History of Canadian-American Relations

Archaeological test excavations of "Spafford's Grant" in 1977 by the University of Toledo revealed the historic remains and features of a frontier, log farm-house of the Early American Republic destroyed during the War of 1812. The house and farm was owned by Amos Spafford and Family, the second U.S. port collector and inspector of the revenue of Port Miami from 1810 to 1830. The farm was destroyed, along with other family farms, when the British and Indians from Fort Malden, Canada, lead by Captain Peter Latouche Chambers and Shawnee chief Tecumseh, invaded the settlement in August 1812 after the fall of Detroit. Spafford and family returned after the war in 1814 to rebuild their house and farm with other settlers.

This article presents a transnational approach asking readers to re-think what is at stake in the ghostly Canadian presence in Kerouac’s “American continent,” in _On the Road_ through Quebecois revisions of the text that illuminate the multiple, competing histories that make up the “America” Kerouac elegizes, as well as the landscape he omits.

This paper deals with two specific celebrations: Canada's National Ukrainian Festival (Dauphin, Manitoba, documented 1994) and the North Dakota Ukrainian Festival (Dickinson, 1998). Both festivals are based on the prairies in western North America. Both are in local Ukrainian communities which started some hundred years ago as rural agricultural settlements. My research method was primarily ethnographic, making video, photographic, and audio recordings in both cases, interviewing organizers and participants, viewing diplays, chatting, tasting the food, and partaking in the festival life.  The structural components of the two festivals were similar, and the thematic content of the program items consistently featured the same topics: pioneer heritage, food, performing arts, the church, souvenirs, and crafts. Both festivals share a posture of openness, celebrating and presenting Ukrainian culture to insiders and ousiders alike.  Observations support those of other researchers of North American festival culture, who argue that festival content tends to reflect and interpret local culture. The border between Canada and the U.S. at the 49th parallel was established several decades prior to the immigrants' arrival, though the most important differences between the Dauphin and Dickinson festivals are not their locations in separate countries. Other factors are more important: the size of the community, its relative density as a percentage of the overall population, economic status, trends in North American popular culture, local tradition, and the personality and motivations of key individual organizers.  Culturally speaking, if not historically, one can argue that the North Dakota Ukrainian community is a southern extension of the larger and denser Ukrainian communities in the nearby Canadian prairie provinces. With regards to Ukrainian festival culture, that boundary has clearly been a permeable one.

Abstract for One Step over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the Northern American Wests, Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus, Eds., Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2008

This eclectic and carefully organized range of essays—from women’s history and settler societies to colonialism and borderlands studies—is the first collection of comparative and transnational work on women in the Canadian and U.S. Wests. It explores, expands, and advances the aspects of women's history that cross national borders. Out of the talks presented at the 2002 “Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History,” Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus have edited a foundational text with a wide, inclusive perspective on our western past.

This analysis examines the disharmony in American–Canadian relations in the period from 2001 to 2005. Canada and the United States co-operated in the early days after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, managing their mutual border and fighting the war in Afghanistan. Yet they soon came into conflict over American plans to invade Iraq and create a ballistic missile defence (BMD) system for North America. President George W. Bush and Paul Cellucci, his ambassador in Ottawa, were insensitive to Canadian concerns. Canadian leaders sent mixed messages to Washington, hinting that they would support a war in Iraq and participate in the BMD system, but ultimately deciding against each. The article examines the limitations of the tolerant ally interpretation of the Canadian–American relationship and illuminates the role of leadership in the rupture that took place between the two countries.

The St. Lawrence seaway and power project, built between 1954 and 1959, was the product of a half century of twisted and tortuous negotiations. It is one of the largest transborder projects ever undertaken by two countries and one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century. The seaway runs 181.5 miles from Montreal to Lake Erie, including the Beauharnois and Welland canals, and features a continual minimum depth of 27 feet, four dams (two of which generate hydroelectricity, including the massive power dam bisecting the international border near Cornwall, Ontario), and 15 locks with a depth of 30 feet.

