Apart from reading her and hearing her, I met her once and saw her in public a few times. She was one of those people you instantly understood to be irreplaceable. Now she’s gone.
Much mention is made of her Death and Life of Great American Cities, and deservedly. But today I'm thinking of a later book called The Economy of Cities, and of a historical argument she made there: cities came before agriculture.
It’s a thought experiment she did, mostly. She posits a settled community arising from control of a trade in a local supply of obsidian. (It might have been copper, or a reliable supply of fish that could be dried, or potter’s clay, or anything unevenly distributed and worth trading for, but for her example she imagines a community she calls "New Obsidian" arising somewhere in Neolithic western Asia.) It’s in this kind of settled community, she hypothesizes, that there would be time and opportunity to observe and reflect and experiment on seeds, or even animals, and how they could be kept and cultivated and gradually adapted to human needs. That’s where agriculture would arise, she argued, not among hunters and gatherers. Later, farming would have been farmed out to the countryside. Cities came before farms, not after.
This idea flows from Jacobs’ fundamental insight about cities as generators of economic innovation, particularly random, unpredictable, unplanned innovations. As a way into Neolithic history, it’s always seemed thoroughly plausible to me. Jacobs’s insight came back when I read Jared Diamond on the unbelievable complexity of breeding corn from the wild teosinte plant of Central America. Or when I looked into the trade networks of non-agricultural Native North Americans before European contact. But I’ve never seen it picked up seriously by historians of early civilization.
Her Systems of Survival has a theory of cultural formation that is challenging for historians too.
Jane Jacobs was a model of what a public intellectual should aspire to, I’d say. Did you know she consistently declined honorary degrees? Every time I see a university giving another one to a celebrity broadcaster or nouveau-riche potential donor, I remember that.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Six Nations at Caledonia
The Globe and Mail editorial last Saturday: "The law must prevail in the native dispute."
I'm all for the rule of law. But here the law is at the heart of the problem. You cannot study the history of the Six Nations (or practically any other First Nations community) without discovering how outrageously government officials plundered First Nations lands from the 18th through the 20th century.
The Six Nations in 1784 held unimpeachable title to almost 400,000 hectares along the Grand River in what is now the heart of Southern Ontario. Today they retain control of 19,000 hectares. Huge tracts were transferred by Indian agents and other Crown officials, always supposedly for the benefit of the Six Nations, into Crown land and delivered to settlers. Somehow the revenues always ended up in the Crown revenues, never in the Six Nations treasury.
Well, they should sue. Sure, but from the 1920s into the 1960s, First Nations were not allowed to sue without government consent. And even when they could sue, judges constantly ignored Canadian treaty commitments in favour of a concept of limitless Crown sovereignty that justified any predatory conduct of Canadian governments. The Six Nations could not get the Crown officials to accept their duties to the Six Nations, and they could not get the Courts to acknowledge this was wrong.
Look into the history of the piece of land that is currently contested, and you will quickly find a bogus transaction that removed it from Six Nations control without their consent and without benefit to them. Look further and you will find a string of court cases in which the judges declared that was just fine.
Sadly, the rule of law in Canada has worked for us and not for First Nations. When we call for the law to prevail, and never expect Canada to take seriously its treaty obligations to First Nations... well, we get the barricades.
I'm all for the rule of law. But here the law is at the heart of the problem. You cannot study the history of the Six Nations (or practically any other First Nations community) without discovering how outrageously government officials plundered First Nations lands from the 18th through the 20th century.
The Six Nations in 1784 held unimpeachable title to almost 400,000 hectares along the Grand River in what is now the heart of Southern Ontario. Today they retain control of 19,000 hectares. Huge tracts were transferred by Indian agents and other Crown officials, always supposedly for the benefit of the Six Nations, into Crown land and delivered to settlers. Somehow the revenues always ended up in the Crown revenues, never in the Six Nations treasury.
Well, they should sue. Sure, but from the 1920s into the 1960s, First Nations were not allowed to sue without government consent. And even when they could sue, judges constantly ignored Canadian treaty commitments in favour of a concept of limitless Crown sovereignty that justified any predatory conduct of Canadian governments. The Six Nations could not get the Crown officials to accept their duties to the Six Nations, and they could not get the Courts to acknowledge this was wrong.
