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

Larry Ostola talks to Dimitry Anastakis, Elizabeth Kirkland and Don Nerbas about their book, Montreal's Square Mile: The Making and Transformation of a Colonial Metropole.

In nineteenth-century Canada, the Square Mile was an elite residential district in Montreal that represented a dramatic new concentration of wealth. Montreal’s Square Mile chronicles the history of the neighbourhood, from its origins to its decline, including the diverse and far-reaching sources of its making and its twentieth-century transformations. Spanning the interconnected worlds of family and home life, business and high politics, architecture and urban redevelopment, this interdisciplinary and richly illustrated volume presents a new account of the Square Mile’s history and an investigation of the neighbourhood’s impact beyond the immediate urban environment.

Dimitry Anastakis is the L.R. Wilson / R.J. Currie Chair in Canadian Business History in the Department of History and at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Elizabeth Kirkland is a faculty member in the Department of History and Classics at Dawson College.

Don Nerbas is an associate professor and the St. Andrew’s Society / McEuen Scholarship Foundation Chair in Canadian-Scottish Studies in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University.

Image Credit: UTP

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 Murray Knuttila about his book, Eroding a Way of Life: Neoliberalism and the Family Farm.

An analysis of how neoliberal policies have radically restructured farming in Western Canada.

The establishment of a Western Canadian economy dominated by family farming was part of the government’s post-Confederation nation building and industrial development strategy. During this era, Western family farms were established and promoted to serve as a market for Canadian industrial goods and a source of export cash crops, which both played essential roles in the national economy.

In Eroding a Way of Life, Murray Knuttila shows how decades of neoliberal policies, state austerity, deregulation, and privatization have fragmented agrarian communities across Western Canada, a process hastened by the advent of the capitalization of machinery and high-input industrial farming. As a result, earning a living on the family farm has become increasingly impossible. As farmers sell off their land to larger producers, rural communities are watching their railroads, schools, churches, post offices, and hospitals close, and many villages and small towns are being reduced to plaques on the highway.

Analyzing the history of prairie agriculture through the lenses of class, federal policies, and global capitalism, Knuttila describes the physical, social, and political reordering of the countryside and the resulting human costs paid by farmers, labourers, and families.

Murray Knuttila is Professor Emeritus at the University of Regina and Brock University. He is the author of several books, including That Man Partridge and Paying for Masculinity. He resides in Regina, Saskatchewan.

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 John Andrew Morrow about his book, The Legacy of Louis Riel: Leader of the Métis People.

Based on a comprehensive review of Riel’s writing, Morrow uncompromisingly examines Riel’s views on vital subjects. These include the term Métis, Métis identity, “Indians,” Jews, Islam, Quebec, French Canadians, the Irish, the United States, women, liberalism, and Métis unity. Riel’s views might rankle readers today. Without toning them down, the author establishes nonetheless the intellectual and political environment in which they developed.

The relevant and timely topics addressed, some of which have been sidelined or entirely ignored, will surelyspark debate. It is hoped that this study will increase our understanding of Louis Riel, his thought, and his writings, and help create greater cohesion among Métis communities throughout North America.

John Andrew Morrow was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He completed his Honors BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Toronto where he focused his research on Francophone, Hispanic, Islamic, and Indigenous Studies. He wrote his MA thesis on César Vallejo’s aboriginal worldview and completed his doctoral dissertation on the indigenous presence and influence in the poetry of two of Nicaragua’s national poets. Dr. Morrow has taught for universities around the world and rose to the rank of Full Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature. During his tenure as a professor, he received a Student Impact Award, was certified as a Master Teacher, and was recognized as a Distinguished Faculty Member. He has published many academic articles and scholarly books, including the Amazon bestseller The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad with the Christians of the World, which earned him an Interfaith Leadership Award. He resides in rural Indiana.

Image Credit: Baraka 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.

Greg Marchildon talks to Royden Loewen about his book, Mennonite Farmers: A Global History of Place and Sustainability.

The book reveals the ways in which modern-day Mennonite farmers have adjusted to diverse temperatures, precipitation, soil types, and relative degrees of climate change. These farmers have faced broad global forces of modernization during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, from commodity markets and intrusive governments to technologies marked increasingly by the mechanical, chemical, and genetic.

