Lindsey Palka holds a Master's degree in Canadian history, focusing on the First World War, youth, and family history in the Atlantic provinces. She reads, reviews, and trashes young adult historical novels from the '80s, '90s, and 2000s on her blog, Young Adult Historical Vault.
That after an ugly childhood and gawky adolescence, I would blossom into a legendary beauty, the type of which that would awe strangers and be best described as “lissome” and “shining,” instead of being someone who obsessively watched makeup tutorials on Youtube and yet still manages to go out with one eye made up perfectly and the other one looking like it had been made up by a drunken goat.
In my line of work, I come across the names of many, many high schools—every high school in Canada, in fact. So I began a tally with myself of the number of schools named after women—at first out of curiosity, and later after developing something of a righteous rage.
Many schools in Canada and the US are named after their towns, and Canada’s wealth of delicious place names gives these
Lindsey Palka's previous work for The Toast can be found here. Who likes cemeteries? Cemeteries, as a rule, are not very popular places. Today they are pretty well ignored (with a few famous exceptions) unless people are attending a burial or visiting a family stone. But this hasn’t always been the case. A graveyard can be a great place to explore local history and genealogy, or just take a peaceful autumn walk. So let's grab our…
Anne is usually described as the intelligent, cultured, beautiful wife of the doctor in Glen St. Mary, Prince Edward Island. But her mysterious origins may hold a key to the bizarre episodes of her time-traveling children.
Those of us who spent our childhood and teenage years obsessively reading L.M. Montgomery books instead of getting drunk in basements and smoking illicit cigarettes in our friends’ cars (full disclosure: definitely did way
Lindsey Palka's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside, the eighth Anne of Green Gables book, does not get half the praise it fairly deserves. Published in 1920, it is much more of a contemporary novelized account of the First World War than what we usually think of as “war novels,” and it is distinctly different from Montgomery’s other works. Most First World War
Lindsey Palka's previous work for The Toast can be found here. This post was brought to you by Caitlin.
If you’ve spent any time at all perusing antique jewelry sales or online estate auctions, you’ve probably stumbled across—and been creeped out by—some Victorian hair jewelry. But come back! Don’t be creeped out. It’s not creepy at all—it’s actually an incredibly interesting type of jewelry that teaches us a lot about the
Lindsey Palka last wrote for The Toast about What Katy Did. Today we forget how hard it was to leave home in the past. We can video chat our loved ones on the other side of the world, text them our every thought within a second, fly (in an emergency) to visit them in a day. Would you leave home if it meant you would probably never return? That you would almost certainly never…
This post, and several others to appear in due course, are generously sponsored by a gentleman-scholar from County San Francisco, supportive of the production and assessment of nasty novels, dealing familiarly with gamblers, misandrists and flashy reprobates. But, like, this one is more of a popular book for kids and stuff. We also have more of his gargantuan donation left, so continue pitching me your 18th and 19th century trash fiction stories. When I…
Would you want to live in Halifax in 1917, if you could? You would have probably enjoyed it. It had dance halls and ice skating on the ponds, a nearly endless supply of soldiers passing through and pouring money into local businesses, a movie theatre showing first-run films, and a Chinese restaurant on Barrington Street. But you may have regretted it, because on December sixth of that year, it became the site of the largest…
