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Journalism professor Randy Boswell\u2019s writings about Ottawa history have been showcased in a new book and in local media coverage surrounding this month\u2019s 200th anniversary of the 1826 founding of Bytown \u2014 the future Ottawa \u2014 and the launch of construction of the Rideau Canal.<\/strong><\/p>\n Boswell teamed with Ottawa photographer and publisher John McQuarrie to produce a new, lavishly illustrated book commemorating the city\u2019s bicentennial. Ottawa, Spirit of Place: 200th Anniversary Edition contains new essays by Boswell about the history of Canada\u2019s capital as well as a selection of history-themed feature stories and columns he published over the past 20-plus years in the Ottawa Citizen.<\/p>\n The book\u2019s main essay, a 10,000-word retelling of Ottawa\u2019s origin story, aimed to incorporate details typically missing from existing accounts of the beginnings of the city and the canal, says Boswell. These include the routinely erased backstory of the dislocation and dispossession of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people who had occupied the Ottawa Valley for millennia before the founding of Bytown by canal builder Lt.-Col. John By and Lord Dalhousie, Governor-in-Chief of British North America.<\/p>\n \u201cThe seminal \u2018moment\u2019 in Ottawa history \u2014 the reason the city is marking its 200th anniversary in 2026 \u2014 has typically been summed up by local historians as an auspicious meeting of two dauntless British men on Sept. 26, 1826, at a backwoods outpost destined to become the capital of Canada,\u201d Boswell writes. \u201cIt\u2019s true. But a closer, lingering look at the genesis story of Bytown-Ottawa invites us to think of that moment in a more layered way, as a series of illuminating scenes surrounding that famous, future-shaping encounter between Lt.-Col. John By and Lord Dalhousie . . .<\/p>\n \u201cIn this era of truth and reconciliation, the Indigenous people \u2014 whose bonds with the land that became Ottawa reach back thousands of years \u2014 are held in high esteem by municipal, provincial and federal leaders. But through ongoing land claims on both sides of the Ottawa River \u2014 for centuries the \u2018Kichi Zibi\u2019 lifeblood of Algonquin commerce and culture in the capital region \u2014 they are still seeking restitution, 200 years after the founding of Bytown, for lost but never ceded territory throughout their ancestral watershed.\u201d<\/p>\n A version of the same essay appeared in the Citizen on Saturday, Sept. 26, billed as a \u201ctakeover\u201d of the newspaper\u2019s front section as a special offering to mark the exact day of the city\u2019s 200th birthday. Boswell and McQuarrie also held a book-signing session at Indigo\u2019s Rideau Centre store on the same day. For example, Lady Dalhousie \u2014 who accompanied her husband on the vice-regal voyage up the Ottawa River that led to the founding of the future Ottawa on Sept. 26, 1826 \u2014 emerges in Boswell\u2019s narrative as an important natural historian and collector of botanical specimens in early 19th-century Canada. The story of a maple sprig she collected along the way to the birth of Bytown was traced to the present-day holdings of Canada\u2019s Royal Botanical Gardens after being lost for more than a century in a storage trunk in a Scottish castle.<\/p>\n Photographs of an official version of the letter from Dalhousie to By dated Sept. 26, 1826 \u2014 widely hailed as \u201cOttawa\u2019s birth certificate\u201d \u2014 were reproduced for the first time in the book and the Citizen.<\/p>\n And Boswell unearthed other previously overlooked details about the founding of the city, including the fact that \u2014 on the eve of Bytown\u2019s birth \u2014 By, Dalhousie and members of their respective entourages took a reconnaissance hike through the woods and swamps that would eventually become the path of the canal through central Ottawa \u2014 including present-day Old Ottawa South and possibly the campus of Carleton University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Journalism professor Randy Boswell\u2019s writings about Ottawa history have been showcased in a new book and in local media coverage surrounding this month\u2019s 200th anniversary of the 1826 founding of Bytown \u2014 the future Ottawa \u2014 and the launch of construction of the Rideau Canal. Boswell teamed with Ottawa photographer and publisher John McQuarrie to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[38,36],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nEarlier this month, CBC Ottawa radio journalist Robyn Bresnahan \u2014 a graduate of Carleton\u2019s journalism program \u2014 hosted an episode of her podcast, This is Ottawa, exploring Boswell\u2019s fresh research findings about the city\u2019s origins.<\/p>\n