"James Marsh has held up a reasonably unflawed mirror to his culture." Historian Viv Nelles
Contents
Hiring the Editor in Chief
Learning from Others
Senior Editors
Compiling the Article List
Internal Conflict
First Principles
The Editorial Process
Editorial Challenges
Production and Marketing of The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Reviews of The Canadian Encyclopedia
A Second Chance: Kudos and Critiques
The Junior Encyclopedia of Canada
Into the Electronic Age
A Nostalgic Gesture and the Future
Mel Hurtig, the Edmonton publisher and high-profile nationalist, writes in his memoirs...
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Charles Dickens took a day off from the theatre in Montreal to ride the railway, praising it extravagantly.
“Canadian writers get as excited about trains as French writers do about sex,” wrote Silver Donald Cameron. No wonder, since the country owes it very existence to the railway.
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MPs and workers alike fled by jumping, crawling, staggering, and scrambling down make-shift ladders.
On the dull, cool evening of February 3, 1916 there was barely a quorum of members in Ottawa’s House of Commons. The honourable member for Northumberland, W.S. Loggie, was droning on about the question of improving the transportation of fish. Suddenly there was a commotion at the main door of the chamber. Two men rushed in and one shoute
d “Fire... Everybody get out!”
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The pseudo-science behind eugenics was based on a crude misconception of heredity
“Great men are almost always bad men,” Lord Acton famously said. If that is so, we are going to have to tolerate flaws if we want to celebrate “great” Canadians. The eugenics movement of the early 20th century particularly tries our tolerance of several of our textbook heroes.
It was Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton who coined the term “eugenics” (Greek for “well-born”) in 1883 to describe the process of improving or impairing “the racial qualities of future generations either...
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“Metro air was fouler than ever recorded… sulphur and muck, trapped in a layer of stagnant air...
Football appeals to Canadians on many levels. Most of us are pessimistic about ever seeing a Stanley Cup again on this side of the border, but eight of our cities can dream of winning the Grey Cup.
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“Hanging out in Skagway,” wrote a later observer, “did nothing for the team conditioning. They were in serious liver training.”
With our national game played out in the hyper serious world of professionalism, it is comforting to look back to simpler times when hockey was closer to community, and was played for love and glory by amateurs. One hundred years ago, before the Stanley Cup was not the captive of the National Hockey League, any Canadian team with some success at the senior level challenge the current champs.
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“Send me better men to deal with, and I will be a better man.”
Sir John A. Macdonald was not the last prime minister who had to put scandal behind him to win an election.
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Corvettes were seaworthy but unpleasant. Their rounded bottom made them bobble like a cork.
To a casual observer, the key battles of World War II were fought on land. Normandy, Stalingrad, El Alamein and others come to mind. Yet many historians believe that the key to the Allied victory was the war at sea, in particular the Battle of the Atlantic.
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Soldiers rounding up terrified civilians, expelling them from their land, burning their homes and crops – it sounds like a 20th century nightmare in one of the world’s trouble spots, but it describes a scene from Canada's early history, the Deportation of the Acadians.
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“Dieppe was a tragedy, not a failure.”
At 0523 hours, August 19, 1942, Captain Denis Whitaker and the men of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry listened as the hull of their flat-bottomed landing craft grated on the stone shingle of the broad beach fronting the French town of Dieppe.
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