The Dominion of Canada might have evolved in a somewhat less British imperial direction over the last three decades of the 19th century, if French Canada had discovered some worthy successor to George-Étienne Cartier. The closest approximation was probably Hector-Louis Langevin, after whom the Ottawa building (“Block”) that houses the 21st century Prime Minister’s Office […]

In the early 21st century it is not easy to think constructively about the now largely vanished first self-governing British dominion of Canada. The northern North American universe from the late 1860s to the early 1960s is both too remote yet still too close at hand. Then there is the late historian Ramsay Cook’s quip […]

Political deadlock in the United Province of Canada probably was a big enough cause of the wider confederation of British North American provinces, for the 2.5 million people who were living in the United Province by the early 1860s. It meant next to nothing, however, for the 583,000 people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick […]

In the early 21st century the loyal Canadian Pamela Anderson told a querulous talk show host on US TV that Canada is “more European” than the United States. In the middle of the 19th century you could see variations on this theme in the British North American triumph of responsible government (or early parliamentary democracy) […]

The establishment of several regional political cultures of united empire loyalism was one thing going on in the second British North America during the first half of the 19th century. Something of this old imperial and monarchist ideology still has traction in some parts of Canada today. Yet it is no longer at any centre […]

On the world wide web today the Wikipedia entry for “United Empire Loyalist” declares that “Loyalists settled in what was initially Quebec … and modern-day Ontario … and in Nova Scotia (including modern-day New Brunswick). Their arrival marked the beginning of a predominantly English-speaking population in the future Canada west and east of the Quebec […]

Just seven days after Anthony Henday set out on his summer explorations in the far north, a British American force from Virginia was defeated by a rival Canadian, French, and Indian alliance, at a marshy clearing in what is now western Pennsylvania called Great Meadows. The defeated force was led by the 22-year-old, six-foot-two-inch Lieutenant […]

Canadian history would be easier to digest if its main story-line was just that the French and Indians began the modern country in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries, and then the British monarchy and its rising global empire took it over at the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham, as […]

If you place a large map of North America on a table, and then turn it so that the Gulf of St. Lawrence is your central point of vision, your eye can easily move south and west, traveling the St. Lawrence River to the lower Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, all the way down […]

Modern Canada begins with contact between North American Indigenous peoples and seaborne Europeans in the 16th century. (There was earlier contact of this sort, more than a half century before the 1066 Norman Conquest in England — as described by Plate 16 in the 1987 first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada, on “Norse […]