Monthly Archives: November 2014

Canadian History: Pre-Confederation was created by John Douglas Belshaw. This creation is a part of the B.C. Open Textbook project. In October 2012, the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education announced its support for the creation of open textbooks for the 40 highest-enrolled first and … Continue reading →

Pre-contact North America was home to a numerous and diverse array of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. Scientific origin theories such as the Bering land bridge and coastal migration suggest that the ancestors of these groups arrived in the Western … Continue reading →

These brief histories of the Aboriginal Americas reveal that categorization is complicated. Take language, for example, which is often used as a key element of nationality (e.g., French people speak French and live in France and almost everyone in France speaks French). … Continue reading →

Early in their encounters with Aboriginal peoples, European newcomers struggled to conceive of and understand a continent teeming with (what was to them) mysterious peoples with highly unusual ways of doing things. Often the Europeans rejected the possibility that these civilizations … Continue reading →

The telling of Aboriginal history in Canada often begins with a discussion of human migration routes into the Americas, which reflects the long-standing misperception that was held by Europeans that Aboriginal societies were primitive, usually migratory, and unlikely to have been … Continue reading →

The idea that the Americas have no history before the arrival of Europeans derives mainly from the apparent absence of a written record. European, Middle Eastern, and Asian civilizations evolved highly bureaucratic and centralized administrative functions based on the ability to write … Continue reading →

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. – L.P.Hartley (1953) Writing history does not take place in a vacuum, nor is it a straightforward process. There are issues associated with cause and effect that have not … Continue reading →

It’s one thing to know about some of the key events in Canada’s history; it’s another to know a thing or two about how our history came to be written. Part of the challenge is defining what constitutes history. For example, it is … Continue reading →

Where does history come from? Historians use a great many different sources to assemble information on the past. Evidence comes in many forms. To think like a historian, we must concern ourselves not only with what people did, but also with what … Continue reading →