British North American Research Articles

God’s Garden: Nature, Order, and the Presbyterian Conception of the British North American “Wilderness”

Evocations of the natural world featured prominently within British North American Presbyterianism between the late eighteenth century, which witnessed an influx of Presbyterians into what became the Dominion of Canada, and the mid-nineteenth century, which witnessed patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and technological sophistication through which human beings attained unprecedented control over vast swathes of territory. Influenced by an ancient tradition deeply ingrained in Western culture, Presbyterians saw the undomesticated environment, or wilderness, as a formidable physical reality that needed to be wrestled into submission. They also saw it, however, as a metaphorical wasteland whose abject sinfulness mirrored humanity’s fallen state. For all their concerns about the iniquity that purportedly pervaded untamed nature, Presbyterians felt that the forbidding wilderness could be transformed into a benign garden through the vigorous promotion of Christianity among both settlers and Indigenous peoples alike. Their fondness for natural environments that had supposedly been imbued with holiness demonstrates that the Presbyterians’ hostility toward what they perceived as the wilderness did not render them averse to nature, per se. Members of the denomination used stereotypically feminine language in referring to natural environments that had seemingly been redeemed and were no longer regarded as ominous. Moreover, they interpreted patterns of material improvement—as exhibited, for instance, in the emergence of fruitful farms and bustling towns—as the inevitable corollary to the propagation of unalloyed piety in backwoods settings. Presbyterian efforts to Christianize undomesticated environments found expression in a thoroughgoing Calvinism and an emphasis on distinctive ecclesiastical traditions known as communion festivals, which served to differentiate the denomination from other Protestant groups. Ultimately, an investigation of Presbyterian attitudes toward the wilderness reveals that religious impulses contributed to human efforts to subjugate nature while environmental phenomena galvanized Christian evangelism.

THE COMMITMENTS OF DEMOCRACY

It underplays the significance of James Kloppenberg's monumentally ambitious and massively learned Toward Democracy to call it a big book—though at seven hundred pages of text, a hundred pages of notes and another five hundred pages of additional endnotes online it is surely that. It is, in voice and subject, several books in one. The first is a sweeping narrative account of the struggles for self-rule in England, the United States, and France from the seventeenth century through the middle third of the nineteenth century. The great revolutions stand at this history's center—the Puritan Revolution of the 1640s, the British North Americans’ revolt against monarchy and their construction of an enduring kingless polity in the 1770s and 1780s, and the revolutionary upheaval in France in the years after 1789—their origins, struggles, and dramas etched with a skilled narrative historian's hand.

Women’s rights and minorities’ rights in Canada. The challenges of intersectionality in Supreme Court jurisprudence

Abstract After a discussion of the impact of the principle of equality, entrenched in the Charters approved in Canada since the 1867 British North American Act, this essay then focuses on the related Supreme Court’s adjudications. A brief analysis of the case-law concerning gender equality is followed by the discussion of cases of Aboriginal and Muslim women with the aim of assessing whether intersectionality represents for these groups of women a source of double discrimination. Brief concluding remarks discuss the challenges deriving from the different options for accommodating the principle of equality with cultural rights.

Steam Writing in the Urli Daiz: William Orr, the Canadian Phonetic Pioneer, and the Cause of Phonographic Reform (pp 57-92)

In the early 1850s, a young and reform-minded phonographer named William Orr , based in Oshawa C.W., devised an ambitious plan to promote phonography and reformed spelling throughout Canada West and the British North American colonies. A promoter of Pitman shorthand, the editor and publisher of the journal the Canadian Phonetic Pioneer (1859-1861), and in all probability the country's first phonotypographer, Orr was considered in his own day to be a "fonetic pioneer" and even today can be considered an innovator in the fields of media and communications. This essay reconstructs the life and work of William Orr and the publishing history of the Canadian Phonetic Pioner, traces his involvement in the politics of the international phonographic community, and looks at related mid-century efforts to promote the "art phonographic" (through platform demonstrations, new associations, and Mechanics' Institute classes). "Spelling reform" is placed here, as it was for its practitioners, in the context of other mid-century social reform movements.

