Mona Parsons was sentenced to a Nazi prison camp for helping dozens of downed Allied airmen escape.

Mona Parsons

Heritage Minutes: Mona Parsons

Tommy Prince

Osborn of Hong Kong

In World War II, the troops in Hong Kong were the first Canadians to see combat. During an attack, Sergeant Major John Osborn of Winnipeg protected his company by throwing himself on a live grenade.

Tommy Prince of the Brokenhead Objibway Nation is one of the most decorated soldiers in Canada's history.

Canadian General Arthur Currie leads Allied forces to Canada's most significant victory of World War I (1917).

Vimy Ridge

A young Canadian gunner stays behind to save his friend in a flaming Lancaster Bomber and dies in the attempt. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for bravery.

Andrew Mynarski

After WWII, veterans confronted a politician about the lack of shelter, launching the construction of 10,000 units of Veterans' Housing.

Home from the Wars

General Jacques Dextraze of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force rescued a group of hostages from the Katangan rebels in the Congo.

Dextraze in the Congo

On the evening of D-Day, musician and broadcaster Johnny Lombardi boosts morale on the edge of a Normandy Beach.

Juno Beach

Heritage Minutes, also known officially as Historica Minutes: History by the Minute, are a series of sixty-second short films, each illustrating an important moment in Canadian history. They appear frequently on Canadian television and in cinemas before movies and are now also sold on DVD. The Minutes were first introduced on March 31, 1991 as part of a one-off heavily-promoted history quiz show hosted by Rex Murphy.

The thirteen original short films were broken up and run between shows on CBC Television and CTV Network. The continued broadcast of the Minutes and the production of new ones was pioneered by Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, Canada Post Power Broadcasting, and the National Film Board. They were devised, developed and largely narrated by noted Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, while the producer of the series was Robert Guy Scully. In 2009 Historica merged with The Dominion Institute to become The Historica-Dominion Institute.

While the foundations have not paid networks to air Minutes, they have made them freely available, and in the early years paid to have them run in cinemas across the country. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ruled that Heritage Minutes are an "on-going dramatic series" thus each minute counts as ninety-seconds of a station's Canadian content requirements.

Mona Parsons

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