This piece was originally posted to THEN/HiER’s blog ‘Teaching the Past‘
This month Kate Zankowicz, the editor of Teaching the Past, has asked all of the blog’s regular contributors to write about learning from objects and collections. Over the past week I debated what I could contribute to this topic. I thought about drawing attention to Ian Mosby’s wonderful piece on ActiveHistory.ca about reading cookbooks as life stories, where he hints at using the cookbook as both text and artifact. I then considered sharing my most memorable experience with an artifact – if that’s the proper term – when I came across the finger nails, skin and hair from Alexander Taché, the first archbishop of Manitoba, in an otherwise non-descript box of documents in a Quebec archive. But then, as I prepared for a class this week on Aboriginal responses to the arrival of Europeans, which draws heavily on the work of archaeologists, I realized that it might be helpful to use this post as an opportunity to consolidate and share some of the resources and collections that I have found useful in teaching early-Canadian history. Continue reading “Teaching Early-Canadian History with Objects and Collections”
Thomas Peace 