Canadian History on the Web?

Yeah, it happens sometimes.

Ryan O'Connor and Alan McEachern have made a website of their research into the 1970s back-to-the-landers in Prince Edward Island. Photography, including the sow at right, by the great George Zimbel.

Jonathan Vance Superstar

There's a long and praiseful review of Jonathan Vance's new book A History of Canadian Culture in The Globe & Mail. First I'd heard of it, actually.

Jonathan Vance came to attention, I think, with Death So Noble, a much admired book not so much about the First World War as about the memory of the First World War. His University of Western Ontario history department website says his interests are "Canadian military and cultural history, war and society in the 20th century, and social memory." But he's growing in scope and ambition, it seems.

A few years ago he tackled aviation's place in the Canadian imagination. Recently he wrote about two Canadian intelligence officers killed in the Second World War. Now comes a big ambitious book on the history of Canadian culture.

This is good. Young (historians can be young a lot time!) and prolific history profs with the tools and the ambition to take on subjects the world might notice and to write well and interestingly about them -- Canadian history could use a few of those. Now Jonathan Vance moves into that territory. We could use more. (Tim Cook comes to mind.)

Ten Best History Books?

The British newspaper The Independent publishes "The Ten Best History Books." (click on the headline above for the link)

How many of the ten best has this wellread historian read? Um. Well, actually.... actually, zero.

I tell myself this is more to do with the rich diversity of historical writing and the insularity of the Brits. And one's on my to-read list, and yes, some of the others sound interesting.

Note the Canadian on the list: Katherine Aschenburg's Clean, published here as The Dirt on Clean.

Speaking of Top Ten Lists, you probably know, you erudite people, that The Guardian online regularly invites writers of all kinds to produce Top Ten Book List on all kinds of intriguing and eccentric topics. Rather more appealing than this absolute top ten thing The Independent seems to be doing

History and place

Years ago I talked with Alex Sinclair of the folky trio Tamarack (website here) about how they toured the country endlessly, performing but also creating songs rooted in local culture and history. Sinclair said wherever they went they made a point of finding the locally-minded book vendor, for there was always someone with a trove of local history, lore, memoir and commemoration for sale. Whenever I hear about how Canadians don't care about their history sufficiently, I remember that.

That theme pretty much drives my column in the April-May Beaver, now reaching newsstands partout. My old friend Robert Morgan has been doing and creating the history of Cape Breton Island for decades, and the publication of his new history Rise Again made my opportunity not only to celebrate him but to consider a variety of people around the country who similarly make local history bloom. (That's him among his roses in Sydney, natch.)

Beaver info is here, but the column's not on their website. Go buy one. Better, subscribe.

History of the border: Get a passport

"It's a real border. Get used to it," new Yank Homeland Security czar Janet Napolitano was reported as saying the other day to all the Canadian lobbyists pleading for special exemptions from American border controls.

Today the Globe & Mail is talking sense on the same topic. To hell with these "enhanced" drivers' licences the provinces are proposing, for which we will pay extra fees so the Americans can invade the privacy of travellers. Foreign borders are a national responsibility, not the purview of the provincial Motor Vehicles department. If you want to cross international borders, get a passport. And stop pretending the 49th parallel is not really a border.

I'm broadly sympathetic to free trade principles, but what always grated about the Canadian FTA proponents back in the late 1980s was their naked ambition, not so much to trade with the United States as to see American rules and (de)regulations imposed on Canadian practice; in short, to pretend the border was not there.

It was always a pipe dream. The FTA was never that broad. George Bush and his crew looked thuggish when they took the border seriously, but that's because they were thugs. They are gone, but the border remains, and it's still real. Get a passport, or stay home.

Make Big Cheques doing Canadian History

The Dominion Institute announces an essay contest for students, linked to its book The Great Questions. It offers serious dollars and a trip to Ottawa. Deadline in May.

If anyone had...

