“A Curse or a Blessing?”: Montreal Jews and the Politics of 1960s Quebec

In this article, the author argues that the politics of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec in the 1960s invigorated Montreal Jews as a religious and cultural minority rather than marginalizing or alienating them. While Jewish activists remained critical of the expanding ambitions of the Quebec state and the rise of nationalism in the province, they took the opportunity to advance Jewish claims and adopted a largely positive outlook on their communal future in Quebec. In fact, Montreal Jews, like their francophone neighbours, but perhaps unlike the anglophone majority, had motives to share in Quebec’s collective thrill during the 1960s: it created opportunities to discuss and advance cultural continuity. This perspective is crucial to nuance the popular assumption that animosity and reluctance alone characterized Quebec Jews’ reaction to the Quiet Revolution, leading many to find solace in Toronto after the election of the Parti québécois and in reaction to long-smouldering tensions. By exploring the themes of education, French language, and nationalism in Jewish English-language newspapers and institutional sources from the 1960s, the author reveals more nuanced dynamics between Jews and French Canadians at the time of the Quiet Revolution.

The Virtual Geoscience Revolution: From William Smith to Virtual Outcrop

In 1799 an English surveyor named William Smith published the World’s first geological map. This map, which covers the whole of England and Wales, fundamentally changed the way that geologists visualised the subsurface (Winchester, 2001). For the next 200 years, field geologists across the World worked in much the same way as Smith had done, tracing geological boundaries on the ground and using ink pens and coloured pencils to record the surface expression of the geology onto paper and maps. Even today, the largest single component of any undergraduate degree in the UK is a “mapping project”, where students make detailed maps of a selected area in this way. There can be very few sciences where there have been no significant changes in the basic data collection methods for over 200 years. However, since the turn of the 21st Century we have seen a quiet revolution in the way in which field data are being collected, analysed and displayed. We call this the Virtual Geoscience Revolution and it has come about in a number of discrete phases, each of which have resulted from the development of a number of distinct but parallel technologies.