My new favourite short film, courtesy of an awesome blog post, The 10 Best Films of the 1890s: 

Click to view

“The X-Ray Fiend” (1897)
X-rays were discovered in 1895, and became a source of public fascination in editorial cartoons and scientific exhibitions. (Scientific American ran an article in 1896 inviting people to make their X-rays at home with a simple ( Read more... )

My apartment has a poltergeist. We call him Steve.

Three light bulbs burnt out in my first week and a half here in this apartment. No big deal, I thought, after the first one. The apartment has been empty for at least three months, right, so the bulbs are just reacting to the initial shock of having electricity running through them again. (I reason ( Read more... )

 Happy belated Dominion Day! (AKA Canada Day) We celebrated it at work in 1846 by... toasting to the Queen! (Victoria, that is.) Denying that the Canadiens of the St. Lawrence river valley will ever be autonomous! Emphasizing how awesome the Hudson`s Bay Company was as a government!

Anyway, in honour of Dominion Day and because I just feel like it, ( Read more... )

The one person that almost everyone remembers from Western Canadian or Métis history - if they remember anyone at all - is Louis Riel. For more information about him, see this awesome Canadian Encyclopedia Online article. For the purposes of this post, all you have to know is that he was a francophone Métis political and religious leader involved ( Read more... )

Yeah, so my last post was a bit short (although it had a nifty video!) and I realize that only a handful of my friends list can read it, so I thought that I'd write an English-language update with extra information ( Read more... )

 I actually spent a ridiculous amount of time today working on my History of Translation paper. I'm planning on writing about Métis translators and the numbered treaties in the 1870s.

( Quick blurb about the Métis for those not in the know... Because everyone should be in the know about the awesomeness of the Métis. )

 I'm not sure if I mentioned it anywhere yet - I'm sure if I did I didn't talk about it in detail - but on Wednesday I got to be a part of the short film they're making at Fort Edmonton. <3

For some information on the Capitol Theatre project, see here. Long story short: they're building a new theatre on 1920s street at the living history museum, ( Read more... )

 Okay guys, so some of you may be aware that I have a fascination with medical history, especially that of the nineteenth century, right? That's what I'm writing my honour's thesis on?

Well, a friend of mine just linked me to what looks like a fascinating website run by the British National Archives. Take a look!

In short, they're: "journals and ( Read more... )

Man, reading stuff from the 1830s has really improved my vocabulary. I've been reading things like the 1839 "Report on Indian Affairs" by J.B.Macaulay. (According to our prof., this will make us forty people join a group of about maybe forty other living people in the entire world who have ever actually bothered to read this 89 page document in ( Read more... )

 
Let me tell you of medicine in the American Civil War... and interesting things hiding about at the University of Alberta.

( Read more... )