... an original hardcover copy of Browne, Documents on Confederation, Carleton Library #40 from 1969 (not the nasty woodpulpy paperback like I have), I could imagine he or she might be a reader of this blog. If it's you, you could help the cause of scholarship here.

(It occurs to me this is a kind of conversation one would not have had, pre-net.)

History of misquotation

That famous line of Edmund Burke? "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

It ain't his. Hilariously demonstrated here, even if you already knew.

History of Copyright

Meera Nair, a doctoral candidate in Simon Fraser's Communications department, has an article in the latest (March 2009) Canadian Historical Review on the history of copyright law in Canada: "The Copyright Act of 1889: A Canadian Declaration of Independence."

It's available here ...but only if you subscribe, or by purchase ($13.00).

As the title suggests, the issue was as much diplomacy and Canadian-Imperial relations as copyright itself. Copyright turned out to be one of the first places where the Canadian government actually stood on the principles of the British North America Act and asserted that Canada really was a self-governing nation, entitled to legislate in the national interest without regard to the conflicting national interest of Great Britain. The key figure in that rare self-assertion was the shortlived prime minister John Thompson.

Life of Hamilton

Reading this long, thoughtful, provocative essay about Alexander Hamilton in City Journal, a mag ostensibly about urban affairs rather than history, I wonder who might ever contribute material like this on any Canadian politician... and who would publish it if they did?

In the meantime, there's David Mitchell in the Globe & Mail, claiming R.B. Bennett as the true father of the activist federal government. Mitchell skates around the fact that most of Bennett's economic legislation was invalidated by the courts. As I understand it, it was the Second World War crisis and the postwar expansions that really facilitated vigorous federal incursion into territories previously considered provincial jurisdiction.

Stephen Harper thinks MPs have consciences?

Stephen Harper wants to loosen the gun-control laws. No surprise. He wants Parliament to pass a bill to that end. No surprise.

But Stephen Harper believes that MPs have a right to make up their own minds on important matters of public policy? Surprise!

Harper urged members of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters to contact opposition MPs and pressure them to support legislation that would target the six-year-old program.

"We are looking to unite a majority of MPs in repealing the long gun registry," Harper told the group in a speech in Mississauga, west of Toronto.

"The leaders of the opposition parties continue to be against this. But there are MPs in all these parties that know what we know, that law-abiding hunters and farmers are not part of the crime problem."

"I challenge you to press these MPs to follow their consciences."

'Course, when you read the fine print, it's the old scam. He wants opposition members to follow their consciences, and then he will attack the opposition leaders for being too weak to prevent them from doing so.

But the idea is sound. Imagine what a lively, responsible, useful place a Parliament could be if MPs said, "You know, what the party leadership wants is actually bad public policy. Some of us are going to urge something different. And if we can't change party policy, so be it. We'll agree to disagree on this one."

Bill Casey, Conservative MP, said essentially that last year. He's out of the Conservative caucus now.

Can you be a Good Historian and a Bad Person?

J.H. Hexter argued that one of the historian's tools was being of the same species as one's subjects; you would inevitably use human intuition, the awareness of human reality, as a way into the personality and actions of one's subjects. So the richness of the historian's character shapes the richness of his or her history?

Usually when it is questioned if a bad person can be a good historian, it's someone like David Irving, the very skilled technical historian and Holocaust denier, who is beinc considered. Recently, the now very elderly and very distinguished British historian Eric Hobsbawm is under scrutiny -- for being an unrepentant member of the Communist Party long after its crimes had been exposed and an unapologetic Companion of Honour while also excoriating Britain and its class system at every turn. What the hell kind of historian can this be, harrumph his critics?

Britain's History Today editor Paul Lay follows the debate here (great photo) and here, with links to the opinion pieces that started and continue the controversy.

I interviewed Hobsbawn once and he was a lovely interview, but we were talking of pirates and rebels, one of his favourite topics, not about complicity in communism. But I once read a comment of his about how dedicated universities today are to their students, and I thought if he could believe that, loyalty to the Communist Party was maybe not so much of a stretch after all.