As Mennonites, Loewen writes, these farmers were raised with knowledge of the historic Anabaptist teachings on community, simplicity, and peace that stood alongside ideas on place and sustainability. Nonetheless, conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and local values, they put their agricultural ideas into practice in remarkably diverse ways. Mennonite Farmers is a pioneering work that brings faith into conversation with the land in distinctive ways.

Royden Loewen is Chair of Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg. His books include Family, Church and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and New Worlds and From the Inside Out: The Rural World of Mennonite Diarists.

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.

Larry Ostola talks to Stephen R. Bown about his book, Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada.

In the late 19th century, demand for fur was in sharp decline. This could have spelled economic disaster for the venerable Hudson's Bay Company. But an idea emerged in political and business circles in Ottawa and Montreal to connect the disparate British colonies into a single entity that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With over 3,000 kilometres of track, much of it driven through wildly inhospitable terrain, the CPR would be the longest railway in the world and the most difficult to build. Its construction was the defining event of its era and a catalyst for powerful global forces.

Bown again widens our view of the past to include the adventures and hardships of explorers and surveyors, the resistance of Indigenous peoples, and the terrific and horrific work of many thousands of labourers. His vivid portrayal of the powerful forces that were moulding the world in the late 19th century provides a revelatory new picture of modern Canada's creation as an independent state.

Stephen R. Bown writes on the history of exploration, science and ideas. His subjects include the medical mystery of scurvy, the Treaty of Tordesillas and the lives of Captain George Vancouver and Roald Amundsen. His books have been published in multiple English-speaking territories, translated into nine languages and shortlisted for many awards. He has won the BC Book Prize, the Alberta Book Award, the William Mills Prize for Polar Books, among others. His 2020 book, The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire, won the J.W. Defoe Book Prize and the National Business Book Award. Born in Ottawa, Bown now lives near Banff in the Canadian Rockies.

Image Credit: Penguin Random House Canada

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Peter Ludlow about his book, Disciples of Antigonish: Catholics in Nova Scotia, 1880–1960.

For generations eastern Nova Scotia was one of the most celebrated Roman Catholic constituencies in Canada. Occupying a corner of a small province in a politically marginalized region of the country, the Diocese of Antigonish nevertheless had tremendous influence over the development of Canadian Catholicism. It produced the first Roman Catholic prime minister of Canada, supplied the nation with clergy and women- religious, and organized one of North America’s most successful social movements.

Disciples of Antigonish recounts the history of this unique multi-ethnic community as it shifted from the firm ultramontanism of the nineteenth century to a more socially conscious Catholicism after the First World War. Peter Ludlow chronicles the faithful as they built a strong Catholic sub-state, dealing with economic uncertainty, generational outmigration, and labour unrest. As the home of the Antigonish Movement - a network of adult study clubs, cooperatives, and credit unions - the diocese became famous throughout the Catholic world.

The influence of “mighty big and strong Antigonish,” as one national figure described the community, reached its zenith in the 1950s. Disciples of Antigonish traces the monumental changes that occurred within the region and the wider church over nearly a century and demonstrates that the Catholic faith in Canada went well beyond Sunday Mass.

Peter Ludlow is an adjunct professor of History and Classics at Acadia University and is editor of Historical Studies, the journal of the Canadian Catholic Historical Association.

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.

Greg Marchildon talks to Ronald F. Williamson about his book, The History and Archaeology of the Iroquois du Nord.

In the mid-to late 1660s and early 1670s, the Haudenosaunee established a series of settlements at strategic locations along the trade routes inland at short distances from the north shore of Lake Ontario. From east to west, these communities consisted of Ganneious, on Napanee or Hay Bay, on the Bay of Quinte; Kenté, near the isthmus of the Quinte Peninsula; Ganaraské, at the mouth of the Ganaraska River; Quintio, on Rice Lake; Ganatsekwyagon, near the mouth of the Rouge River; Teiaiagon, near the mouth of the Humber River; and Qutinaouatoua, inland from the western end of Lake Ontario. All of these settlements likely contained people from several Haudenosaunee nations as well as former Ontario Iroquoians who had been adopted by the Haudenosaunee.

This volume brings together Indigenous knowledge as well as documentary and recent archaeological evidence of this period to focus on describing the historical context, efforts to find the villages, and examinations of the unique material culture discovered there and at similar settlements in the Haudenosaunee homeland.

