History
Over the last thirty years, a debate has been ongoing whether a tiny number of Ukrainians settled in Canada before 1891. Most controversial is the claim that Ukrainians may have been infantrymen alongside Poles in the Swiss French "De Meurons" and "De Watteville" regiments who fought for the British on the Niagara Peninsula during the War of 1812 – and that Ukrainians were among those soldiers who decided to stay in Upper Canada (southern Ontario). Other Ukrainians supposedly arrived as part of other immigrant groups: claims that individual Ukrainian families may have settled in southern Manitoba in the 1870s alongside blocks of Mennonites and other Germans from the Russian Empire; or that single male Ukrainians were participants in the Russian Empire's exploration parties and fur trade along the western coast of North America (including British Columbia). Because there is so little definitive documentary evidence of individual Ukrainians among these three groups, they are not generally regarded as among the first Ukrainians in Canada.
Read more about this topic: Ukrainian Canadian
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)