Medicine Hat had a vibrant Jewish community: although it numbered only about forty families, their impact on city life was substantial. As S.M. Selchen wrote in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle in 1954, “This tiny Jewish island among a non-Jewish…
The “Fishes” section of Shaw’s General Zoology includes four volumes, each with an engraved title page adorned with a vignette of a fish in an ocean scene. In my hand-coloured copy of this title, all four vignettes have also been hand coloured.
Men carrying wooden boxes of supplies, piled on the riverbank where they were unloaded from a steam wheeler, into camp. Such deliveries were infrequent and necessarily large. This magic lantern slide has been hand-coloured.
Head tax certificates, as they came to be known, include photographs that attempt to fix identity in place. The text that accompanies the photographic portrait categorizes the subject as a legal immigrant, showing that the head tax required by…