What actually happened
The events, disasters, inventions, expeditions, scandals, and people that made Canada, written to be read to the end, with the sources on the page to prove every word.
10 stories in the library so far · every one sourced · new stories every week
On this day
In Canadian history
Featured story
Canada bought the northwest in 1869 without asking the people who lived there. The Métis of Red River, led by Louis Riel, stopped the transfer, formed a government, wrote a List of Rights, and negotiated Manitoba into existence, at a cost that followed Riel to the gallows.
Read the story · 12 min read
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Canada bought the northwest in 1869 without asking the people who lived there. The Métis of Red River, led by Louis Riel, stopped the transfer, formed a government, wrote a List of Rights, and negotiated Manitoba into existence, at a cost that followed Riel to the gallows.
Read the story · 12 min
On December 6, 1917, a collision in Halifax Harbour touched off the largest explosion of the age, killing 1,782 people and remaking a city.
Read the story · 8 min
In April 1980 a 21 year old from Port Coquitlam dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic and started running a marathon a day across Canada. He never reached the Pacific. Canada has been finishing his run ever since.
Read the story · 9 min
For more than a century, Canada and the churches ran a school system designed to separate Indigenous children from their families, languages, and cultures. This is what the record shows, in the words of the commission that documented it.
Read the story · 7 min
A grassy cove at the tip of Newfoundland held the answer to a thousand year old question. How the Norse reached Canada around the year 1000, what they built, the evidence they left, and the tree ring study that dated their axes to the exact year 1021.
Read the story · 9 min
In 1755 British authorities deported the Acadians, a farming people who had lived in the Maritimes for five generations. The oath they would not swear, the order read aloud in the church at Grand Pré, the ships, the deaths, and the long road home.
Read the story · 10 min
“History is not a set of lies agreed upon here. It is a record, and the record can be checked. That is why every story on this site ends with its sources.”
From How we source, the standard every story here is held to
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