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  • Senior portrait of a young white woman with dark hair wearing a high-collared dress. Text read “Miss G. Misener.” It is the senior photo of Geneva Misener from Queen’s University.

    “More than a prize scholar or bookworm”: The Leadership and Legacy of Dr. Geneva Misener

    Pamela Young

    Geneva Misener, the University of Alberta’s first woman professor, was a pioneering Classicist and tireless advocate for women’s rights. Born in 1877, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, co-founded the Canadian Federation of University Women, and promoted women’s education, suffrage, and sport. Though underrecognized today, her enduring legacy reminds us that individual resolve can drive lasting social change.

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  • Sustained Opposition to Black Immigration

    Dr. Jennifer Kelly

    Newspapers frequently reported negatively on the arrivals of Black immigrants from the United States, including the Edmonton Bulletin, Edmonton Journal, and Calgary Eye Opener. The first group of Black peoples to arrive were noted rather disparagingly by one newspaper, “It was in 1908 that the first party arrived from the cotton fields of Oklahoma and settled along the Grand Trunk Pacific, the largest settlement being at Chip Lake.”

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  • A photograph of workers with picket signs standing outside the Bay Building downtown, with the A-Channel "A" logo above them.

    Station of Broken Promises

    Adrian Pearce

    Previously, ECAMP presented a story from an A-Channel employee who decided to cross the picket line during the 2003-4 strike. Adrian Pearce – a cameraman who helped lead the strike – submitted this response. Read what the strike was like for workers who held the line for 166 days.

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  • A photograph of Robert Goulet in a suit with slicked-back hair speaking to Laura Lindsay, who is elegantly dressed in front of a fireplace.

    Laura Lindsay, First Lady of Daytime TV in Alberta from 1955-68

    Katherine Koller

    When Sunwapta Broadcasting first produced local television in Edmonton in 1954, CFRN aimed daytime programs at the homemaker audience. Laura Banks was the popular face of this programming from 1955-1968, under the stage name Laura Lindsay. Decades after her death, she remains well-loved by women who tuned in for her sewing and cooking demonstrations and celebrity interviews.

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  • : A three-storey brick cell block is connected to a workshop and another large industrial building with two tall chimneys. There is a large hole in the side of one of the buildings suggesting it had started to be dismantled and/or suffered structural damage. A tilled farm field that would have been worked by prisoners is in the foreground.

    Hard Times in the Alberta Penitentiary, 1906-1920

    Matt Ormandy

    The Alberta Penitentiary operated on Edmonton’s River Lot 20 from 1906 – 1920, where Clarke Stadium is today. It was the first federal prison in Alberta. One constant in prisoners’ lives was unpaid hard labour, from mining coal to farming potatoes.

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  • Eight players pose for the camera in their jerseys, with their coach and a basketball.

    Women Wanted to Work, and Win: The Grads Take Flight

    Renée Englot

    In 1932, Edmonton had the best women’s basketball team in the world: the Edmonton Commercial Graduates. But it looked like they’d have to miss a charity game that May in Calgary – they’d never be able to get there in time after work. Until, that is, the Grads’ coach rallied supporters to strap some seats into the back of two little aircraft and make history.

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  • Wooden boats crewed by colourful voyageurs meet crowds of HBC employees, Métis, and First Nations on the bank below an expansive wooden fort. First Nations tipis also crown the nearby hills.

    The Company and the Combination: Collective Bargaining at the River’s Edge

    Tom Long

    In 1853, a group of voyageurs shipping furs from Fort Edmonton put down their oars in solidarity with one of their crew members. It was an early murmuring of organized labour in the West: not quite a strike, not quite a mutiny, but very much a show of strength and unity.

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  • Around fifty women gathered in front of a wooden building. Included in the crowd are young children, smiling mothers, and older women. They are dressed in simple but comfortable-looking clothes, with some women holding babies.

    Making Home: The Role of Homemakers’ Clubs in Life on Reserve

    Shayne Giles

    Women like Emma Minde joined Homemakers’ Clubs to overcome isolation by doing work like sewing, canning, and charity drives together. Indian Affairs required its approval to start these clubs though, and used them to monitor members’ activities.

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  • A photograph of items from Larry Svenson's life, including photographs and pins.

    There are Far More Kind People in the World Than We Think

    Terrence (Tess) Adams

    How do you calculate the hole left behind when a loved one dies? In this story, Terrence Adams sorts through the legacy of their uncle, Larry Svenson. Svenson worked for the Government of Alberta, using health data to ask big questions like whether it was possible to predict the peak of flu season.

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  • A group of workers standing outside the A-Channel headquarters, holding a sign that says "Scab TV"

    The Labour Dispute Will Be Televised

    John Vandenbeld

    An inside look at the 2003-2004 strike at A-Channel Edmonton. “The strike dragged on through the fall and into the winter,” writes John Vandenbeld. “I both wanted it to end and feared its conclusion, knowing that I’d have to work with these people again.”

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  • A black and white photograph of a middle-aged woman shown in profile from the shoulders up. She wears a v-cut black top with a long white pearl necklace and her hair is pulled back into a low bun.

    Maud Bowman: The leader who kickstarted the Art Gallery of Alberta

    Danielle Siemens

    In the early 1920s, a resolute woman named Maud Bowman set out to start the Edmonton Museum of Arts – today’s Art Gallery of Alberta. Bowman was a somewhat unconventional model of a female museum leader. Her work is even more remarkable given the sexism she faced.

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  • A daguerrotype of an older woman, a boy, and a young man.

    Lessons of loss and perseverance from Jane Klyne McDonald

    Catherine C. Cole

    During the early days of the Covid pandemic, I thought of my Métis great-great-great-grandmother, and the loss of three of her young children to scarlet fever in Edmonton in May 1845.

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