In the wake of the racial violence in the mid-2010s across the United States, several journalists, pointing to historic and contemporary discrimination against minorities in Canada, cautioned Canadians against being "smug about race." Highlighting the plight of indigenous peoples, one contributor to the country's leading newsmagazine went even further, declaring, "Canada's race problem? It's even worse than America's." Canadians have long been both keen observers of racial discrimination in the United States and prone to drawing self-congratulatory comparisons. To wit, the Canadian singersongwriter Neil Young's songs "Southern Man" (1970) and "Alabama" (1972) were sharply critical of southern bigotry, while in "American Woman" (1970), The Guess Who told their eponymous American target: "I don't need your ghetto scenes." As one member of the band recalled of the song's genesis, "We'd never seen ghettoes in Winnipeg before and suddenly we're in Savannah, Georgia, witnessing real poverty." Yet 1960s Canada did have its own "ghetto scenes," though many Canadians seemed willfully ignorant of this fact. As the Métis activist Howard Adams complained in 1969, white Canadians were "self-righteous, arrogant, and free from any social conscience with regard to racism." Two years later, J. Ashton Brathwaite, a Barbadian living in Canada, noted: "Contrary to widespread belief, Canadian society is polluted with the virus of racism-subtle racism." Canada, he added, should stand for "Cold Anti Niggers And Definitely American." 1 As this range of comments indicates, the United States looms large in Canadian understandings of racism, with many Canadians emphasizing a continental divide on race. Constance Backhouse has called this outlook an "ideology of racelessness," and this Canadian view has been intertwined with a national myth "that there is less racism here than Asa McKercher is an assistant professor of history at the Royal Military College of Canada. For their helpful comments and criticisms on early versions of this paper, my thanks to the anonymous reviewers, to the members of the Cambridge Faculty of History's American History Workshop, especially

Niagara Falls is one of the world’s most iconic natural features. Yet in many ways Niagara Falls is decidedly unnatural, for the United States and Canada physically manipulated this waterfall over the course of the twentieth century so that its waters could be diverted for hydropower production while still ostensibly retaining the cataract’s aesthetic beauty for tourism. While this appears contradictory, since the latter depends on ample amounts of water flowing over the Falls while the former requires water going around the Falls, experts believed that they could engineer a compromise and essentially fool the public. Following the 1950 Niagara River Diversion Treaty, the two North American nations constructed hydroelectric stations and remedial works (various engineering interventions including excavations, fills, reclamations, weirs, and dams) at Niagara Falls that allowed for the majority of the water volume to be diverted for power production. Moreover, the largest of the Niagara cataracts, the spectacular Horseshoe Falls, was reshaped in an effort to hide the fact that the majority of the Niagara River’s water volume was abstracted.

Nationalistic blinders and misunderstandings have regularly exaggerated differences between the two countries (or whatever we might call the northern half of the continent before the twentieth century). As I suggest below, Canadians in particular remain prisoners of these easy ruts. Time has not helped us become any more enlightened in our discussions of the United States.

Full text: http://activehistory.ca/2020/11/teaching-canada-u-s-relations-in-2020/

2011, Komisja Rzeki St. Croix 1796-1798 i początek pokojowego rozstrzygania sporów w stosunkach kanadyjsko-amerykańskich, [in:] Amerykomania. Księga jubileuszowa Profesora dra hab. Andrzeja Mani, tom II, (eds.) Włodzimierz Bernacki, Adam Walaszek, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, pp. 221-238.

Harold Innis was one of the most profound thinkers that Canada ever produced. Such was his influence on the field of communication that Marshall McLuhan once declared his own work was a mere footnote to Innis. But over the past sixty years scholars have had a hard time explaining his brilliance, in large measure because Innis' dense, elliptical writing style has hindered easy explication and interpretation. But behind the dense verbiage lies a profound philosophy of history. In Emergence and Empire, John Bonnett offers a fresh take on Innis' work by demonstrating that his purpose was to understand the impact of self-organizing, emergent change on economies and societies. Innis' interest in emergent change induced him to craft an original and bold philosophy of history informed by concepts as diverse as information, Kantian idealism, and business cycle theory. Bonnett provides a close reading of Innis' oeuvre that connects works of communication and economic history to present a fuller understanding of Innis' influences and influence. Emergence and Empire presents a portrait of an original and prescient thinker who anticipated the importance of developments such as information visualization and whose understanding of change is remarkably similar to that which is promoted by the science of complexity today.

This article reviews Joseph Jockel's classic study of bilateral Canadian–American defence arrangements during the early Cold War: No Boundaries Upstairs. It considers the political context in which Jockel wrote and highlights the bilateral experiences that contributed to his unique perspective. It also reviews Jockel's account and analysis of the evolution of Canadian–American continental defence cooperation from 1945 to 1958. Finally, this article describes the longevity of Jockel's analysis as well as how historians and political scientists continue to build on his research.