Brian Young Conference in Montreal

Brian Young, the about-to-retire history professor at McGill, has been a productive and stimulating writer on Quebec history for a long time. His core works have been rather specialized and technical, I suppose, not bestseller material. Even his biography of George-Etienne Cartier is anything but a conventional admiring biography; it's mostly a close, tough analysis of the business and class interests of the "Montreal bourgeois."

One book that shows off Professor Young's methods and skills is his 1994 study The Politics of Codification. It sounds, ah, unpromising, I know: a book-length analysis of the mid-19th century revision and codification of Quebec's French-derived civil law into the Quebec Civil Code. Okay, it's not easy going, but there is a profound analysis here of a great political, legal, social, intellectual achievement -- one that says much about an evolution taking place in Quebec and particularly in Montreal at that time.

Most of Young's work has like that: sceptical interrogations of the socio-economic structures of 19th century Quebec society and politics from a marxist point of view. When I've needed to write something about Quebec, even on topics far afield from Young's specific interests, his seemingly-specialized works are ones I find myself going back to.

He's had wider interests too. He's the author of Respectable Burial, a study of Montreal's Mount Royal Cemetary. The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum was a powerful critique of changes -- regrettable changes, in Young's view -- at Montreal's McCord Museum. And he co-authored the widely used survey Short History of Quebec with John Dickinson.

Young has also been active for many years in a network called the Montreal History Group (long called the Montreal Business History Group). On April 30, the Group is hosting a day-long conference in Brian Young's honour. It's at Thomson House on the McGill campus -- more information, if you are interested, by email to mhgmayday2009[at]gmail.com

History of Skating

Kevin Plummer has it all at his Historicist blog. Great archival photos too.

Obligatory Canadian history?

The kids at St Theresa Secondary School in Belleville, Ontario, think they deserve more Canada in their school classes. Indeed, they think everyone does.

They have launched an online petition -- find it here -- to "change the high school graduation requirements [in Ontario] to include a mandatory Canadian history course at the grade 12 level." The St Theresa gang were inspired by a Dominion Institute survey and they have the support of Canada's National History Society and the Ontario Historical Society.

I applaud the efforts of the students (and all their backers are old comrades of mine). But this is one petition I am not going to sign.

Students entering Grade 12 have a lot of choices to make and a lot of options to choose from. They feel their futures and their careers are on the line. It's really only in Grades 11 and 12 that they have any serious range of course options to chose from. So they have difficult choices to make; I think they can choose for themselves.

And while I'm second to none in supporting history classes for those who want them, I'm actually cool to pushing history down anyone's throat. Nor am I convinced that history is the only pathway to the kind of Canadian knowledge and Canadian citizenship the students (and I!) want to promote. What's wrong with a course in law that brings kids up against our Canadian legal system, the Charter, and the rights and obligations of citizenship? Or a philosophy course plumbing the meaning of citizenship, liberty, and the balance of individual and society? Or an economic course investigating how Canada does its business? Or a politics course, or one in Canadian literature? And that's not to mention the value for French-language studies to anyone deeply engaged with this country. In other words, there are lots of ways for Grade 12 students to engage with Canada without being locked into a mandatory history course.

And hey, don't we want our kids to be scientifically literate, and knowledgeable about the environment, and physically fit, and ...? There are not enough slots in the schedule for all the courses a bright, curious, conscientious high school student will want to take already!

And I mean no discredit to our educators when I say that the real crisis in Canadian historical knowledge is not in the schools, but outside the schools. It's a truism that "no history" is taught in our schools. But my children have both gone through the Ontario public schools in recent years, and it seems they did Canadian history endlessly -- and very little of any other kind of history.

