited by propagandists in Allied countries to stir up fervid support for the war...

Spring has arrived and with it the latest issue of Geist magazine (No.96).

My regular column takes a look at John Ralston Saul's book on Aboriginal rights, The Comeback. Saul thinks that Aboriginal people in Canada have made enormous strides in reversing years of population...

It is surprising how you can live in a community for many years and still know so little about its history.

I am talking about myself here.

I've lived in North Vancouver for 28 years, not ten minutes from the famed architect Fred Hollingsworth who died ten days ago at the age of 98, yet until quite recently I was unaware of the role Hollingsworth...

If you are close to North Vancouver and looking for a good time this Wednesday, don't forget "Secrets, Booze and Rebellion," an evening of "hidden history" featuring myself, Eve Lazarus and Aaron Chapman at the Lynn Valley Library. Fun starts at 7 p.m.

And just to show that the subject of prohibition (the topic of my latest book) is forever relevant, I learn that a small distiller in Ontario is now marketing...