Bonjour – Hello!
Welcome to the Atwater Library Living History Collection – a permanent collection linking Montreal islanders to their past, present, and future.
We hope you’ll stay awhile, browse, and learn something that interests you about our particular area of the Montreal island by listening to the stories of the people who live, work, or simply visit here. Enjoy!
“Of (all) the works of the mind, history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws… A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.”
-“History Essay,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841