2020 commemorated the 300th anniversary of French presence on Prince Edward Island. Like much of North America, the Canadian Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island were highly contested...
Prepare for tricks, treats, and time travel! In honor of Halloween, we’re traveling back to the mid-seventeenth century to investigate a case of demonic possession and the practice of exorcism in New France. Mairi Cowan, an Associate Professor of...
2020 commemorates the 300th anniversary of French presence on Prince Edward Island. Like much of North America, the Canadian Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, and Prince Edward Island were highly contested...
Polygamy is not a practice that often comes to mind when we think about early America. But it turns out, polygamy was a ubiquitous practice among different groups of early Americans living in 17th and 18th-century North America. Sarah Pearsall, a...
Did Canada almost join the American Revolution? Bruno Paul Stenson, a historian and musicologist with the Château de Ramezay historic site in Montréal, joins us to discuss how the American Revolution played out in Canada. This episode originally...
Before the English settled in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 or the Dutch settled near Albany, New York in 1615, a group of French-speaking, Catholic settlers established a settlement in Nova Scotia in 1605. By 1755, nearly 15,000 Acadians lived in...
When we think about early American slavery, our minds evoke images of plantations where enslaved men and women were forced to labor in agricultural fields and inside the homes of wealthy Americans. These images depict the practice of chattel...
How do you build colonies without women? Most of the colonial adventurers from England and France who set out for Jamestown, New France, and colonial Louisiana were men. But how do you build and sustain societies and spread European culture—in...
Colonial America comprised many different cultural and political worlds. Most colonial Americans inhabited just one world, but today, we’re going to explore the life of a woman who lived in THREE colonial American worlds: Frontier New England...
In the Treaty of Paris, 1783, Great Britain offered the new United States generous terms that included lands in between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. Why did the biggest empire with the greatest army and navy concede so much...