The history of Chambly’s fort is as storied as the one at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. After all, they were part of the same defence system built by the French in the 17th century. A wooden fort was first built in 1665, the remnants of which can still be seen in the ground. Read more…
On September 20, 2021, the United Nations in New York organized a virtual event called SDG Moment. The UN Secretary General, President of the UN General Assembly, and other bigwigs delivered speeches about the importance of poverty reduction and how the pandemic stunted five years of progress. Then, Korean boy Read more…
If John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Clint Eastwood could be neighbours this would be the place. This national park is so stunning I cried as I was driving through the twisting valley road. The pictures are real and being present in the dry gorges and between colorful sandy mounds was Read more…
A member of staff at the Boréalis museum told me that Trois-Rivières used to be the “paper capital of the world” with their world’s largest paper factory in the 1950s. The factory was razed about a decade ago to make way for new apartment buildings and only the water filtration Read more…
Founded in 1697 and completed in 1715, the Ursuline monastery in Trois-Rivières is one of the few French-built buildings to survive the fire of 1908. Although it is now a museum, it is still a working monastery. There are no young women becoming nuns so the 40 last nuns are Read more…
The often overlooked history of indigenous peoples in North America and their exploitation by Europeans is still a contentious issue in Canada. As history museums are usually conservative, a safe way to explore indigenous cultures is by visiting UBC’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. They have a huge collection that Read more…
I’m stretching the Magog region to include Saint-Benoît-du-Lac where a Benedictine abbey lies. The monastery was founded in 1912 and the construction of the present stone structure began in 1939. The cheese factory was actually built a year before but didn’t serve its cheese to the public until 1943. The Read more…
A language is defined as a system of communication used by a particular nation or people group (Gessner 2017). There is no consensus on the over 100 definitions of culture by anthropologists, but it is widely accepted as “a web of meaning which human beings weave and in which are Read more…
Mostly known for its military history, Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu is the site of the first French fort in Canada. First built in 1666, Fort Saint-Jean has been continuously occupied from 1748 to the present day, albeit changing hands several times. The second fort was built in 1748 and destroyed by the French Read more…
William Lyon Mackenzie King kept a daily diary totalling about 30,000 pages from 1893 to 1950, almost all of it is available online on the Library and Archives Canada digital library. He wrote much of his diary at Kingsmere near Gatineau, an estate that comprised of three parts. Kingswood was Read more…