Ronald F. Williamson is founder and now Senior Associate of Archaeological Services Inc. He has spent most of his career studying the history and archaeology of Ontario Iroquoians, much of it collaboratively with Indigenous partners. He is also Vice Chair of the board of Shared Path Consultation Initiative, a charitable organization dedicated to moving beyond collaboration and consultation to Indigenous decision-making in land use planning. He has published extensively on both Indigenous and early colonial Great Lakes history. He is appointed as adjunct status at the University of Western Ontario and he is Chair of the board of the Museum of Ontario Archaeology in London. His primary interests are in the ancestral Wendat occupation of Ontario, the Early Woodland Period in the Northeast and more broadly in the origins and development of the northern Iroquoian cultural pattern.

Robert von Bitter is the Archaeological Data Coordinator at the Ontario Ministry of Heritage, Sport, Tourism and Culture Industries in Toronto where he lives with his wife and two daughters. Although broadly interested in the archaeology of the province, Robert has recently found the second half of the 17th century both a unique and fascinating period on which to focus his personal research.

Image Credit: University of Ottawa 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 Alister Campbell about his book, The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier.

Elected for the first of his two terms as premier of Ontario in 1995, Mike Harris introduced some of the most sweeping reforms the province has ever seen: substantial reductions in spending and taxation as well dramatic changes to welfare, education, health care, municipal affairs, labour relations, energy, the environment, and much more. He altered the way elections were fought, how the provincial government is held accountable, how it works with its counterpart in Ottawa, and on his retirement in 2002 said his only regret was “I wish I had done more… faster.” Three decades after the launch of his famous Common Sense Revolution, Mike Harris and his policies still galvanize emotions on all sides of the political spectrum. In this comprehensive and highly readable examination of The Harris Legacy, an all-star collection of political experts reviews what worked, what didn’t, and what’s still up for debate.

Alister Campbell has served as CEO of several Canadian insurance companies. He was the “Message Guy” in the 1995 Mike Harris campaign, responsible for policy, speech, communications, advertising, and media.

Image Credit: Sutherland 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.

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Sean Carleton about his book, Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia.

Lessons in Legitimacy brings the histories of different kinds of state schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples – public schools, Indian Day Schools, and Indian Residential Schools – into one analytical frame. Schooling for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and youth had distinct yet complementary functions in building British Columbia. Students were given lessons in legitimacy that normalized settler capitalism and the making of British Columbia, first as a British colony and then as Canada’s westernmost province.

Sean Carleton combines insights from history, Indigenous studies, historical materialism, and political economy to present different histories of education for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples together. In the process, this important study reveals how an understanding of the historical uses of schooling can inform contemporary discussions about the role of education in reconciliation and improving Indigenous–settler relations.

Historians, Indigenous studies scholars, and those in the field of education history will find this work illuminating, as will educators and general readers with an interest in schooling’s role in truth and reconciliation.

Sean Carleton is an assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. He has published in Historical Studies in Education, History of Education, Settler Colonial Studies, and BC 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.

Nicole O’Byrne talks to Martin Friedland about his book, Canadian Criminal Law in Ten Cases.

Canadian Criminal Law in Ten Cases explores the development of criminal justice in Canada through an in-depth examination of ten significant criminal cases. Martin L. Friedland draws on cases that went to the Supreme Court of Canada or the Privy Council, including well-known cases such as those of Louis Riel, Steven Truscott, Henry Morgentaler, and Jamie Gladue.

The book addresses such issues as wrongful convictions, the enforcement of morality, Indigenous experiences with criminal law, bail and trial delay, and the impact of the 1982 Charter of Rights on the criminal justice system.

Friedland describes in a masterful way the factual background of each case and the political, social, and economic conditions of the time. Each character – the accused, judges, and counsel – is described in detail, as are the relevant laws and procedures. Friedland includes recommendations on how the criminal justice system can be improved, such as by creating a new federal commission devoted solely to criminal justice and by the enactment by Parliament of enhanced codes of evidence and criminal law and procedure.

Canadian Criminal Law in Ten Cases is an indispensable guide to understanding the criminal justice system for lawyers, students, and anyone interested in criminal law and the administration of criminal justice.

Martin L. Friedland is a university professor of law emeritus 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.