Look into the history of the piece of land that is currently contested, and you will quickly find a bogus transaction that removed it from Six Nations control without their consent and without benefit to them. Look further and you will find a string of court cases in which the judges declared that was just fine.
Sadly, the rule of law in Canada has worked for us and not for First Nations. When we call for the law to prevail, and never expect Canada to take seriously its treaty obligations to First Nations... well, we get the barricades.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Vote for Louisbourg Portraits
The Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart, founded 1906, is celebrating its centenary this year. Congratulations -- a publisher that lives a hundred years is something special, and look at the books they have done. Actually they are dying to show you. They have set up a website listing the 100 great M&S titles from one hundred years of publishing.
I'm happy to say my Louisbourg Portraits is one of the hundred. The impressive roster of titles is heavy on (some pretty good) fiction, but history titles include George Blackburn's The Guns of Normandy, Barry Broadfoot's Ten Lost Years, Richmond Hobson's wonderful BC memoir Nothing too Good for a Cowboy and a few others.
At their website www.mcclelland.com/100years you can see the whole list of 100. And they invite you to vote for your own personal favourites. Just by voting, you can win a library of all 100.
Looks like voting is a little light right now -- serious voting action on only a handful of titles. If you all log on and vote for Louisbourg Portraits, your favourite Canadian title (and still in print from McClelland and Stewart), you just might be able to move its stats a little. Go for it!
I'm happy to say my Louisbourg Portraits is one of the hundred. The impressive roster of titles is heavy on (some pretty good) fiction, but history titles include George Blackburn's The Guns of Normandy, Barry Broadfoot's Ten Lost Years, Richmond Hobson's wonderful BC memoir Nothing too Good for a Cowboy and a few others.
At their website www.mcclelland.com/100years you can see the whole list of 100. And they invite you to vote for your own personal favourites. Just by voting, you can win a library of all 100.
Looks like voting is a little light right now -- serious voting action on only a handful of titles. If you all log on and vote for Louisbourg Portraits, your favourite Canadian title (and still in print from McClelland and Stewart), you just might be able to move its stats a little. Go for it!
Borovoy on Freedom of Speech
I was gratified the other day to see Alan Borovoy, longtime general counsel to the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (www.ccla.org) criticizing the Alberta Human Rights Commission's investigation into Ezra Levant and his magazine Western Standard for publishing those Danish cartoons about violence under the cover of Islam.
I expect Alberta's investigation into the Western Standard will come to nothing. The magazine's right to publish cartoons will be affirmed, and the Commission will declare it has no authority to interfere with that right.
But Borovoy's point was that Human Rights Codes should restrain behaviour, not speech. It's not good enough that free speech will eventually be permitted. The Commission should have said at the outset that it has no mandate to investigate the exercise of free speech. The investigation should not be taking place.
This is a blog about Canadian history -- and I'll get back to that. But sometimes issues arise.
I expect Alberta's investigation into the Western Standard will come to nothing. The magazine's right to publish cartoons will be affirmed, and the Commission will declare it has no authority to interfere with that right.
But Borovoy's point was that Human Rights Codes should restrain behaviour, not speech. It's not good enough that free speech will eventually be permitted. The Commission should have said at the outset that it has no mandate to investigate the exercise of free speech. The investigation should not be taking place.
This is a blog about Canadian history -- and I'll get back to that. But sometimes issues arise.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Freedom and Tenure
H-Canada, the electronic discussion board for historians of Canada, has recently been discussing academic freedom. Someone quoted a journal called Academic Matters (Spring 2006 -- not a journal I know), which has an essay on the lives of sessional lecturers. The essayist used a pseudonym, evidently fearing the consequences of speaking freely about the working conditions of untenured scholars. The poster, Professor David Calverley, also quotes Michael Ignatieff saying (same issue of Academic Matters), "It is amazingly hard...to think an honest and independent thought in academic life." What does the essayist's fear of being identified say about freedom of thought in the academy, Calverley wonders.