It's not by forcing history on school kids that we will save the country or even build a historically-literate society. When we build a consciousness throughout society that Canadian history is a civic skill and a cultural treasure that adults and citizens should cherish for themselves, then we will not have to worry about delegating the task of knowing history to schoolchildren.

Death or Canada on History Television tonight

Tonight sees the broadcast of the Canada-Ireland production Death or Canada, an ambitious dramatized documentary on the Irish famine of the mid-1840s and the immigration to Canada of tens of thousands of refugees. Judging by the stills here, the production values are high, and the program has already been nominated as Best Documentary Series in Ireland.

Outside Canada, the film's title seems to be "Fleeing the Famine," but there looks to be a good deal of Canadian involvement in the project. Toronto insurance man Robert Kearns is a backer and onscreen presence, the work of Archaeological Services on famine sites in Canada is featured, and University of Toronto historian Mark McGowan wrote the book that goes with the film.

Surprisingly enough, the broadcast is on History Television, normally the last place one looks for serious or challenging material about history. It's eight to ten pm Eastern time tonight March 16. (h/t - Andrew Stewart)

Political History of the Census

Strange how just counting heads becomes a political act. Censuses are always political.

Here's a creepy proof of that: the United States census in 2010 will stop tallying same-sex unions and will not record the sexual orientation of citizens. Censuses used to count same-sex common-law couples, but the "Defence of Marriage Act" now forbids collection of such data. Parents of children in same-sex households will be recorded... as single parents.

Canada? Well, Canada does not ask about sexual orientation, but it does tally same-sex couples. They were about 0.5% of all couples counted in 2001's census, and same-sex married couples counted as "married" on the 2006 mini-census (though the gay-rights org Egale criticized the way the question was phrased.) Evidently how all this will be phrased on the Canadian 2011 census is being reviewed.

Of course if StatsCan continues with its insane policy of making the raw census data secret forever, even in a hundred years we won't be able to assess all the implications of the findings. But surely that whole idea is too wierd to survive.

History of Translation (or vice versa)

This is awkward. On his blog Pample the Moose, University of Guelph historian Matthew Hayday reports on his reading of André Pratte's provocative essay collection Reconquering Canada: Quebec Federalists Speak up for Change, translated by Patrick Watson -- a book and argument we've noted here before. Being a properly bilingual Canadian historian, Hayday's also been comparing the English text to the French original.

So when he reads a spectacular historical clunker in the English-language text about "the Manitoba Schools Question of 1890, which created publicly funded separate schools for French and English students," he finds his faith in the book and its authors being shaken. He knows well -- don't we all, my lovelies? -- that the thing in question in the Schools Question was Manitoba's abolition of publicly-funded schools for francophone students. Perplexed, Hayday goes back to the original...

...and finds the mistake is not there at all. The little parenthetical explanation that misstates the whole point of the Manitoba Schools Question just doesn't exist in the original essay. It was added into the translation.

You should read Matthew's whole post.

Should history be political? Should politics be historical? Should the whole thing be online?

Two American historical bloggers have opened a book review cum seminar on the meaning of historical work and the politics of doing history. Notorious Ph.D is here, and Historiann, following up, is here. (Warning: the "politics" they mean may not be what you expect, if you expect politics to be all-Obama or all-Ottawa all the time.)

One line I'm still pondering, from Historiann's post:

One major reason women’s historians have gravitated to modern history I think is that most of us want to write books with happy endings.

But I'm also intrigued by the rising phenomenon of serious, committed professional historians doing one serious and substantial aspect of their given work in blogs.

There seems to be a developing tradition of thoughtful and provocative blogging on historical matters coming from younger scholars in American and European history departments (great blog titles too, many of them). But I haven't found much trace of it going on among Canadian historians or on Canadian historical subjects. Not that there are no CanHist blogsites online, but they tend to be from non-academic enthusiasts.

I'd be glad to be corrected on this.

mr wtsn cum hr i want u

Historica reports today that on March 10, 1875 (glitch: they give the date as 1765, which would really be news), Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call. Okay he made the call in Boston, but we'll let Brantford claim him anyway.

