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From the archives

Dangerous Grounds

Coming soon to a democracy near you

The Collapse of Syria

The story of a nation’s unravelling, one neighbourhood at a time

Trompe Le Toil

The modern conundrum of overwork

Daniel Woolf

Daniel Woolf teaches history at Queen’s University and sits on the board of Historica Canada.

Articles by
Daniel Woolf

Premier Event

The life and times of John Norquay December 2024
Set squarely on York Avenue, a secondary thoroughfare running southwest to northeast through Winnipeg’s downtown, is a ten-storey modernist building constructed in the late 1950s. Designed by an Icelandic-immigrant architect and erected by one of the city’s Belgian-immigrant construction firms, it was for a decade the city’s tallest structure, used primarily as a home for government and administrative…

A Sum of Parts

Paying tribute to John English September 2023
The Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle once declared, “No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Oscar Wilde, on the other hand, believed that biography — having one’s peccadilloes and failings encased in amber —“lends to death a new terror.” More recently, the American novelist Thomas McGuane suggested that any future chronicler of his life ignore him altogether and concentrate on his…

From Dogmatic Slumbers

A history for our times December 2022
Half a century ago, the historian Carl Berger published The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. This was a remarkably fascinating foray into a rather fallow field, Canadian intellectual history. Since then, the field has become far more fertile, with more Canadianists identifying as intellectual historians and with more Canadian scholarship showing an awareness of the European…