10 quirky things to know about the Don Valley
Originally posted by Chris Bateman on BlogTO Toronto has a powerful love/hate relationship with the Don River. At once prized for its unspoilt scenery, the mighty river and its impressive valley have been extensively manhandled over the last 200 years,…
How the Don River Defined Toronto
By Mark Brosens. Originally published on The Inside Agenda Blog, 14 August 2014 The Don River is easy to dismiss as a muddy stream surrounded by some of Toronto’s busiest roads. But a new book is coming out that argues…
From the Archives to the Bee Yard
One of the reasons I chose to locate my postdoctoral research on the environmental history of beekeeping at the University of Guelph was the presence of reknown honeybee researchers Ernesto Guzman and Gard Otis, and the existence of the Honey…
Thinking with Bees
Bees have received a lot of attention over the last five years. You could say they’ve become media darlings, of sorts. The “disappearance” of 30 billion honeybees—one quarter of the population in the northern hemisphere—from hives in North America and…
Writing the Environmental History of Toronto’s Don Valley Parkway
When I first began to explore the history of Toronto’s Don River Valley five years ago, the story of the major highway that runs through the valley failed to capture my imagination. I was interested in the effects of highway…
On Oral History and the Presence of the Past
When I first moved to Toronto from British Columbia ten years ago, I took up a job with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario, coordinating an oral history project on the Scarborough community of Agincourt. Conducted in partnership with the…
Fruitful Collaborations: Libraries as Partners in Historical Research
Part of my doctoral research on the social and environmental history of Toronto’s Don River Valley involved making sense of the area’s industrial past. Given the volatile nature of nineteenth-century industry—some companies opening and closing again in short succession, others…
History from the Urban Fringe
Toronto’s Lower Don River slides unceremoniously along the eastern limits of the old city core, its muddied, placid channel host to the scattered wreckage of twenty-first-century urban living: plastic bags snagged at intervals along its length; a rusting shopping cart…
On Teaching History to Retirees
Part of the purpose of Teaching the Past: A Blog About Teaching History in Canada is to discuss experiences and strategies related to teaching history in diverse venues. In the fall of 2010, I was invited to teach a course on the…
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