Legislaturas revolucionarias: El caso neogranadino (1811-1816)

In contrast to the British North American colonies, the Spanish ones lacked any form of legislative bodies. As a consequence, at the onset of their revolutions in about 1810, their leaders were utterly lacking in parliamentary experience. In the light of this, it can be said that one of the most relevant innovations brought about by independence in Spanish America was the onset of the legislative branch of political power. However, the composition and operation of the earliest among those collegiate powers remains fundamentally unknown to this day. I seek to amend this by recourse to the Neogranadino case and, particularly, the provincial State of Antioquia, whose six successive legislatures are here studied in terms of their member composition and legislative activity.

Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec by Richard A. Jarrell

Reviewed by: Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec by Richard A. Jarrell Anthony Di Mascio Richard A. Jarrell. Educating the Neglected Majority: The Struggle for Agricultural and Technical Education in Nineteenth-Century Ontario and Quebec (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2016) Educating the Neglected Majority is the late Richard A. Jarrell's study of the movement for agricultural and technical education in 19th-century Ontario and Québec. Led by ambitious educational reformers – a group which included legislators, journalists, manufacturers, and philanthropists – Upper and Lower Canada (later Ontario and Québec) took part in the earliest attempts in the North Atlantic world to institute agricultural and technical instruction for the working class. Jarrell was a professor in the Faculty of Science at York University before his death in 2013. A prolific researcher and writer on the history of Canadian science and technology, often with a particular focus on science and technical education, Jarrell's background situates him well to offer the most comprehensive study of its kind to date. Jarrell's analysis is divided into two parts. The first part considers the shape and form of agricultural and technical education in pre-Confederation Canada. Through an analysis of the agricultural press, the minutes of nascent agricultural societies, provincial exhibitions, and an insightful reading of surviving government records, Jarrell demonstrates that the prime movers and shakers in Canadian educational politics were ahead of their time in the promotion of agricultural education in Upper and Lower Canada, and even made efforts to establish agricultural colleges. Nevertheless, convincing the farmer that sending a child away for such an education was worth the effort was another matter still. The few private agricultural schools that did spring up before Confederation tended to attract few students and funds, and died shortly after their founding. Despite interest from educational leaders such as Jean-Baptist Meilleur and Egerton Ryerson, "simply building up the common-school systems in Canadas East and West took all the available energy and money." (63) Universities did not fill the void in the early years, and tended to focus on liberal education intended to prepare students for other careers. Pre-Confederation efforts in technical education were led mainly by supporters of informal mechanics' institutes. From its beginnings in England in 1823, the movement spread quickly throughout the British North American colonies, with the Montréal Mechanics' Institution firmly in place by 1828. The Rebellion of 1837–1838 slowed the movement down, but new mechanics' institutes, particularly in Canada West, began to appear in the 1840s. While libraries were their main attraction, they also served an array of purposes, from better training and education to organized social activities. Jerrell shows us that mechanics' institutes served a vast population, including not only those in the manual trades but also people from commerce, education, a variety of professions, and many of Upper and Lower Canada's political elite. The "Victorian middle class," the author reminds us, "rarely conceived of leisure time in a frivolous way but rather believed it must be constructive and uplifting." (71) The development of more formal technical education in pre-Confederation Canada, however, was dismal. One bright spot, though, was the emergence of engineering programs at both the University of Toronto and McGill University in Montréal. The second part of this book considers developments in post-Confederation Canada and the campaign for advancements in agricultural and technical education in the two provinces until the early [End Page 312] 20th century. For the farmer in search of formal education, this era was one of major advancement. Successive provincial governments in Ontario assumed the state's role in providing financial stimulation toward agricultural development and education. The Ontario College of Agriculture in Guelph was one such investment at the macro level, while at the micro level Ontario acknowledged its responsibility to fund the growing number of private, and increasingly specialized, agricultural associations. This was seemingly the right approach, according to the author. "Ontario's agricultural sector was far more complex at the end of the century, and its educational response was as good as any on...

Fictions of Race: American Indian Policies in Nineteenth-Century British North American Fiction

This article explores the hemispheric and transatlantic uses of race and empire as tropes of settler-colonial otherness in the novelThe Canadian Brothers(1840) by Canadian author John Richardson. In this pre-Confederation historical novel, Richardson contrasts the imperial British discourse of racial tolerance, and the British military alliances with the Natives in the War of 1812, with the brutality of American Indian policies south of the border, in an effort to craft a narrative of Canadian difference from, and incompatibility with, American culture. At the same time, the author's critical attitude towards all European military and commercial interventions in the New World illuminates the rootedness of both American and Canadian settler colonialisms in British imperialism, and exposes the arbitrariness and constructedness of the political boundaries dividing the continent.

