John Geddes at MacLean's interviews a colleague of Ken Taylor, the Canadian diplomat who in revolutionary Iran helped hide six Americans.

On news of the death of Ken Taylor, at 81, I called Colin Robertson, another former Canadian diplomat, who served under Taylor in the early 1980s in New York, soon after Taylor became a hero for his role in ( Read more... )

Late last month, Spacing Toronto's Adam Bunch wrote a nice biography of John Rolph, an aspiring radical politician in pre-1837 Upper Canada who for a time looked like he might become the leader of a Canadian republic. (This failed, needless to say.)

There’s a small town on the very western edge of England, not far from the River Severn, which ( Read more... )

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling shares photographs of the Euromaidan protests in Kiev.
• BlogTO notes that Toronto in the 1970s and even after was actually pretty dirty, with soot covering all kinds of iconic buildings.
• The Burgh Diaspora's Jim Russell argues that higher education linked to migration is going to give the United States a key ( Read more... )

The 1848 revolutions of Europe beginning in France are the subject of Daniel Little's post. The transnational revolution which began in France had lofty ideals, but they were not realized, not even in France which (as suggested by Roger Price in his Documents on the French Revolution of 1848) may have enjoyed a certain prosperity but was still more ( Read more... )

• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton wonders why fictional names for an independent western Canada are so lame.
• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait goes over the evidence about the supposed massive distant gas giant Tyche in our system, pointing out that there are suggestive theories but no proofs, and no, this has nothing to do with the Sumerians.
• blogTO ( Read more... )

Jonathan Edelstein on the Nepalese revolution.