"Plaque Build-up" Commemorating the Buxton Settlement, 1950 - 2000"
Embedded in the landscape are several commemorative plaques. In South Buxton, immediately in front of St. Andrew’s Church, there stands a short cairn with a small bronze plaque that reads, “1949, In memory of Rev. Wm. King who founded Buxton Settlement, 1849, and built St. Andrew’s Church, 1859.” A few steps away from this cairn, stands a blue plaque that also commemorates the Buxton settlement. It was placed there in 1965. In North Buxton, there is a museum and a set of three plaques that designate the Buxton Settlement as a national historic site. Why are there so many commemorations to a single place and a single moment in history?
Cultural Tourism, Commemorative Plaques, and African-Canadian Historiography: Challenging Historical Marginality
Although Black Canadians have participated in the history of Canada since the
European invasion, the study of Blacks in Ontario has been a marginalized historical
endeavour. Recently the marketing of Black history as a tourist attraction
has attempted to bring the African-Canadian experience to the attention of the
general public. Commemorative plaques, erected by local historical societies and
all three levels of government, including the Ontario Heritage Foundation of the
Ontario Ministry of Culture and Tourism, form the backbone of these tours. The
absence of plaques pertaining to experiences since the Civil War and the wording
and viewpoint of many of the older plaques, however, do not do full justice to
Blacks’ role in the history of the province.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.