Café Historique

  Wednesday February 4
John Lutz
What if… Disease had not Decimated
the Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific Northwest?

 

Diseases, and particularly smallpox, swept through the Pacific Northwest decades before Indigenous people first met Europeans, and returned many times through the nineteenth century. Estimates suggest Indigenous populations fell by as much as 90%.  This presentation looks at the impact of disease and how the history of Indigenous-settler relations might have evolved differently had smallpox not broken out using, as one point of comparison, New Zealand/Aotearoa, which was spared smallpox epidemics.

 

Geoff Bil

 

 

Following his celebrated return in 1836 from five years of exploration aboard HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin suffered from a debilitating chronic illness that has yet to be determined. He might well have fared worse; shipwreck, violent conflict, and deadly pathogens claimed the lives of many seafaring travellers in his day. This presentation considers how the history of science—most notably the theory of evolution by natural selection—might have looked differently without Darwin. Whose version of evolutionary theory would have won the day? And what might have been the consequences for the history of science and beyond?

 

Wednesday April 1
Jason Colby
What if… the South had Won the US Civil War? 

 

In July 1863, the Union Army of the Potomac defeated the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Gettysburg. By shoring up Abraham Lincoln’s faltering presidency and deterring Great Britain and other European powers from recognizing Confederate independence, the battle paved the way for northern victory and the destruction of American slavery.  This presentation explores history’s possible paths if the Union had lost.  What course would the story of freedom and equality have taken?  How might the world, including Canada, look different from what we know today?

 

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