Humanities desk
< July 19	<< Jun \| July \| Aug >>	July 21 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 20

I have 3 questions regarding the history of Canada

1. Are any black Canadians today descended from black slaves in Canada? 2. Were any pagan or wiccans ever persecuted such as put on trial or burned at the stake? 3. Were any Inuit in northern Canada slaves? Thank you! 2001:569:766F:BF00:BDF9:DFA5:4B2F:757E (talk) 03:56, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

1. With 30,000 American slaves using the Underground Railroad to reach freedom in Canada,[1] some of their descendants are Canadian.[2]

2. In 1658 Quebec (pre-Canada), Corporal René Besnard was sent to prison and later exiled for sorcery.[3] Also, in 1684, Jean Campagna was charged, but later acquitted, of being a sorcerer.[4]

3. According to the Inuit Heritage Trust, First Nations people "were also known to take Inuit as slaves in raids." Probably before Canada was established, but the article doesn't specify. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:07, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

According to our article on slavery in Canada (which I had not thought to look up before this question; amazing the things you learn on the refdesk), there was black slavery in both New France and British North America, so not all the slave ancestors of modern Canadians were American slaves. To be sure, the American situation was, at least numerically, much worse. --Trovatore (talk) 07:49, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also 2. Marie-Josephte Corriveau was rumored to have practiced witchcraft, but was actually executed for murder. This article also notes a few other trials in Canada during the colonial period. This may or may not be comprehensive. It should be noted that Wicca is a religion that was formalized in the 20th century, only a few scant years before Capital punishment in Canada was ended, so it seems unlikely that any wiccans were ever executed in Canada. As an aside, I did find this article which discusses a rarely-but-still-used law in Canada which even recently has been used to prosecute people for "fake witchcraft". Legitimate witchcraft appears to be legal in Canada, however. --Jayron 32 11:48, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note that the specific question seems to refer to black slaves in Canada so Trovatore's answer would apply but I don't see that US slaves who fled to Canada would be black slaves in Canada, unless they were also enslaved in Canada. Nil Einne (talk) 14:18, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

1. The majority of Black Canadians today have more recent roots in Africa or the Caribbean, but there is a population that goes back to the Black Loyalists, ie those who sided with the British at the end of the American Revolution, and left the newly United States. There were Africans in (what later became) Canada before this time but, as I understand it, a few individuals, not a settled community. I do not know of a black Canadian parallel to the Daughters of the American Revolution, for instance, but many families stayed in British North America and their descendants are legion; see for example Black_Nova_Scotians#Notable_people. The whole point of the emigration via the Book of Negroes was that these people were no longer enslaved. If you exclude them, it might be hard to find descendants of black slaves in Canada.

2. Wiccans, as pointed out above, are a C20 phenomenon, and pagan is a very broad term. You might be interested in reading about the methods of the Jesuit missionaries. It wasn't the pagans who burned.

3. Slavery among the Inuit is a fascinating question. Previously I had believed not, because the economic base is hunting, and you cannot safely control a captive if, to get economic value from him, you must arm him with deadly weapons. (This leaves aside the question of sexual slavery.) But on reading a bit more, I have come across a challenge to that assumption. These papers refer mostly to the American Arctic, ie Alaska and the Eskimos there. The Handbook of American Indians states "among the Eskimos slavery was unknown" (page 597 and also quoted in "Slavery among the Indians of Northwest America"). But here's a Reddit thread quoting historians and archaeologists, documenting Arctic slavery. That led me to "Raid, Retreat, Defend (Repeat)" - lots of warfare and slavery in the Arctic, though again, not where Canada is now. Still, the things we learn on the RefDesks! And check out the etymology of Slavey - the people, language, and places in the subArctic. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 22:31, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You seem to have missed the points from the slavery in Canada article. Black Loyalists may have come into (what is now) Canada and been free, but white Loyalists imported their slaves, and kept them. Not in large numbers compared to the US, but not mere isolated cases either. --Trovatore (talk) 22:42, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, slavery was not abolished in British North America until 1834 by the UK Slavery Abolition Act. See Black Enslavement in Canada. However, the importation of slaves to Upper Canada (present day Southern Ontario) was prohibited by the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, which was the first anti-slavery legislation in the Empire. Alansplodge (talk) 18:36, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

15 types of Gregorian calendars?