It's always seemed to me -- a writer outside the university for many years -- that the issue is the nature of institutions, not the nature of political agendas about academic freedom. Universities are bureaucratic institutions. Inevitably they are run by rules, not personalities, like any other part of the civil service or corporate organization. If the person teaching History 123 is hit by a bus today, the university's need will be another person able to take up the course tomorrow with as little disruption as possible. It's in the nature of institutions to foster sameness and to inculcate institutional loyalty, obedience to hierarcy, commitment to the mission. Those things are not the university's intellectual mission, to be sure, but institutional behaviour drives them in that direction.
That institutional weight seems to me a greater threat to originality, honesty, independence, than any political agenda, or at least one that is much less easy to identify and resist. It's a professor's burden to be at once a loyal servant of the institution and a fearless independant intellectual at the same time, and of course the duties are incompatible.
This is not a factor that academic reflection upon academic freedom ever seems to consider very seriously.
It's always seemed to me -- a writer outside the university for many years -- that the issue is the nature of institutions, not the nature of political agendas about academic freedom. Universities are bureaucratic institutions. Inevitably they are run by rules, not personalities, like any other part of the civil service or corporate organization. If the person teaching History 123 is hit by a bus today, the university's need will be another person able to take up the course tomorrow with as little disruption as possible. It's in the nature of institutions to foster sameness and to inculcate institutional loyalty, obedience to hierarcy, commitment to the mission. Those things are not the university's intellectual mission, to be sure, but institutional behaviour drives them in that direction.
That institutional weight seems to me a greater threat to originality, honesty, independence, than any political agenda, or at least one that is much less easy to identify and resist. It's a professor's burden to be at once a loyal servant of the institution and a fearless independant intellectual at the same time, and of course the duties are incompatible.
This is not a factor that academic reflection upon academic freedom ever seems to consider very seriously.
Historians at Banff
I've just returned from a writers' conference at the Banff Centre for the Arts, one of Alberta's great contributions to Canadian culture. The Centre offers extraordinary facilities in which artists can meet, and if the meeting lags, there are always those great slabs of rock rising into the sky all around, sunlight and cloudshadow playing on them.
This was a gathering of writers, but some of the writers were historians. Lynne Bowen, the British Columbia historian of Vancouver Island coal miners and much else, was describing how "Boss Whistle," the phrase she coined for her early 1980s book with that title, has gone into the local idiom.
"Boss Whistle" was Lynne's own way to evoke how the minehead whistle dominated miners' lives: start work now, stop work now, no work today. It's a good book Boss Whistle; you should look it up and read the powerful passage at the start that presents the power of Boss Whistle.
Nowadays no one around Naniamo does anything about local mining heritage without using the phrase. Lynne was a little ambivalent about how easily her own image has been appropriated -- (no one credits the originator!). But I'd say creating fresh idiom is what writers are for.
Ted Bishop, an Edmonton writer at the conference, was explaining how his recent book Riding With Rilke sets out an analogy between the shock of a motorcycle accident (he knows that in his bones) and the shock of archival discovery. I know archives better than choppers, but the way he suggested the comparison makes me think it's a book archives rats ought to look out for.
This was a gathering of writers, but some of the writers were historians. Lynne Bowen, the British Columbia historian of Vancouver Island coal miners and much else, was describing how "Boss Whistle," the phrase she coined for her early 1980s book with that title, has gone into the local idiom.
"Boss Whistle" was Lynne's own way to evoke how the minehead whistle dominated miners' lives: start work now, stop work now, no work today. It's a good book Boss Whistle; you should look it up and read the powerful passage at the start that presents the power of Boss Whistle.
Nowadays no one around Naniamo does anything about local mining heritage without using the phrase. Lynne was a little ambivalent about how easily her own image has been appropriated -- (no one credits the originator!). But I'd say creating fresh idiom is what writers are for.
Ted Bishop, an Edmonton writer at the conference, was explaining how his recent book Riding With Rilke sets out an analogy between the shock of a motorcycle accident (he knows that in his bones) and the shock of archival discovery. I know archives better than choppers, but the way he suggested the comparison makes me think it's a book archives rats ought to look out for.
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