Witness to Yesterday (The Champlain Society Podcast on Canadian History)

Greg Marchildon talks to Sandra Rollings-Magnusson about her book, Folklife and Superstition: The Luck, Lore and Worldviews of Prairie Homesteaders.

The homesteading era on the Canadian Prairies (1867–1914) saw hundreds of thousands of migrants from northwestern and eastern Europe settle in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, seeking prosperity or fleeing hardship.

Historian Sandra Rollings-Magnusson emphasizes the personal stories of these homesteaders, using archival sources to showcase their lives filled with humor, superstition, and resilience. She explores practices like water-witching and neighborly pranks, illustrating how they adapted to challenges and formed diverse communities. This blend of traditions created a unique Prairie culture, enriching our understanding of this significant period in Canadian history.

Sandra Rollings-Magnusson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at MacEwan University with over thirty years of research on western Canadian homesteaders. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Regina and a PhD from the University of Alberta and has published numerous articles and three books on homesteading life.

Image Credit: Heritage House

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Greg Marchildon talks to Eric Cline about his book, Squandered: Canada’s Potash Legacy.

An exposé of the reality of Saskatchewan’s potash industry management—prioritizing private profit over public interest.

Eric Cline practiced law in his hometown of Saskatoon prior to serving 16 years in the Saskatchewan legislature, where he held several senior cabinet positions, including Health, Finance, and Industry and Resources. After politics, he worked for 12 years as a corporate executive in the mining sector before establishing an arbitration practice and working as a professional fused-glass artist.

Image Credit: University of Regina Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Catharine Anne Wilson about her book, Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830–1960.

Being Neighbours takes the reader into the heart of neighbourhood - the set of people near and surrounding the family - through an examination of work bees in southern Ontario from 1830 to 1960. The bee was a special event where people gathered to work on a neighbour’s farm like bees in a hive for a wide variety of purposes, including barn raising, logging, threshing, quilting, turkey plucking, and apple paring. Drawing on the diaries of over one hundred men and women, Catharine Wilson takes readers into families’ daily lives, the intricacies of their labour exchange, and their workways, feasts, and hospitality. Through the prism of the bee and a close reading of the diaries, she uncovers the subtle social politics of mutual dependency, the expectations neighbours had of each other, and their ways of managing conflict and crisis. This book adds to the literature on cooperative work that focuses on evaluating its economic efficiency and complicates histories of capitalism that place communal values at odds with market orientation.

Catharine Anne Wilson, FRSC, is the Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professor in Rural History at the University of Guelph and founder and director of the Rural Diary Archive website.

Image Credit: McGill-Queen’s University Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Nicole O'Byrne talks to Greg Marquis about his book "Canada's State Police: 150 Years of the RCMP. Drawing upon all of the available literature related to the organization's history, Marquis lays bare what he regards as 150 years of state police action and seeks to challenge what he claims are the carefully constructed myths about the RCMP's role in Canadian life.

Greg Marquis is a historian at the University of New Brunswick. He specializes in Canadian history and criminal justice theory. He has developed a number of courses in the area of law and society, and is on the editorial board of Acadiensis. He is the author of multiple books including, The Vigilant Eye: Policing Canada from 1867-9/11, Truth & Honour: The Death of Richard Oland and the Trial of Dennis Oland, and John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year That Canada Was Cool. Greg Marquis lives in Quispamsis, New Brunswick.

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Image Credit: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Ronald Rudin about his book, Against the Tides: Reshaping Landscape and Community in Canada’s Maritime Marshlands.

Against the Tides is the never-before-told story of the Maritime Marshland Rehabilitation Administration (MMRA), a federal agency created in 1948. As farmers could not afford to maintain the dykes, the MMRA stepped in to reshape the landscape and with it the communities that depended on dykeland. Agency engineers borrowed from some of the farmers’ long-standing practices, but they were so convinced of their own expertise that they sometimes disregarded local conditions, marginalizing farmers in the process. The engineers’ hubris led to construction of tidal dams that compromised a number of rivers, leaving behind environmental challenges.

This book combines interviews with people from the region, archival sources, and images from the record the MMRA left behind to create a vivid, richly detailed account of the push–pull of local and expert knowledge, and the role of the state in the postwar era. Ultimately, Against the Tides is a compelling study of a distinctive landscape and the people who inhabited it that encourages us to rethink the meaning of nature.

Ronald Rudin is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Concordia University. He is the author of numerous books, among them Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian’s Journey through Public Memory and Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park. The latter received the Canadian Historical Association Clio Prize for best book on Atlantic Canada, the Canadian Oral History Association Prize, and the Prix de l’Assemblée nationale from the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française. Rudin has produced eight documentary films, most recently Unnatural Landscapes, which accompanies this book.

Image Credit: UBC Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Larry Ostola talks to Ross Fair about his book, Improving Upper Canada: Agricultural Societies and State Formation, 1791–1852.

Agricultural societies founded in the colony of Upper Canada were the institutional embodiment of the ideology of improvement, modelled on contemporary societies in Britain and the United States. In Improving Upper Canada, Ross Fair explores how the agricultural improvers who established and led these organizations were important agents of state formation.

