A 12-year old boy, son of an Italian camp cook, is shot in the back and killed near the Orford Mountain Railway construction site in rural Quebec in August 1905.  The crime is all the more staggering for being the second child murder on a railway in three days. A wave of shock and terror… Read more »

Some liken formal histories to four-lane highways. Nick Fonda answers with a meandering country road, quietly charming, with a human face. If all politics is local, so all history is local… and anecdotal. As the great urban thinker Jane Jacobs said, anecdotes are the only real evidence because they come from stories people tell. Though… Read more »

Frederick Coburn (1871-1960) was arguably Canada’s best-known painter at the peak of his career. Nick Fonda revisits Coburn’s work providing charming new insight into the painter and his surroundings. His method includes casting an inquisitive gaze on other accomplished artists who have followed quite unusual paths as they responded to the same muse that moved… Read more »