“A great caravansary filled with strangers”: American popular democracy in T. C. Haliburton’s political satire

This article examines the political satire of Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton through the lens of early nineteenth-century transatlantic debates over reform and the best form of government. Haliburton’s Sam Slick sketches, featuring a charismatic Yankee commenting on global political affairs, were immensely popular at the time, being published and read in Britain, Canada, and the US. The following pages argue that Haliburton’s portrayal of American culture is informed by his negative views on popular democracy and on its relationship with the nascent industrial capitalism transforming North America. Haliburton’s political satire was meant to persuade colonial readers that the introduction of American-style elective institutions in Nova Scotia had the potential to radically alter British North American culture, and push the colonies out of the orbit of the Empire.

Judicial Independence in British North America, 1825–67: Constitutional Principles, Colonial Finances, and the Perils of Democracy

It is well known that “formal” judicial independence—appointment on good behavior rather than at pleasure—was established in Britain with the 1701 Act of Settlement, and, like many other aspects of the English constitution, not exported to the colonies of either the First or the Second Empire. Its absence formed one of the allegations against the crown in the American Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the New Republic accordingly included a federal judicial independence provision. British imperial policy in North America after the Revolution regarding judges continued as before, so that formal judicial independence was not established until 1834, and then only in Upper Canada (now Ontario). In the other three principal British North American colonies this was later still. What is now Quebec (Lower Canada) received good behavior appointments in 1843, and Nova Scotia in 1848. In the other colonies that joined the Canadian Confederation in 1867 (New Brunswick) or within a few years afterwards (British Columbia, Manitoba, and Prince Edward Island), good behavior appointments were introduced for the first time only when the colony joined Confederation.

Friends of Ireland: early O’Connellism in Lower Canada

AbstractIn September 1828, societies of the ‘Friends of Ireland’ were founded throughout the United States and British North America for the purpose of raising funds and disseminating propaganda in support of the O’Connellite campaign for Catholic emancipation. In March 1831, the societies were briefly revived to agitate for repeal of the Union. The first Irish diasporic social movement to appear in Britain’s overseas empire, the British North American Friends of Ireland enjoyed greatest support in French-speaking Lower Canada, where for a time sympathetic local patriotes perceived a common cause with their new Irish neighbours. This article explores the transatlantic reciprocal interactions, cross-ethnic alliances and regional distinctions which characterised early O’Connellism in Lower Canada. It follows its initial successes to its virtual collapse in the early 1830s, as an increasingly polarised Lower Canada slid towards rebellion. Comparisons are employed with similar agitation elsewhere in British North America, in the United States, and in Ireland. It is argued that instrumentalist explanations for Irish diasporic nationalism, typically drawn from studies of post-famine Irish-America, do not convincingly account for the appearance and form of O’Connellite nationalism in British North America.

Monarchism, an Emerging Canadian Identity, and the 1866 British North American Trade Mission to the West Indies and Brazil

ABSTRACTIn 1865, the colonies of eastern British North America created a joint commission to investigate the possibility of reciprocal trade agreements with other parts of the Western hemisphere. In early 1866, the commissioners visited the West Indies and the Empire of Brazil, where they met officials and business leaders. No actual tariff agreements resulted from the commissioners’ travels, the main concrete result of the 1866 trade mission being the establishment of a direct steamship service between Canada and the West Indies. The study of contemporary discussions of the trade mission deepens our understanding of the history of relations between the British West Indies and British North America in the aftermath of emancipation and the end of the ‘Old Colonial System’. Moreover, these discussions reveal different elements of an emerging Canadian identity. Discourse of Britishness influenced the 1866 trade mission, but so did a sense of affinity linking Canada to the other monarchical territories in the Western hemisphere, such as the Empire of Brazil. For their part, some contemporaries in the West Indies welcomed the Canadian trade initiative because they wished for a counterweight to the growing influence of the United States in the region. The article also presents new information about British policy towards Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil, as well as British commercial diplomacy more generally. The article is based on materials in archives in the United Kingdom and Canada as well as a range of printed primary sources.

Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson

Reviewed by: Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America by Gary Clayton Anderson Ashley Sousa Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America. By Gary Clayton Anderson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014. Pp. [x], 462. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4421-4.) In Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America, Gary Clayton Anderson argues that colonial and United States policies toward and treatment of Native Americans were not genocidal, but are instead better understood as ethnic cleansing. Anderson examines the Indian policies of the British North American colonies and the United States from 1607 to the end of the allotment era, drawing on dozens of episodes to support his argument that Euro-Americans, from colonial governors to presidents and frontier settlers, pursued ethnic cleansing as a consistent, stated Indian policy. [End Page 135] Anderson’s argument is strongest where he shows, in painstaking detail, a centuries-long effort by colonists and American citizens, by means fair and foul, to strip Indians of their land. He ably illustrates this effort across different eras of Indian policy and regions of what is now the continental United States. Whether this constitutes a policy of ethnic cleansing is less clear, as he offers no definition of ethnic cleansing beyond mentioning the prohibition of forced deportation and relocation of populations under international law. His argument would benefit from drawing more on the theoretical scholarship on genocide and ethnic cleansing. On the question of genocide his intervention is less convincing, owing to inconsistencies in how he defines genocide. Anderson calls the legal definition of genocide—the one set out in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide—a “dead letter” because it allows too many crimes and perpetrators to fall under its definition (p. 4). He relies on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as the standard against which to characterize violence against native peoples because he contends that for violence to be considered genocide, “a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement the crime” (p. 13). Even with this narrower scope, he adds his own criteria to further refine the definition, maintaining that no genocide could have been perpetrated against native peoples because “large numbers of Indians survived” (p. 4)—a criterion inconsistent with the legal definition. Anderson’s argument is also confused by his inconsistent definition of “Indians.” In some cases, he treats native peoples as one group, which allows him to emphasize the large number of Indian survivors of white violence. This has the effect of diminishing the severity of violence perpetrated against Indian people while treating them as a monolithic group rather than as hundreds of distinct societies that engaged and experienced colonialism differently. In other cases, he argues that the deaths of specific groups in particular episodes of violence “hardly equal the numbers of those killed under other regimes,” suggesting that the murder of a few hundred or few thousand people does not constitute genocide (p. 217). Scholars familiar with particular regions or episodes covered in the book might take issue with Anderson’s use of evidence in certain cases. For example, in his discussion of California’s Indian policy, he fails to account for the explicitly genocidal rhetoric espoused by the state’s political leadership, including at least two governors, as well as their funding of militias bent on exterminating Indians. Such omissions cast doubt on his conclusion that “there is no evidence that any state or federal governmental entity ever supported” the actions of California militias that planned to exterminate the Indian population (p. 217). As an intervention into the growing field of scholarship on the question of genocide in North America, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian deserves the attention of scholars in the field, as well as those teaching courses in the field of Native American history that grapple with the genocide question. Whether or not readers agree with Anderson’s conclusions, his arguments and evidence will surely provoke lively conversations. [End Page 136] Ashley Sousa Middle Tennessee State University Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Giving Peace to Europe: European Geopolitics, Colonial Political Culture, and the Hanoverian Monarchy in British North America, ca. 1740–63

As William Pepperrell, the famed commander of New England’s expedition against Louisbourg, was laid to rest at Kittery Point in 1759, his eulogist praised the departed general for giving peace to Europe. This sermon spoke to an influential yet scarcely studied strand of British North American public discourse, in which colonists meditated upon the workings of the eighteenth-century European state system and the developing role of the British Empire as a great power. During the tumultuous global conflicts from 1739 to 1763, British American geopolitical thinking exerted a profound influence on colonial political culture, fostering support for the Hanoverian monarchy as the “arbiter” of Europe while inspiring commensurate discourses of royalism and colonial British nationalism. However, British Americans participated in this transatlantic debate over British foreign policy on their own terms, fashioning distinctively colonial conceptions of intervention, allegiance, and nationality. These subtle expressions of Americanization, which would come to have a major impact on the imperial crisis after 1763, present a starting point for reconsidering the historical importance of this rich but little-quarried vein of colonial political culture.

