Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

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April 30, 2023

News broke a couple of weeks ago that plans are being formulated to release the captive orca known as Lolita back into the wild, sort of.

Lolita has been held in a small tank in a Florida marine park ever since she was captured in Puget Sound in 1970. During the 1960s and 1970s dozens of animals were taken from the Northwest Coast for sale to amusement parks and aquariums around the world....

April 18, 2023

The BC Book Prize nominees for 2022 have been announced (here) and there are not many history/biography titles on the list this time around. The only books I would place in that category are The Acid Room (Anvil Press) by Erika Dyck and Jesse Donaldson, about the...

April 5, 2023

Congratulations to artist and art historian Robert Amos whose gorgeous book, E.J. Hughes: Canadian War Artist, has won this year's Basil Stuart-Stubbs Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book about British Columbia. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the prize jury.)

Hughes,...

April 3, 2023

I was out mucking about in the woods last week looking for evidence of the Great North Vancouver Streetcar Trestle. Turns out it wasn't that hard to find.

The BC Electric Railway Company opened its first streetcar line in North Van in 1906. There were eventually three lines: one up Lonsdale, a second heading east out to Lynn Valley, and a third travelling west to Capilano Road. That western...

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