Upper Canada

Аннотация. Статья посвящена изучению влияния англо-американской войны 1812 г. на социально-политические процессы в Канаде. Основное внимание уделяется прежде малоизученным аспектам конфликта, связанным с его восприятием общественно-политическими элитами и широкими слоями населения, воздействием на межэтнические отношения в Британской Северной Америке, ролью в становлении политической системы колонии. На основе архивных материалов в работе предпринята попытка по-новому взглянуть на ряд устоявшихся историографических концепций.
Abstract. The article studies the influence of the Anglo-American war of 1812 on the socio-political processes in Canada. Main attention is paid to the little-studied aspects of the conflict: its perception by the elites and population, the impact of war on ethnic relations in British North America, the role of the conflict in the development of the political system of the colony. On the basis of archival materials author tried to take a fresh look at a some historiographical concepts.

During the excavation of the Loyalist-period Butler Homestead site in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario a small cache of glass condiment bottles was discovered in a space identified as a larder or pantry. The form of the bottles suggests that they once contained dry mustard powder, the bottles of which are usually recovered from military sites when found in Canada. This paper examines the cultural history of mustard as a food and medicine, its role in eighteenth-century British cookery and agriculture, and demonstrates how this specific form of glass container tied a Loyalist household to local and international trade networks in British North America and England.

Why does Ontario’s Law Society cling to an arcane tradition of insisting its name must remain as the Law Society of Upper Canada?  It’s 2017. As a lawyer, I am required to pay membership fees to an organization whose title includes the name “Upper Canada.” However, the fact it is the regulatory body for lawyers who live in northern areas of the province that never were part of the territory of Upper Canada is truly bizarre.  In 2012, there was a motion to the LSUC’s May 2012 annual general meeting drafted by lawyer Tom Vincent and supported by 10 other signatories to update the law society’s name to the “Ontario Law Society.”  Sadly, this effort failed.

Upper Canada was formed in 1797 and ceased to exist as a political entity in 1841, a time period that oversaw mass appropriation of indigenous land, largely through bloodshed. The Province of Upper Canada was created by the United Kingdom to govern the central third of British North America (as it then was called) and to accommodate Loyalist refugees of the United States after the American Revolution.  It included all of modern-day Southern Ontario and all those areas of Northern Ontario that had formed part of New France, essentially the watersheds of the Ottawa River and Lakes Huron and Superior. The “Upper” prefix in Upper Canada reflected the territory’s geographic position being closer to the headwaters of the Saint Lawrence River than that of Lower Canada (or present-day Quebec) to the northeast, but Upper Canada excluded any lands within the watershed of Hudson Bay.
As a lawyer who has worked with and advocated on behalf of indigenous peoples in Ontario, I am ashamed that the regulatory body governing lawyers remains strongly associated by virtue of its title with a very dark period in Ontario’s history.

When Egerton Ryerson, Chief Superintendent of Education and Upper Canada’s most famous Methodist preacher, wrote to defend a clause in the 1846 Common School Act banning the use of American textbooks, he pulled out all the stops. Not only were such books “anti-British, in every sense of the word,” they were a threat to the colony’s very survival. “[I]n precisely those parts of Upper Canada where the United States School Books had been used most extensively,” he railed, “there the spirit of insurrection in 1837 and 1838, was most prevalent.” While Ryerson thundered in public, however, his fellow preachers quietly went about their usual business of filling the shelves of the colony’s burgeoning Sunday school libraries with books imported in bulk from the United States. Although historians have tended to take Ryerson’s public censure of American schoolbooks at face value, this paper argues that his views were more complicated and can only be fully understood in the context of Methodist efforts to establish Sunday school libraries across the colony in the preceding decades. More than just early sites for the promotion of basic literacy and sectarianism, these denominational libraries functioned as vibrant transnational spaces where Canadian Methodists developed an experienced and complex understanding of a wider North American market for schoolbooks and juvenile literature. Although at times constrained by political necessity, Ryerson soon recuperated this broader understanding of the market to develop policies in the early 1850s that not only eschewed his earlier anti-American rhetoric, but also led to the pervasive adoption of American schoolbooks in Upper Canada’s emergent common school and public libraries.

Canada's banks today are among the most stable in the world. But that wasn't always the case. The Bank of Upper Canada, founded in 1822 as a de facto creation of the Family Compact, collapsed 44 years later. My story looks at archival letters written at each end of this storied bank's life

On June 9, 2014, Maya Hirschman presented about the early history and settlement of London, Ontario, making use of historic paintings and illustrations of the region, maps, historical documents, and primary sources.  This presentation accompanied her talk, but is not the content of her talk.

This paper argues that the distribution of American Methodist periodicals throughout Upper Canada after the War of 1812 had a profound influence on the evolution of Methodist religious identity north of the border. While they helped to foster the denomination’s remarkable postwar recovery, these periodicals also served to reinvigorate languishing transnational ties binding Canadian and American Methodists together at a time when anti-Americanism was on the rise. As Canadians and Americans read about Methodism’s advances on both side of the border, and as Canadians patterned the growth of Sunday schools and other missionary activities on American models, the linkages uniting North American Methodists into a single imagined community of readers only strengthened. The sustained distribution of these periodicals also did much to prepare the ground for the later introduction of Canadian Methodism’s own denominational weekly, the Christian Guardian, in 1829.