Charlotte Gray, OC

They've given my friend, and one fine writer, Charlotte Gray, the Order of Canada. Good on them.

Canada Day with Taylor Parnaby and Rudyard Griffiths

If you are in Toronto and vicinity this weekend, I'm talking Canada Day with radio guy Taylor Parnaby on CFRB, 1010 AM, at 6.05 pm tonight, Saturday night. Then I'm off to a beach by a northern lake for a few days.

Speaking of Canada Day, my friends at the Dominion Institute have released their annual poll proving once again that Canadians don't know dick about Canadian history.

Now I hugely admire what Rudyard Griffiths and the DomInst have done the last ten years. And they have invited me to some great parties over the years (not something you expect as a historian!). But as I have said elsewhere, if you asked Canadians the poll question, "What month did the October Crisis happen?" eighty percent would be socialized to say, "I don't know; we don't have enough Canadian history in our schools."

If Canadians were not interested in Canadian history, I'd have to find some other line of work, is my bottom line on this. I'm damn grateful to all those of you who do share my interest, and not much inclined to ram Canadiana down the throats of the others.

Literary Review of Canada

My essay "Teenage Mutant Supreme Court Justices: When a copy is not a copy" (it's on the Robertson v. Thomson copyright decision in the Supreme Court of Canada) is in this month's Literary Review of Canada. It is just published and on newsstands everywhere ... well, in a few places anyway. It's to be the available-online article at http://lrc.reviewcanada.ca/ too, but they have not got around to posting this month's there yet.

Blogger counts this as my 200th blog posting. Must put this blog about 190 ahead of the median for all blogs.

Late update: it's there now.

First Nations Day of Action

Tomorrow, June 29, is the First Nations Day of Action. With the potential for occupations and confrontations, there's much talk that native people should not be above the law.

Well, it's true, we all ought to have equal protection under the rule of law. But native people's legal rights and entitlements in this country been too rarely been safeguarded by the rule of law. Canada's treaty obligations are real and serious. But our governments have always demanded that First Nations endlessly litigate even the most obvious requirements. Our settler courts have rarely been active in pushing governments to comply with the treaties.

So I would prefer the rule of law. But I understand it's hard to expect people to respect that rule when it never seems to work for them.

I hope everything goes peaceably tomorrow, and that we learn from what we were spared.

Lipstadt

Just to note that today the "Blog of Note" featured on the Blogger home page is historian Deborah Lipstadt's History on Trial.

Lipstadt is the American historian who called David Irving a Holocaust denier, was sued by him, and was vindicated by the courts.

I've been looking about for historical bloggers recently, and there are not many in Canada.

Historians at IdeaCity

Here's one big salute to Moses Znaimer, who conceived IdeaCity as a conference to throw together interesting people with big ideas in all fields, and made it so. There's no podium, speakers get just 20 minutes with a big clock running down the time right in front of them. No questions. 500 people, it runs for three days, often 9 am to 8 pm with breaks for things like yoga. And there's a lavish party each night. Intense fun. Cost you about $3000, but like intellectual summer camp for rich people. To press your nose to the glass, try ideacityonline.com
Three writers did us proud on the history of Canada: Charlotte Gray her sharp, pithy, charming self. Jack Granatstein confronting a mostly left-liberal crowd with unfashionable thoughts about why we should support the U.S. And Noah Richler offering, without a note or a prompting, twenty minutes of deeply-thought reflection on how we construct stories and stories construct us.



Yeah, I talked to. Mostly on creativity on the digital world. Sweet for an historian, to be on a panel with cool kids talking about technology and sex. Think I held my own.

Alas poor Otzi

I find I'm still ... depressed, almost, over the news that Otzi, the 5000 years dead "Ice Man" whose body was found in a glacier between Italy and Austria in 1991, died in battle.

An arrow in a major artery in his back did him in, apparently. And he had other wounds. And he had the blood of several other people on him. Death in combat looks like the plausible explanation.

Well, sure, that's our species. But I find myself wishing when we have one guy to testify to life in Europe 5000 years ago, that he had not gone for soldiers like so many of his descendants.

Update, July 2007: Current National Geographic has the story in its typically superb fashion, with some revisions to the summary above.

IdeaCity This Week!

Launching on Wednesday. Details here. Hoping to blog from it when I can.

If you are there, say hello.

Old Media Spurns Blogging Historian

At the National Magazine Awards gala at the Carlu in Toronto last night, my work for The Beaver, nominated as Best Column up against columnists from Maclean's, Toronto Life, L'Actualité, etc., did not win. Oh well. You can still read the columns here. Well done, Robert Fulford, who won for work in Queen's Quarterly.

I see the press today says The Walrus had 51 winners. That was 51 nominations, of which a handful were gold (gold means you go up on the podium, do the shake hand and the speak bit ). All nominees were already winners ? How oddly consoling, for a moment.

Scott Feschuk, MC for the event , said the difference between old media and new media is new media doesn't get to chi-chi banquets like this.

Book of the Week: The Sushi Economy

Sasha Issenberg, Yank journalist, has a wonderful book out called The Sushi Economy (Penguin Books, hardcover) .

It's not so long ago nobody outside a few fish markets in Tokyo ate raw fish. Now the world does. What's the history of that?

Issenberg starts at North Cove, Prince Edward Island. Not long ago, when they caught a champion tuna, they took a photo -- and then buried it with a bulldozer. Japan Airlines, looking for cargo it could ship from Canada on its Tokyo-Toronto freight run, said hmmmm. And the rest is the story of the globalization of trade and taste. Brilliant idea.

History of the dollar

Currency trading creates a kind of historical record: what a dollar is worth at any particular time. The Canadian dollar was way up near parity with the American dollar back in the 1970s, then it went falling falling endlessly into the $0.65 range. Rose a bit in the late 1980s, supposedly a quid quo pro for free trade, then down again.

Now it's heading back to parity. Well, yes, say the experts, of course. Canada has sound fiscal policy, shrinking debt loads, strong demand for its commodities, things like that. The world wants all that, so the dollar is rising.

But ...Canada has had all those things for most of a decade, and for most of that time the market yawned. You have to conclude the money boys were probably undervaluing the dollar five years.

They are probably overvaluing it now, as it rises toward parity. The fast money boys who set markets today don't know what the right level is. The market is not that smart.

Still, remember Keynes. The market's ability to remain irrational is greater than your ability to remain liquid.

CBC's Seven Wonders

Must say they lost me when they dropped Gros Morne. www.cbc.ca/sevenwonders for what's left.

Killing off the mammoths

Archaeologists of North American paleo-history hardly find a Clovis point, it sometimes seems, unless it is embedded in the mammoth bone some early hunter droven it into. Humankind erupted into the Americas, goes the story, and the big prey species were quickly hunted to extinction or, like the bison, changed into something quite new.

The Economist, of all sources, notes an alternative history. Scientists are finding evidence that hints of a catastrophe in North America at about 12,900 years ago. This one was not a meteor like the one that did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, they theorize. It would have been a comet that vaporized above the earth, leaving no vast crater but producing an enormous heat explosion sufficient to devastate North America. Maybe that's what killed the mammoths, speculates James Kennett of UCal Santa Barbara. Maybe it killed the Clovis people too, and a second migration or a remnant population had to start all over again.

Hmm. What would this startlingly recent disaster have done to the remaining glaciation? To the oceans? Would there really be so little evidence for it? Why were, say, grizzlies, caribou, and bison spared?

Sounds like a catchy theory that needs work.

Expo Kaleidoscope online

My Beaver cover story now online at their site.

Sergeant Beaver

Oughta be iconic -- the Beaver magazine cover for my story.