This quarter at Canada's History: Olympics, Charter, drag balls, lost Manitoba and more

Canada's History magazine, six issues a year since beyond living memory, recently switched to a quarterly format.  I might have hoped it would go monthly instead.  But the quarterly format has its advantages, I admit. More space, a greater diversity of stories for starters. 

Fall 2026 looks good.  I'm happy to say one of the feature stories is mine.  The Charter's Course started as a report on how the Hudson's Bay Company's 1670 Charter, a unique piece of 17th century calligraphy, was saved from the commercial auction-market hammer and finally found its proper place in the collection of a great Canadian public museum.  

With the presence of pungent comments from Grand Chief Phil Fontaine and former GG Edward Schreyer, it grew into something more: themes of tyranny and resistance, and the fundamental question of who owns Canada and who should. You can read it right here: The HBC Charter Comes Home - Canada's History

The issue also has a substantial section for the fiftieth anniversary of the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games, and it's not just anniversary commemoration: there's good tough pieces on "the worst case of artistic censorship in the country's history" by Taylor Noakes, and and interview with Richard Pound, not only an Olympics competitor but also Canada's most influential Olympic Committee player.

Drag balls in 1950s Toronto -- a new field for Canada's History, I think, and well tendedby Christine Sismondo.

And, as they say, much more.  If you subscribed like you should you would already have it.

CH Cover art: Ken Danby.

A book so interesting

Looking for summer reading by the lake while you think about the Indigenous and HBC Fur Traders sweating as they navigated the back country in their canoes and worked on the maps they made as they went along?

McGill-Queen's Press is currently pushing an award-winning history of HBC map-making by the late Queen's University geographer Richard Ruggles. 

This is what MQUP has to say:

Maps were an essential tool for the Hudson's Bay Company and during the two centuries before Confederation the Company became the main mapping agency in British North America for the immense territory extending from Ungava Bay to the Pacific Ocean.

In A Country So Interesting Richard Ruggles describes and analyses the mapping activities of more than 160 Company servants and surveyors as well as the contributions of more than 50 Indians and Inuit who drew sketches and provided original configurations. Also included are annotated catalogues of all the maps known to have been produced by the Hudson's Bay Company and sixty-six reproductions of the most important maps and sketches.

The Hudson's Bay Company was responsible for the largest collection in North America of manuscript charts and maps related to the fur trade and Ruggles has produced the first and most comprehensive study of this unique and rich body of material.

But before you order it, read and vote for Chris's 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal. Or vote and read later.