Imprinting Britain: newspapers, sociability, and the shaping of British North America

Printing presses were instrumental in creating and upholding a sense of community during the eighteenth century. While the importance of print in the development of colonial America and the nascent United States is well-established, Imprinting Britain extends the historical discussion northward to explore the dynamic and interrelated world of newspapers, coffee houses, and theatre in the British imperial capitals of Halifax and Quebec City. Michael Eamon describes how an English-language colonial community coalesced around the printed word, establishing public spaces for colonists to propose, debate, and define their visions of an ideal society. Whereas American newspapers functioned as incubators of republican and revolutionary thought, their British North American counterparts featured a moderate discourse that rejected republicanism, favoured civic engagement, advocated liberty with propriety, extolled democracy under monarchy, promoted reason over superstition, and encouraged social criticism without revolution. The press also safeguarded against the uncertainties of colonial life by providing a steady stream of transatlantic news, literature, and fashion that helped construct a sense of Britishness in an environment rife with mixed loyalties. Imprinting Britain is the story of communities that turned to the press for a canon of British norms, literary touchstones, and Enlightenment-inspired ideas, which offered a blueprint for colonial growth and a sense of stability in an ever-changing, transatlantic milieu.

Pariahs of the Empire: Settler ambivalences in T.C. Haliburton’s The Clockmaker

This article uses the concept of settler-colonialism to revisit the work of Nova Scotian writer T.C. Haliburton in its cultural and political context and to argue for his continuing relevance for students of colonialism and postcolonialism. Haliburton’s The Clockmaker exposes the synchronic existence of parallel cultural geographies in the first half of the 19th century on the North American continent. Applying a settler-colonial reading to Haliburton’s political satire reveals the contradictions and fractures within 19th-century definitions of Britishness, exposes the importance of political ideologies in the early articulation of British North American and US settlerhoods, and illuminates the triangulation of both these settler-colonial identities with one another and with Britain.

Colonial New Jersey's Paper Money Regime, 1709–75: A Forensic Accounting Reconstruction of the Data

. Forensic accounting is used to reconstruct the data on emissions, redemptions, and bills outstanding for colonial New Jersey paper money. These components are further separated into the amounts initially legislated and the amounts actually executed. These data are substantial improvements over what currently exists in the literature. They also provide a more complete and nuanced accounting of colonial New Jersey's paper money regime than what has been done previously for any British North American colony. Enough detail of the forensic accounting exercise is given for scholars to reproduce the data series from the original sources.

Vocabularies of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: The North American Fur-Trade and the Imperial World

This article examines the particular work that languages of slavery and abolition did in British North American fur-trade territories with an eye to comparing these histories with those of slavery and anti-slavery in Australia. Temporally, it focuses on the two decades following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and geographically it examines the parts of northwestern North America claimed by Britain and administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. Here traders, missionaries and critics wrote of slavery and anti-slavery in the fur-trade in ways that repeated metropolitan patterns but were also arguably distinct, and certainly merit our attention. In British fur-trade space, vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery provided language for the particular unfreedom of Indigenous people, the experience of indentured migrant labourers, and the political arrangements of colonial space. Seeing how the vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery tracked through different colonial spaces reminds us of the uneven and intertwined histories that cut across and through the nineteenth-century world.

Introduction: Deconstructing the (Re)construction of South Asian Identities in Canada

