BOOK LAUNCH | An Accidental History of Canada - Geoffrey Hudson

Thursday, September 19th, 2024
7:00 PM

An exploration of accidents and their causes, consequences, and afterlives

Join co-editor Geoffrey Hudson for the launch of An Accidental History of Canada.

Entershine Bookshop
196 Algoma Street South
Thunder Bay, Ontario
807-343-9109

https://www.entershinebookshop.ca/

Megan J. Davies is professor emerita at York University and an activist community historian.
Geoffrey L. Hudson is associate professor in the History of Medicine at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine University.

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Although Canadian history has no shortage of stories about disasters and accidents, the phenomena of risk, upset, and misfortune have been largely overlooked by historians. Yet such events often have a vivid afterlife in the communities where they happen, and the way in which they are explained and remembered has significant social, cultural, and political meaning.

Whether arising from colonial power relations, urban dangers, perils in resource extraction, or hazardous recreations, most accidents occur within circumstances of vulnerability, and reveal precarity and inequities not otherwise apparent.

Bringing together original studies of an intriguing range of accidents stretching from the 1630s to the 1970s, An Accidental History of Canada makes plain that whether they are interpreted as an intervention by providence, a miscalculation, an inevitability, or the result of observable risk, accidents - and our responses to them - reveal shared values.