The book investigates the initial failed attempts to create a single agricultural society for Upper Canada. It examines the 1830 legislation that publicly funded the creation of agricultural societies across the colony to be semi-public agents of agricultural improvement, and analyses societies established in the Niagara, Home, and Midland Districts to understand how each attempted to introduce specific improvements to local farming practices. The book reveals how Upper Canada’s agricultural improvers formed a provincial association in the 1840s to ensure that the colonial government assumed a greater leadership role in agricultural improvement, resulting in the Bureau of Agriculture, forerunner of federal and provincial departments of agriculture in the post-Confederation era.

In analysing an early example of state formation, Improving Upper Canada provides a comprehensive history of the foundations of Ontario’s agricultural societies today, which continue to promote agricultural improvement across the province.

Ross Fair is a lecturer in the Department of History at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Image Credit: University of Toronto Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Greg Marchildon talks to Andrew Lawton about his book, Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life.

When Pierre Poilievre was elected leader of Canada’s Conservative party in 2022, he vowed to put Canadians back in control of their own lives.

He took aim at the country’s elites and “gatekeepers” as well as governments that sneer at their own citizens. Railing against the housing crisis and spiralling inflation, Poilievre was telling ordinary Canadians he was on their side. As the adopted son of two Alberta teachers, Poilievre knows the middle class. But he’s also the embodiment of a career politician, having spent nearly his entire adult life in politics.

Andrew Lawton is a senior journalist at True North and host of The Andrew Lawton Show. He previously hosted a daily talk show on Global News Radio. He has published written work across the world, including in the Washington Post, the National Post, the Toronto Sun, and on Global News. He is the bestselling author of The Freedom Convoy.

Image Credit: Sutherland House Books

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Larry Ostola talks to Richard White about his book, The Beaches: Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood.

The Beaches is one of Toronto’s best known and most admired neighbourhoods. It has no striking works of architecture or splendid public spaces, no must-see galleries or public institutions, and no associations with historic events or great celebrities – the sort of things that create neighbourhood reputations and draw visitors. It does, however, have an attractive character, and it is this character that Richard White seeks to understand, offering insights into how it came to be and why it has endured.

With an eye to the broader historical context, The Beaches recounts the neighbourhood’s initial colonial settlement, its development as a lakeside recreational community in the late nineteenth century, its emergence as a streetcar suburb after 1900, its maturation in the 1920s and 1930s, its relative decline in the 1950s and 1960s, and its revival in the 1970s and beyond. Utilizing a wide range of archival records, including council minutes, plans of subdivision, newspapers, public land records, city directories, assessment rolls, and historical photographs – as well as the present-day landscape – The Beaches reveals the various forces, public and private, local and international, that shaped this cherished urban neighbourhood.

Richard White is a historian, author, and former lecturer of Canadian history and urban planning history at the University of Toronto.

Image Credit: University of Toronto Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Greg Marchildon talks to Raymond B. Blake about his book, Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity.

This incredibly thorough analysis of the words of prime ministers will find an appreciative audience among scholars and students in Canadian and political history, and political science and rhetoric studies – and readers of Canadian history will discover a new take on Canada’s development as a nation.

Raymond B. Blake is a professor of history at the University of Regina and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has held visiting professorships at Philipps-Universität Marburg and University College Dublin, where he has twice held the Craig Dobbin Chair in Canadian Studies. He was formerly the director of the Saskatchewan Institute of Public Policy and the director of the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. He has written and edited more than twenty books, most recently Where Once They Stood: Newfoundland’s Rocky Road towards Confederation (with Melvin Baker), which won several awards, including the Pierre Savard Award from the International Council for Canadian Studies.

Image Credit: UBC Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.

Greg Marchildon talks to Gerald Friesen about his book, The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman.

John Norquay, orphan and prodigy was a leader among the Scots Cree peoples of western Canada. Born in the Red River Settlement, he farmed, hunted, traded, and taught school before becoming a legislator, cabinet minister, and, from 1878 to 1887, premier of Manitoba.

Once described as Louis Riel’s alter ego, he skirmished with prime minister John A. Macdonald, clashed with railway baron George Stephen, and endured racist taunts while championing the interests of the Prairie West in battles with investment bankers, Ottawa politicians, and the CPR. His contributions to the development of Canada’s federal system and his dealings with issues of race and racism deserve attention today.

Recounted here by Canadian historian Gerald Friesen, Norquay’s life story ignites contemporary conversations around the nature of empire and Canada’s own imperial past. Drawing extensively on recently opened letters and financial papers that offer new insights into his business, family, and political life, Friesen reveals Norquay to be a thoughtful statesman and generous patriarch. This masterful biography of the Premier from Red River sheds welcome light on a neglected historical figure and a tumultuous time for Canada and Manitoba.

Gerald Friesen taught Canadian history at the University of Manitoba from 1970–2011. He has written several books, including The Canadian Prairies: A History and Citizens and Nation, and is co-author of Immigrants in Prairie Cities. Former president of the Canadian Historical Association, he was an advisor on CBC-Radio Canada’s television series Canada: A People’s History. He lives in Winnipeg.

Image Credit: University of Manitoba Press

If you like our work, please consider supporting it: bit.ly/support_WTY. Your support contributes to the Champlain Society’s mission of opening new windows to directly explore and experience Canada’s past.