History links for a rainy Sunday
Besides the Jean Drapeau archives, the major history thing this week, Radio-Canada looked at the use of computers in its election coverage starting in 1963. There’s also a piece about the appearance of video arcades in the 1980s.
The Gazette’s retro-specs looked at the 1995 pro-Canada unity rally, among others.
The Centre d’histoire piece this week is about the Indians of Canada pavilion at Expo 67, which, as they note, would not be called by this name now. The totem pole still stands over on the island, but the teepee-inspired pavilion is long gone.
On a different indigenous theme, the city’s Centre d’histoire page looked recently at what we know about the way of life of the St Lawrence Iroquoians, the longhouse dwellers Jacques Cartier encountered when he first landed on the island that would become Montreal. The Wikipedia article about this culture makes it clear that their identity is an educated triangulation made by anthropologists, linguists and others, as they left few traces and we don’t know which groups either absorbed them or killed them off.
Anonymous 08:49 on 2019-10-28 Permalink
Holy shit did I waste my youth in the arcades along Ste-Catherine. I walk down there now and think about how every other storefront used to be an arcade or stripclub (which looked the same and was very confusing to me as a child).
Kate 09:07 on 2019-10-28 Permalink
I spent time in the arcades too, playing those old Konami and Sega games, with occasional breaks for pinball, which they also had. Some of the arcades eventually added peep shows, which brought in a clientele that created a nasty atmosphere for a young woman, so I lost the habit.
Pinball had only stopped being illegal here a few years before the era mentioned in the article. But that’s another story.