2nd Montreal History Festival | Step into the history of the metropolis

Launched in the midst of a pandemic, the Festival d’histoire de Montréal will be back for a second edition, from May 13 to 15, and will highlight the 380^and anniversary of the founding of the city with a host of activities, many of which are free.

Simon Chabot
The Press

Led by the group of 14 Montreal history museums, the festival offers 46 activities this spring throughout the city, most of them in person (with the wearing of a mask).

Among them are many guided tours, including a two-hour stroll on Mount Royal to explore its turbulent past with historian Rod MacLeod. The park was largely designed by American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose 200^and birthday took place on April 28. Other visits will allow you to discover the sectors of the Golden Square Mile, La Petite-Patrie, Milton-Parc… or even the ghosts of Old Montreal.

As part of the festival, a conference will focus on the sometimes surprising links between history and video games, with the contribution of a dozen historians who participated in the design of the game. Assassin’s Creed. A game in which you are the hero will also invite participants to find the culprit of a theft committed during the New France era at the Pointe farm, today the Maison Saint-Gabriel.

Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec, for its part, will invite you to dive into the dozen street albums of Edouard-Zotique Massicotte, who left some 6,000 photographs and drawings published between 1850 and 1915, a valuable source of information for understanding the newspaper of the time. Another conference, entitled “Mastering desires: sex and censorship at the Collège de Montréal”, will focus on the sometimes controversial role played by the Sulpicians to safeguard the honor of young Montrealers in the 18^and century.

Finally, a series of podcasts will encourage Montrealers to examine a thousand facets of their city through urban circuits in particular. One of them is interested in the Montreal Bronx, a district of the borough of LaSalle, another in the Faubourg à m’lasse, etc.

Registration for activities is done on the festival website.