The Atlas historique du Québec is one of the primary publications of the Centre interuniversitaire d’études québécoises (CIEQ) and showcases the CIEQ’s unique approach to understanding Quebec’s past through its social and spatial dimensions. Produced by interdisciplinary teams of authors, the atlases are a mix of texts, cartographic representations and image. The texts are both scholarly and accessible to the general public, and present both a synthesis of existing work and original research not available elsewhere.
One more volume is currently in production: L’école au Québec (expected for 2023). Since 2014, the focus of the Atlas historique du Québec project has shifted from published volumes to online «chantiers», ongoing publication projects that are progressively expanded as texts are produced. All of the original atlases are also available for download. The original atlases were produced only in French. We feel that it is time to make this work at least partially available in English. Hence the current project of preparing a translation of a selection of texts from the atlases. The focus for now is on the first six atlases, which mainly addressed francophone society in what was termed the «Axe laurentien», the Saint Lawrence valley. We have chosen not to update or revise the existing texts, which thus reflect the research orientations and state of knowledge at the time of initial publication. Some fields, such as Indigenous history, have evidently advanced very considerably over the last two decades.