Old News Features

When Housing Bubbles Burst

Tuesday, 31 March 2009 19:00

The global crisis started with the bursting of a U.S. housing bubble in 2007 — the same as the panic of 1857.

Inflated prices and excessive debt lead to a 19th-century, three-year global recession. A principal difference now is that impoverished speculators no longer face the prospect of debtors' prison.

Read an inside account of the bursting of an Ontario real estate bubble 150 years ago in the accompanying Old News Issue No. 11.

Shipwreck Stories, Tall or True

Saturday, 28 February 2009 19:00

Those who crossed the Atlantic in the days of the tall sailing ships were always in peril on the sea. Tens of thousands died, from scurvy, disease, shipwreck.

In this Old News preview, two newspaper shipwreck stories: one about two cannibal survivors, and another harrowing story about survivors of a shipwreck off Sable Island, a graveyard of the Atlantic.

Joys and Tribulations Of the Horseless Carriage

Saturday, 31 January 2009 19:00

Cars were a summer-time thing in the early years of the automobile age. Every winter they were jacked up and laboriously prepared for indoor storage, with batteries and wheels removed, inner tubes carefully folded and tucked away. Parts were removed, checked, cleaned, greased and replaced. Old Dobbin then pulled the family sleigh on snowy roads and streets. When cars emerged again in spring, they were started with hand cranks, and no prudent driver set forth without a towrope. Old Dobbin might be called upon again.

An Iconoclast Blazes Trail For Woman Lawyers

Wednesday, 31 December 2008 19:00

Among the pantheon of leaders who crashed the doors and shattered the glass ceiling that held women back from the professions and business, few have done as much crashing and shattering as Clara Brett Martin (1874-1923) of Toronto. At a time when it was almost unheard for women to enroll in university science or technical programs, Martin won a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Toronto's Trinity College, at age 16. Three years later, she petitioned the Law Society of Upper Canada for permission to become a student lawyer. The big wigs ruled that the law did not permit women lawyers. With the support of such people Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat, that was changed by a new law passed by the Ontario legislature on April 13, 1892. Martin became a student lawyer. In 1897, she became the first woman lawyer in the globe-spanning British Empire—the trail blazer for probably more than a million women lawyers in more than a score of countries.

Scandal: Lady Aberdeen Takes Tea With Servants

Sunday, 30 November 2008 19:00

Ottawa was scandalized when Lady Aberdeen took high tea with her servants.

The wife of Governor General (1893-98) Lord Aberdeen, Ishbel Maria Couts Marjoribanks, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, was an aristocratic democrat, social reformer, and one of Canada's first feminists. She did not endear herself to the social establishment by her efforts to promote women's rights, democratic attitudes, religious and ethnic tolerance, and greater esteem and power for workers.