The seven pages like Common year starting on Sunday mention 15 types of Gregorian/Julian calendars (and how often they come up). How is it not 14 (common/leap times 7 starting days)? --Tardis (talk) 04:20, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In case anyone's confused, that's since been changed to "fourteen types of year". The statement that "The up to 15 types of years repeat in a 400-year cycle (20871 weeks) in the Gregorian calendar" was introduced by User:Crissov last year. I also find that puzzling, but perhaps he can explain what he meant. --Antiquary (talk) 10:00, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Could this be perhaps a confusion for the fact that a Perpetual Calendar would consist of 14 possible calendars plus one chart designating which should be used for each year? (=15 pages) - Nunh-huh 10:18, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Or could he just have been thinking of the original year repeating itself as the cycle starts again, though that would mean a 401-year cycle with still only really 14 different types of year. Well, just a thought. --Antiquary (talk) 10:21, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Or the 15th type could be years of adjustment, which historically have been of unusual length in multiple eras :-) Nyttend (talk) 11:25, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No, because it talks about the 15 types as part of a repeating cycle. I think it's an error. --69.159.60.147 (talk) 18:02, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As explained in the cited source, The Mathematics of the ISO 8601 Calendar, there are in fact 15 different years in the Gregorian calendar (According to ISO 8601 rules), because a common year starting on Saturday (dominical letter B) can either follow a common year starting on Friday (C) or a leap year starting on Thursday (DC): the former type has the weekend of 1 and 2 January in week 52 of the preceding year, the latter in week 53. — Christoph Päper 11:35, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ah! So there are only 14 types unless you use that week-numbering system. I think that needs explaining somewhere. --69.159.60.147 (talk) 07:09, 22 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe we should follow Nachum Dershowitz and Edward Reingold, who, in their book 'Calendrical Calculations, don't even call the ISO week calendar the Gregorian Calendar, and instead have a chapter titled "The ISO Calendar". I'd suggest having the main text say their are 14 types of Gregorian calendars, and relegate the calendars that assign weeks entirely to one year or another to a footnote. Jc3s5h (talk) 11:35, 22 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What year had the most amount of different songs at hot 100 weekly billboard chart?

What year had the most amount of different songs at hot 100 weekly billboard chart?
If we count every-time a single gone to the hot 100 weekly billboard chart at a certain year, what year would have the most amount of different hot 100 singles?177.92.128.26 (talk) 16:37, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Billboard.com maintains an extensive archive of their charts. Here is the 1958 page at their archive. Click the individual issue to get the hot 100 for that week. You can get every hot 100 they've ever published from Aug 9, 1958 (the first) through the current. --Jayron 32 17:12, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

There has to be a more efficient way than scrutinizing 3,100 of those. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 18:33, 20 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Only if someone had already done exactly that. If they haven't yet, then no, there isn't. Someone has to do it. I doubt God is going to spend a miracle making it happen spontaneously. --Jayron 32 04:23, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well it also depends what you mean by "more efficient" and "scrutinising". I imagine a competent programmer could easily script something to automatically parse the data probably in significantly less time than anyone is likely to do it manually. But if SMW could do this they wouldn't be asking the question and I doubt anyone is going to volunteer and it doesn't seem the sort of thing worth paying someone to do unless SMW is very rich with both their history and again the fact they bothered to ask suggests they aren't. So analysing the data manually is probably the best bet. Nil Einne (talk) 06:41, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I am not the OP. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 06:47, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No, but you did ask a question to indicate that you didn't understand that a real person at some point would have to do real work to get what the OP wanted; both myself and Nil were disabusing you of the misconception that things happen without someone actually doing work. --Jayron 32 11:39, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes I did miss that but either way, someone is going to have to do the work, and it's unlikely either you SMW or the IP/OP are capable of scripting something to do this without a lot of learning so the quickest solution would be manual. (Although the IP only left that one comment, it's likely anyone capable of scripting something would have thought to check out the site, and then not bothered to ask when they got their answer however many minutes later when they ran their script. And besides [5].) Nil Einne (talk) 12:00, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I just thought this question might be wondered often enough to be in a trivia section somewhere on the Internet. Possibly the Billboard site itself which has a financial interest in increasing interest in the most famous US song chart by having a trivia section. Maybe some of the hundreds of millions of Americans did it manually doing a tiny amount of the work each week for decades and put it on a website or one of the millions of programmers in America have wondered this before and scraped the site. Someone on Earth probably knows but whether that can be easily found I'm not sure. Especially in a verifiable non-original research source like some guy's claim that he (and his ancestor(s)?) have been keeping track of this in a notebook each week since 1958. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:15, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If anyone is interested, that website can be scraped rather easily. The URL is formatted with dates, not random strings. For example, view-source:http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/1958-08-09 is the Hot 100 list for August 9 1958. You can easily cycle through the days. Then, inside the HTML, the listing is broken into articles. You can pull all article elements from the document and the attributes include a style which embeds the listing number (chart-row--1 is song number 1) and the song title as data-song-title. So, if you don't care who did the song, you can get the position and title from the article tag itself. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 12:51, 21 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]