I've always thought that one of the hardest areas to teach is what life was like in the interwar and post-world war two period. The weight of the wars and the depression tend to inhale a lot of time for any class, often leaving little time to deal with other topics.

It creates a real challenge of finding other topics that are teachable and interesting to students in these time periods. I've always thought that Joe Stafford (a GG Award recipient from 2008) really captured this with his diamond jubilee project. Within the interwar period in the 1920s, he had found an original and interesting teachable moment that said something unique about the time.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was continuing my reading of Pierre Berton's biography. It turns out that Berton's big break came in 1947 when he travelled up to the Nahanni river. A minor international interest had developed over the area and Berton flew up to bring the story back to Canadians. It was picked up by the wire services and broadcast around the world (I’m still trying to find a good source for them, but you should be able to find them at your local library, especially if you are in Vancouver).

Now I had read about the Nahanni River in back issues of The Beaver magazine, and had never really thought much about it. But here you have a moment that seems to catch the still remoteness of Northern Canada only just over sixty years ago. Shuttled into his place, Berton landed in an area all but unknown to the rest of the world.

Berton's crazy trip up north and the wire stories that followed would seem to open themselves up to a wonderful array of moment that describe transportation, communications, and information technology in the post-war period.