By Adam Bunch
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One of Toronto’s most famous early monuments — and its connection to Sam the Record Man
It was one of Toronto’s most famous early monuments — so well-known to locals that many simply called it the Monument. It was erected in 1939, in...
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The tale of two Canadian children’s authors vs. the President of the United States
Once upon a time (by which I mean the late 1800s and early 1900s) stories about intelligent, anthropomorphized animals were all the rage. The trend had...
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One of the CNE’s weirdest exhibits ever: live animal surgeries in the early 1960s
The Ex had never been more popular than it was in 1962 and ’63. More than three million people walked through the gates during those years. The...
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Simcoe’s vision for Toronto: a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution
1791. Just ten years earlier, John Graves Simcoe had been fighting on the British side of the American Revolution. He made a name for himself in that...
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The Great Toronto Stork Derby — why the city went baby crazy during the Great Depression
It all started on Halloween in 1926. That’s the day Charles Vance Millar died. He was a rich Toronto lawyer and financier — best known for modernizing a...
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A bird’s-eye tour of Toronto in the early 1930s
The late 1920s and early 1930s were an important time in the building of Toronto. Many of the city’s most beautiful landmarks opened in those few...
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How the first black hole ever discovered was discovered at the University of Toronto
This is a photo of a star called HDE226868. It’s a blue supergiant, more than 20 times as big and hundreds of thousands of times as bright as the...
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A brief history of the pigeons of Toronto
Pigeons have been living with people for literally as long as anyone can remember. They were one of the first animals we ever domesticated — sometime back...
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Toronto’s first truly terrible leader — the slave-owning gambling addict Peter Russell
In 1796, John Graves Simcoe got sick. Just three years earlier, he had founded Toronto as the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. But now, he was...
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Torontonians have been fighting over road tolls for nearly 200 years
Toronto was just a tiny little frontier town when its first road tolls were introduced. That was back in 1820; York wasn’t even 30 years old yet. There...
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How Napoleon is indirectly responsible for one of Toronto’s most beautiful walking trails
Nobody could beat him. Ever since the beginning of the French Revolution, France had been fighting wars with pretty much every single other big country in...
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Spring comes to Toronto in 1837 — a first-hand account of the city’s transformation
One of my favourite primary sources for old Toronto history is Anna Jameson’s diary, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. She was a British...