Double Double: Chapter 3

Tim’s Tale: From hockey sticks to stir sticks In September 2011, I walked into a co-branded outlet of Cold Stone Creamery and Tim Hortons on West 42rd, just west of Times Square in midtown Manhattan, and ordered a medium coffee. The server surprised me by handing me a cup held in a sleeve, which you …

The Race to the New World: Excerpt

  On November 4, 1494, Nürnberg’s Jerome Münzer ascended the bell tower of Seville’s Cathedral of the Virgin Mary. It had been built in the late twelfth century as the minaret of Seville’s great mosque, when the city was the capital of the Muslim empire of the Maghreb, which included North African territories from present-day …

Yzerman: Chapter 1

“How many lines did the Red Wings use when they finally started winning  Stanley Cups?” Dick Todd asks. Four, is the answer. “And how many lines are the winning teams now using?” he continues. Four. The same number that the Peterborough Petes used when Todd coached them in the 1980s, when Steve Yzerman was his …

Rewriting History: Alwyn Ruddock and John Cabot

A shorter version of this story was published by Canada’s History in April 2010. I also wrote about Ruddock and her Cabot research in The Race to the New World On February 17, 2006, a 418-word obituary for Alwyn Amy Ruddock appeared in The Guardian. Written by Edith Emma Mason, a former colleague in the …

Beardmore: The Middle Claim

Excerpted from Beardmore: The Viking Hoax that Rewrote History, by Douglas Hunter, published Sept. 2018 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. On the hot summer night of 16 July 1934, a Canadian National Railways (CNR) train clattering through the boreal gloom of northern Ontario was brought to a sharp halt about four miles southwest of the whistle …

Was New France Born in New England?

One of the enduring curiosities of early Canadian history is what Samuel de Champlain, routinely celebrated as Canada’s founding father, was even doing in eastern North America when he first arrived in 1603. From his initial appearance on the St. Lawrence River in that year, until his departure from Acadia in 1607 as the Port …

The Ghost Cat

It was early autumn, 1968, and a teenaged Dave Anderson was booting along a gravel road in a light-green Dodge half-ton pickup with his brother Richard. They were in the northwestern corner of the province, north of Kenora, on the way to a family trap line, when they saw something they weren’t supposed to see, …