In The Fence and the Bridge: Geopolitics and Identity Along the Canada-US Border, Heather N. Nicol adds to growing analyses of the functioning and perception of borders by focusing on the historical development of the Canada-US border-security relationship, tracing it from the present post-9/11 era back into the preceding centuries. While the book does tend to assume Canada as a country subject to US dominance, thereby inhibiting consideration of the growing harmonisation of North American security policies, this a worthy contribution to studies into the contested meanings of borders in the specific context of US-Canadian relations.

2005, The Myth of the Undefended Border in Contemporary Canada, [in:] The Making of Canada: A European Perspective / La Construction du Canada: Une Perspective Europeenne. Proceedings of the 12th European Seminar for Graduate Students in Canadian Studies, Barcelona, 2003, (eds.) Quim Bonastra and Esther Mitjans, Brno: The Central European Association for Canadian Studies / Masaryk University, pp. 75-86.

... Temperatures during the winter night hover in the range -20" F. to -40" F., very seldom falling below -63" F. One seems to become conditioned to ... ally rise above zero, and the airstrips are still solidly frozen, making this the best time of the year to resupply the remote stations by air ...

In The Fence and the Bridge: Geopolitics and Identity Along the Canada-US Border, Heather N. Nicol adds to growing analyses of the functioning and perception of borders by focusing on the historical development of the Canada-US border-security relationship, tracing it from the present post-9/11 era back into the preceding centuries. While the book does tend to assume Canada as a country subject to US dominance, thereby inhibiting consideration of the growing harmonisation of North American security policies, Ivan Farias Pelcastre finds this a worthy contribution to studies into the contested meanings of borders in the specific context of US-Canadian relations.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, no solution to the problem of Canadian magazines could have found a consensus in the media or in the federal Cabinet, whether Conservative or Liberal. The governments of the day experienced great difficulty in formulating a policy on this issue because there was no consensus in Canada as a whole, or even within the Cabinet, over how to preserve and promote the country's culture, or over whether the state has a role to play in culture. The politicians also faced the challenge of proceeding in opposition to the commercial interests of the US.

The Joint Arctic Weather Stations (JAWS) were the first intentionally permanent state presence on Canada's arctic archipelago.  Recent geographic and historical scholarship focusing on arctic science has greatly increased our understanding of scientific culture and the challenges of arctic fieldwork.  In particular, this scholarship emphasizes the contemporary desire, and failure, to turn the arctic into a laboratory-like environment, where controlled experiments could be conducted systematically.

tists, however, held graduate degrees, and remained transient visitors at sites such as the JAWS.  Our research, including over 20 oral history interviews with JAWS veterans, combined with extensive archival research compels us to rethink and democratize the boundaries of Cold War scientific culture.  JAWS personnel remained in the arctic for a year or more at a time, creating a very different scientific culture.  While station personnel embraced scientific objectivity, understood the importance of sound methodology, and were often fascinated by the research of their guests, they were not trained scientists.  Instead, they were weather “observers” who, lacking university degrees, cultivated professionalism when collecting data to be sent south for analysis.  Moreover, station culture never assumed “laboratory” aspirations, and instead often adopted rugged and masculine qualities.  Long-term isolation from the south, especially during the dark season, created administrative, safety, and personal challenges for JAWS personnel.  Conversely, the spring and fall resupply season created buzzing activity that disrupted station routines.  Despite this very different scientific culture, the JAWS program collected decades of reliable meteorological data.

This article reviews Joseph Jockel’s classic study of bilateral Canadian–American defence arrangements during the early Cold War: No Boundaries Upstairs. It considers the pol- itical context in which Jockel wrote and highlights the bilateral experiences that con- tributed to his unique perspective. It also reviews Jockel’s account and analysis of the evolution of Canadian–American continental defence cooperation from 1945 to 1958. Finally, this article describes the longevity of Jockel’s analysis as well as how historians and political scientists continue to build on his research.

Historical and Archaeological investigations reveal a thirty-four year old archaeological cold case file that solves a two-hundred year old mystery about an early American frontier village destroyed during the War of 1812 by a British and Indian force from Upper Canada.