Introduction: Deconstructing the (Re)construction of South Asian Identities in Canada Simon Chilvers (bio) and Margaret Walton-Roberts (bio) Published Spring 2014 In May 2011 the International Migration Research Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) hosted a conference on South Asian migration. It was organized as an interdisciplinary gathering with support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Margaret Walton-Roberts and Simon Chilvers were the principal organizers. While most research papers (a total of 60) were contributed by scholars based in North America and Western Europe, 14 came from the South Asian region itself. The event’s premise was that research on South Asian migration increasingly required interdisciplinary and transnational collaboration (and still does). Major aims were to “take stock” of topics being explored and identify significant new areas of research. Prominent discussions included (1) how to adequately conceptualize factors determining acts of migration; (2) different types of migration (e.g., internal, international, temporary, permanent, etc.) and their connections; (3) changing spaces and scales of citizenship claims; (4) developmental roles performed by overseas South Asians in the subcontinent; and (5) how distinctive intra- and intergenerational identities were reproduced, yet evidently with considerable flux in different conjunctures. This special issue of Diaspora presents a selection of articles concerned with the last theme, with an emphasis on how contemporary South Asian communities in Canada are actively reconstituting their collective identities. The purpose of this introduction is to supply a brief background context and highlight significant commonalities and divergences between authors. The history of South Asian migration to Canada can be traced (at least) to 1867, when different British North American colonies were federated. The origins and formation of diasporic communities can be [End Page 121] considered inseparable from the elevated position of Canada within the empire: that is, as a predominantly white-European-settler society. South Asians were subalterns: economically (as laboring classes), politically (being disenfranchised), and culturally (by representing “lower races”). After independence was granted to newly formed states in South Asia, some important changes were registered in Canada. By 1967, many precepts concerning South Asians appeared to have undergone a revolution. Officially, legal barriers to intercommunity equality were removed. A new discourse of “multiculturalism” replaced that of domination. Whether any change subsequently occurred in relative life opportunities for diasporic populations is perhaps the axis around which many varied debates revolve. All of the included articles can be read as impinging upon this metaquestion—whether they concern diasporic sensibilities, atypical living arrangements, or interactions with other “Canadians.” (Though, it can critically be noted, none seek to document claims of inequality, nor consider how other communities might be fractured.) Explicitly, a common refrain is how contradictions within South Asian diasporic communities relate to a changing world outside of Canada. The articles are especially sensitive to how populations have used broader discourses concerning the subcontinent itself. We believe that, in this respect and others, the selection offers readers some noteworthy empirical details and theoretical insights. Superficially, the contributions may appear quite specific—and perhaps even unduly restricted. In their details, the articles mainly focus on particular linguistic communities, with “religion” often foregrounded. There is little in the way of comparative methods; authors have largely preferred what might be termed an “ethnographic” idiom. While all the authors are anxious not to reinforce insular and powerful stereotypes about South Asians in Canada, some things must be mentioned here to situate this intellectual approach. First, “South Asian,” as the lead article stresses, is a quite peculiar construct in Canada. It has been partly engineered by communities themselves, but increasingly it is also the preferred affix of officialdom. Many in Canada, informally, claim more specific origins and group labels. A majority identify with Punjabi, Tamil, or Bengali heritages. Such commonplace references to “linguistic-regions” meshes with subcontinental administrative practice (e.g., with many States of the Indian Union established this way). Yet profound historic reasons also exist for these groups (and their political-cum-religious debates) being most prominent. Notably, these areas were among those most tightly woven into the fabric of colonial state-making. Furthermore, significantly, many of their “ancestral” claims still remain unresolved (e.g., in relation to Partition). [End Page 122] Second...

Experimental Study of Axially Compressed Cold Formed Steel Channel Columns

Analysis and design of axially compressed cold formed steel channel section presented in this paper was conducted through experimental study, design based on British standards and North American Specification for the design of cold-formed steel structural members. More than 18 laboratory experiments were undertaken first on these steel channel columns under axial compression. A series of parametric studies were also carried out by varying the thickness and column length. All of these columns failed by local and distortional buckling. The test results were compared with American (AISI-2007) and British Standards (BS5950-Part5) for the design of cold-formed steel structural members. The details of these investigation and the outcomes are presented in this paper.

Palliser’s Triangle: Reconstructing the ‘central desert’ of the southwestern Canadian prairies during the late 1850s

Between 1857 and 1860 the British North American Expedition, led by Captain John Palliser, explored and surveyed the Canadian Prairies primarily to establish its suitability for agriculture and settlement. Historical and paleoclimate records indicate the Expedition coincided with below normal precipitation, leading to the perception of an arid or semi-arid region that would ‘forever be comparatively useless’ for agriculture. Today, this part of the Canadian Prairies is known as the Palliser Triangle, and is Canada’s productive dryland agricultural region. Here we present historic, geomorphologic, and chronometric evidence to reconstruct the landscape encountered by the Expedition. We contend that Palliser’s perception of the region was strongly influenced by his experience travelling through active sand dunes in the Middle Sand Hills of southeastern Alberta. At present, the dunes are entirely stabilized by vegetation, in contrast to Palliser’s report of ‘miles of burning sand’. Archival aerial photographs and optical ages of near-surface samples are used to reconstruct the landscape encountered by the Expedition in the Middle Sand Hills. Optical ages of presently stabilized sand dunes date primarily to between ad 1850 and 1934, peaking in c. ad 1925, and are indicative of a dune field undergoing reduction in activity, prior to the onset of 20th century droughts. Ages of interdune sand sheets further attest to regional dune activity occurring at least since ad 1750, concurrent with activity in other southern Canadian Prairie dune fields. Collectively, this evidence supports observations by Palliser of severe travelling due to bare sand conditions in 1857–1859. These conditions and Palliser’s inference of their extent influenced his perception of a ‘central desert’, thus delaying construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway along a southern route and postponing the westward colonization of Canada.