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Two weekends ago, I enjoyed an afternoon at Toronto's Art Gallery of Ontario. One of the first works I saw on this visit were these two terracotta busts by one Hamilton Plantagenet MacCarthy. The one in the back is of Sir Isaac Brock, an acting Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada who died in an...

A couple of weeks ago, Tristan Hopper's National Post article "The grandiose — but failed — 1960s plan by an Ontario war hero to settle a ‘second Canada’ below the Arctic" caught my attention. Richard Rohmer had a very ambitious plan for the settlement of the Canadian Shield. If things had gone...

The Irish Potato Famine, more recent students of history have begun to realize, was but a facet of a broader European disaster hitting societies across Europe with peasantries dependent on the cultivation of the potato. Belgium seems to have been the worst hit per capita, with upwards of fifty...

I do think that getting outright support in France for the creation of a unified Germany is unlikely. French support for Italian unification was conditional enough, Napoleon III probably being surprised by the extent to which his support for a reordered pro-French Italian landscape was outpaced...

Last month, as part of Toronto queer cultural event Nuit Rose, I attended a theatrical retelling of the story of learned of the existence of Les Mouches Fantastiques, a zine published in Montréal between 1918 and 1920 that was about as out and proud as a zine could be at that time. Daily Xtra's...

I did go to Charlottetown's Province House on my recent visit back to Prince Edward Island, but I did not go inside. I could not. The entire building has been closed down indefinitely for much needed repairs, the provincial legislature adjourning for the duration to the Coles Building to the...

At the end of Alan Sheridan's Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth, the author speculates on what is to come from Michel Foucault. The author and philosopher is still a relatively young man, and he has explicitly stated that he has many more volumes to produce. What will he explore next...

The above photo was taken of a video monitor at the Toronto Railway Museum during my Doors Open visit, poised on a display in front of the Nova Scotia Pullman car. It preserves a scene from 0:23 of Historica Canada's Halifax Explosion Heritage Minute, when train dispatcher Vince Coleman</u></a>...

On Sunday, doing my part to enjoy Ontario's Doors Open, I visited Fort York. It was a beautiful afternoon to see the fort, nestled in what is now one of Toronto's many new condo districts close to the shore of Lake Ontario. Besides being a reconstruction of a British military outpost, Fort York...

Yesterday evening, I ended a day with a friend with Toronto with Lalibela Ethiopian Restaurant, a long-established Ethiopian restaurant on Bloor Street West. We split one of their $C 25 platters, served on a round sheet of injera bread, and pronounced ourselves quite satisfied. Ethiopian...

Comics and graphic novels make up one of my weaknesses, and one of my particular weaknesses is the Marvel graphic novel Wolverine: Enemy of the State. This is not because I think it good, but rather because I think it a great example of camp in the Susan Sontag sense. (Her points 19, 33, and 37...

Over at my blog, I write about the profound flaws in Jared Diamond's theory of Easter Island as a casualty of indigenous ecocide. The Rapa Nui were apparently managing their island quite well, dealing with ecological catastophes not of their own making and sustaining a highly complex and...

Wendell Wilkie buttons of Jane Jacobs at @UrbanspaceTO by Randy McDonald, on Flickr I just found out, via my visit to the excellent Jane at Home exhibition in Toronto's Urbanspace Gallery, that Jane Jacobs had supported Wendell Wilkie's bid for the American presidency in 1940. 24 at the time...

(Originally blogged here.) In February 2013, in noting the arguments of Jonathan Last about migration, I noted that policy on migration--in sending countries and in receiving countries--was important in directing flows. The example I used was that of post-2004 Polish migration to the United...

Memory of the Queen Street subway #toronto #westqueenwest #queenstreetwest #queenstreet #subway #alternatehistory by Randy McDonald, on Flickr The commemorative monument at the centre of the photo, erected on Queen just east of Dufferin dedicated to the "Queen Street Subway" with a date of...

(This was originally a blog post of mine, made here.) Last December, I wrote a short blog post about the latest study on the Greenland climate during the Norse era, suggesting that the temperature wasn't that much warmer than now. This, as was noted at the time, had substantial implications...

Waiting at the Sacré-Cœur #toronto #cabbagetown #carltonstreet #church #paroissedusacrecoeur #paroissedusacrécoeur by Randy McDonald, on Flickr This church at 381 Sherbourne Street is the home base of the Paroisse du Sacré-Cœur, a Roman Catholic congregation founded in 1889 that in the...

I just posted a blog post about the problems with some Brexit proponents in the United Kingdom for a liberalized migration zone including only the ... right Commonwealth countries. (Why include New Zealand and not Jamaica, you might wonder?) The Commonwealth cannot a substitute for the...

(This is adapted from a blog post of mine, "Some thoughts on the origins of low fertility in Germany in reactions to totalitarianism".) In Europe, northern and western European countries have relatively high levels of completed fertility, higher than those of southern and eastern European...

The other day, I posted this screenshot from the Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual on Instagram. This map of the Milky Way Galaxy is one of many images in that book, of galactic maps and starship schematics and flags of the Federation's five founding member states and even guides on...