Michael B. Payne

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Michael B. Payne
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Historian.

Raised and educated in Winnipeg, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Queens University at Kingston and a Master’s degree from the University of Manitoba. He worked as a research historian with Parks Canada, the Alberta Historic Sites Service, and as the City of Edmonton Archivist. He has written extensively on western Canadian history, especially the history of both Alberta and the Hudson’s Bay Company. He has published several books on early western Canadian history including The Fur Trade in Canada: An Illustrated History and “The Most Respectable Place in the Territory” Everyday Life in Hudson’s Bay Company Service at York Factory 1788 to 1870. He was also co-editor with Catherine Cavanaugh and Donald Wetherell of a two-volume centennial history of Alberta entitled Alberta Formed – Alberta Transformed. He has also worked as an editor of academic studies and published collections of primary materials, and his current research project is a study of suburban real estate development in Ottawa in the 1920s and 1930s.

His articles for the Manitoba Historical Society:

“The Healthiest Part of the Known World” Prince of Wales Fort as Fur Trade Post and Community in the 18th century
MHS Transactions, 3rd series, Number 35, 1979

Review: Martha McCarthy, Grand Rapids, Manitoba
Manitoba History, Number 19, Spring 1990

Review: Sydney Augustus Keighley, Trader, Tripper, Trapper: The Life of a Bay Man
Manitoba History, Number 19, Spring 1990

Fort Churchill, 1821-1900: An Outpost Community in the Fur Trade
Manitoba History, Number 20, Autumn 1990

Review: Dale R. Russell, Eighteenth-Century Western Cree and Their Neighbours
Manitoba History, Number 24, Autumn 1992

Review: Henry Epp (editor), Three Hundred Prairie Years: Henry Kelsey’s “Inland Country of Good Report”
Manitoba History, Number 27, Spring 1994

Review: William Barr and Glyndwr Williams (editors), Voyages in Search of a Northwest Passage 1741-1747: Volume 1, The Voyage of Christopher Middleton 1741-1742
Manitoba History, Number 29, Spring 1995

Review: William Barr and Glyndwr Williams (editors), Voyages in Search of a Northwest Passage 1741-1747. Volume II: The Voyage of William Moor and Francis Smith 1746-1747
Manitoba History, Number 32, Autumn 1996

Review: Gerald Friesen, River Road: Essays on Manitoba and Prairie History
Manitoba History, Number 37, Spring / Summer 1999

Western Canadian Fur Trade Sites and the Iconography of Public Memory
Manitoba History, Number 46, Autumn/Winter 2003-2004

Commemorating Ethnocultural Communities in Manitoba
Manitoba History, Number 50, October 2005

Review: Cole Harris, The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada Before Confederation
Manitoba History, Number 64, Fall 2010

Review: David A. Morrison, Profit & Ambition: The North West Company and the Fur Trade 1779-1821
Manitoba History, Number 64, Fall 2010

Review: Scott P. Stephen, Masters and Servants: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Its North American Workforce, 1668-1786, University of Alberta Press, 2019
Prairie History, Number 2, Summer 2020

Family History and Trans-Atlantic Connections In the Fur Trade
Prairie History, Number 4, Winter 2021

Review Essay: In Hindsight: Half a Century of Research Discoveries in Canadian History. A series of 21 podcasts featuring Donald Smith and produced by the Ontario Historical Society
Prairie History, Number 13, Winter 2024

Page revised: 9 April 2024