From Tragedy to Gratitude

Photo: Boston Discovery Guide
Today is the 100th anniversary of a terrible tragedy in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- a maritime accident leading to an explosion whose destructive power would not be exceeded until the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. It is also the beginning of a century-long (so far) story of redemption and gratitude.

I learned the general outline of this story shortly after moving to the Boston area in 1997, but I learned a lot more from a brief conversation on NPR's Morning Edition today. Journalist Steve Inskeep discusses the accident in the context of U.S.-Canadian relations with John U. Bacon, author of The Great Halifax Explosion.

Spoiler alert: I knew that the people of Halifax continue to send the best Christmas tree they can find to Boston in gratitude for the help that came from our city to theirs. From this conversation, however, I learned just how significant the gesture was in the context of strained relations between the two countries at the time. In our dangerously xenophobic times a century later, it is good to be reminded that most people are of good will.

I mentioned the radio story to a colleague and friend who teaches the geographies of Canada and the United States in my department. She shared a number of resources, including a map that will help listeners better understand the accident and an excerpt from the CBC production Shattered City.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Balún: Sleep While Dancing

Image
Photo by way of PopGun I had not heard of the Puerto Rico-Brooklyn band until yesterday, when I caught this interview on the NPR program Studio 360 (which gave credit to Latino USA for the original story). The interview centers on the construction of the band's signature "dreambow" rhythms, particularly in the band's new song El Espanta . Angélica Negrón describes what she sees as the therapeutic value of this approach. I found it both enjoyable and instructive to listened to that song a few times before returning to the interview. The video of Balún's La Nueva Ciudad is an example of what the artists mean by dreambow, and is a perfect example of Negrón's expression "sleep while dancing." The lyrics describe a progressively more complicated metaphorical connection between the narrator and the stars, as her head, throat, and legs represent a telescope. The chorus laments a growing distance from a human subject. The longer video "Full Episode&q
Read more

Aw, Professor

Image
1,000th POST I began this blog -- which I sometimes call my "main blog" -- in 2008. At the time, I had just started using the center of my faculty home page to highlight examples of environmental geography as I see it. Those examples are still there, but the new platform of blogging seemed a more effective way to add many kinds of examples, and emerging social media platforms made it easy to share those examples with a wide readership. I recently realized that I was approaching my 1,000th published post (quite a few more remain as yet-to-be-published drafts), and I decided to celebrate with something fun. Coincidentally, I recently started making my own "Aw, Professor" memes, which friends and followers on Facebook really seem to appreciate. These are tongue-in-cheek words of unsolicited advice that echo themes found on the Not-the-13th Grade section of my faculty site. It seems fitting to gather all of them on this post, to which I will add any more that I end up
Read more

Animal Talk

Image
This week, the president of the United States justified his calls for even tougher action on immigration by referring to those who cross illegally into the United States as "animals" and worse. With the recent appointment of an acknowledged torturer to one government agency (CIA) and the announcement of familial torture as a deterrent by another (ICE), the words could not be taken lightly. Within a day, his administration was partially walking back the comment, insisting that it applied only to the Salvadoran-American gang MS-13. This is part of a broader strategy, of course, of using a small number of admittedly odious migrants as rhetorical cover for deporting dishwashers, shopkeepers, and thousands of other ordinary undocumented Americans. In this case, though, the rhetoric is different not only in degree, but in kind. It is not acceptable talk for a person occupying an office that was once called "leader of the free world" in a country whose national anthem stil
Read more