A few months ago, I visited Ottawa and went on a guided tour of Centre Block (which is one of our Parliament buildings, for those unfamiliar). It was very interesting to see all of it, but my favourite was the Library of Parliament. There were many gasps from my group when…
I've been reading a lot of historical fiction lately. I've been enjoying it, returning to it regularly, with the same urgency I often feel about certain history and biography books I read. I am indeed an adult who deals with her problems, but at the same time, I'm also…
Memorial plaques for three of the family members of Plum Johnson, author of the memoir They Left us Everything (check it out at amazon.ca or amazon.com), which I mentioned in a recent entry. I would hesitate to call this "history," but seeing these plaques (I had forgotten they were there, so…
My husband bought the Hark, a Vagrant! book recently and insisted I read it too. I'm so glad he did. Not only is it great to read funny things from someone who is also mystified by the "sex sells history" trend (and shares my love of early political cartoons), it's fun…
"Well now, history is not just the tale of the victors," he said, "It's the tale of the privileged. The men in the mud of the battlefield didn't leave much of a story behind, and the stories they did tell were mostly ignored or forgotten." - A Desperate Fortune, Susanna Kearsley.…
Last month, my husband and I spent a couple of weeks visiting family in Finland and Germany. The historical site we were both most excited to see was Turku Castle, in southwest Finland. Turku was the capital of Finland until 1812, when Alexander I, thinking Turku was a little too close to…
Many buildings outside London had thatched roofs of reed or straw, and in January 1784 Woodforde noted: 'I rejoiced much this morning on shooting an old wood-pecker, which had teised [teased] me a long time in pulling out the reed from my house. He had been often shot at by…
We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things . . . but such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so…
Last year, I found a copy of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management in a secondhand book store, and snapped it up eagerly. It isn't obvious when it was printed. A previous owner wrote her name and the year 1944, but certain things made me believe this was already a few years old when…
This 1945 penny was in my change from the grocery store in 2010, and it's one of my most prized possessions. I’m not really a monarchist, but I like to imagine the way the world was when this coin was new. In the grander scheme of history, it's very recent,…
