Surely we will all agree that transportation history is inherently interesting. If, somehow, we can’t, we should recognize that we can’t understand the history of commerce and migration without it. We have previously seen (here and here) the challenges Bishop Plessis faced while traveling around the Maritime colonies and down to New York in the […]
Continue readingCategory: British Canada
The Many Trials of Lower Canada
In the last blog post, we considered how Lower Canadian agriculture may or may not have traversed a period of crisis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Historians still debate whether the colony experienced a sustained production crisis. The challenges were unquestionably many, however: soil exhaustion; fluke climatic events; fluctuating demand in Britain […]
Continue readingFinding Franco-Americans in Agricultural Reports
As we’ve previously seen on this blog, nineteenth-century government reports contain abundant information about French-Canadian emigration. Legislative committees studied the issue in 1849 and again eight years later. Emigration was also a matter of debate in the halls of Quebec’s provincial legislature after 1867. Studies and commentaries commissioned (or received) by the contemporary Canadian press […]
Continue readingOthering the Madawaska in Travel Narratives
Three month ago, this blog plunged into the Upper St. John Valley, an area whose history often falls on the margins of existing narratives. The hard work of reconstructing the history of the Madawaska, its relationship with neighboring regions, and its place within empires is complicated by surviving sources that tell (at best) a partial […]
Continue readingReview: Mayer, Congress’s Own
Book Review Holly A. Mayer. Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. It may too trite to assert, as scholars have for generations, that the American struggle for independence was complex, messy, and far from linear. But, in the wake of the national holiday, the […]
Continue readingCrossing a Closed Border in 1808, Part II
The story of the commercial embargo on Lake Champlain continues with E. A. Kendall. See Part I here. “I was in pursuit of no palace for my lodging; but, even I was destined to adventure. On the Province Point, on the north side of the boundary, I was taught to expect to find a store, […]
Continue readingCrossing a Closed Border in 1808, Part I
The Canada–U.S. boundary is often represented as the longest undefended border in the world, symbolizing centuries of peace and amity between the two nations—or whatever Canada was prior to the twentieth century. As is often the case in history, this easy trope conceals a more complex and arguably more interesting tale—of which the current ban […]
Continue reading“This province is your country”: Understanding the Acadian Deportation
In all the said places and colonies to be yielded and restored by the most Christian King [Louis XIV], in pursuance of this treaty, the subjects of the said King may have liberty to remove themselves, within a year, to any other place. . . But those who are willing to remain there, and to […]
Continue readingTraveling with a Bishop in 1815, Part II
See Part I here. His arduous journey was still far from over as Bishop Plessis definitively left Halifax on July 27. A carriage provided by a Mr. Conroy took them overland to Windsor, a town with a small estuary opening on the Bay of Fundy. Plessis seemed startled to find a good number of Black […]
Continue readingTraveling with a Bishop in 1815, Part I
Four men joined the expedition—men of the cloth, all with a strong constitution, able to carry a heavy load of personal belongings, supplies, and religious items that would eventually fill up Quebeckers’ deep well of curse words. De Boucherville, Gaulin, Gauvreau, and Bolduc had as their esteemed companion and leader the bishop of Quebec, Joseph-Octave […]
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