History of wedlock

Gotta love the 18th century for stories like these: He fights a duel to defend her honour and is fatally wounded. In gratitude, she marries him on his deathbed. Then he recovers.

International Women's Day was yesterday. If I had been blogging yesterday, I would have recommended this link to Jonathan Yardley's review of Wedlock by Wendy Moore (no relation), about the marriage and divorce of the lady in question.

Update: History Today's history of International Women's Day is here: ninety-eight years old, and started by Clara Zetkin.

History of Daylight

So I got up, cursed the darkness, switched a lot of lights on and turned up the heat, and found myself thinking: is there any evidence that, north of the 44th parallel, say, this early switch to daylight savings really does any good at all? The day is still short up here, and I wish I had more of it in the morning.

History of Citizenship

Rudyard Griffiths, acknowledging that he is himself a dual citizen, thinks dual citizenship may be A Bad Thing:

I have come to the conclusion that Canada will not survive the coming decades in its current form if more and more of its Canadian-born citizens continue to live, as I have, with the mental gymnastics of dual citizenship.

It's from the book he's been working on.

Rudyard creates a litmus test for how we think of citizenship and nationality. Assume that we want to think globally, promote and benefit from diversity, and provide ourselves with all the challenges and opportunities this old world can offer. Do we do that best by collecting all the citizenships we can or by committing ourselves fully to one national community?

I don't think I know many people who have the opportunity to have more than one passport and who have foregone it out of the kind of principles Rudyard is recommending. People make a pragmatic choice, and then defend the ethics of it.

(Full disclosure: my situation is precisely the reverse of Rudyard's. I only have one citizenship, but I'm entitled to a second if I want it, and I often think I (and even more my children) should be taking advantage of it.

What happens to accountability?

Barely three months ago, Michael Ignatieff became a party leader by the authority of his party's parliamentary caucus (as he should, as they all should). In many ways, he seems to be doing rather well at it. But already Mr. Ignatieff is reverting to the standard operating assumption of Canadian party leaders: that he doesn't answer to the caucus, it answers to him.

The job of MPs, he declares, is to raise money and to recruit members (oh, and to vote as he directs). He has assigned recruitment targets for "his" MPs. And if they don't measure up:

As party leader, Mr. Ignatieff has the right to reject nominees by refusing to sign their nomination papers. Sources say he would use this tool to rebuff those who fail to reach the targets.

I'm not sure he has the right at all, but the party's private rules do give him the power. But how can MPs claim to be the elected representatives of the Canadian people if their very presence in the legislature is conditional on how well they fulfil the assignments of one of their fellow caucus members?

When the MPs are accountable to the electors, and the leaders are accountable to the MPs, then I can see how the government is accountable to Parliament. But when they are not, where is the accountability?

Addendum: J.C Bourque, a consultant at Strategy Corp, offers, seemly in response to the Globe's article on Ignatieff's new leadership rules, nine axioms of political party leadership from the late Dalton Camp. Now I hate to say anything unenthusiastic about Dalton Camp, because he once wrote that my 1867 was "the best book on our history I have ever read" (he did, really), but all of them seem to promote the authority of the party over the authority of Members of Parliament. Which is, in a nutshell, the problem.

Toronto's 175th

This link is not safe for determined Torontophobes. But I remember talking to a writer I thought of as a voice of the north and the wilderness, and hearing him say one of his favourite regions of Canada was... Toronto. In that spirit, the Toronto Star lists 175 things it likes about Toronto for Toronto's 175th anniversary. And a bunch of them made me laugh.

Senate Reform

Paul Wells of Maclean's provides a conversation on Senate reform between two would-be Senators and the prime minister that nicely captures the intellectual collapse of the whole Senate Reform movement.

Byfield: Why does Canada need a Senate at all, and why should it be elected?
Harper: Why do we need a Senate at all? I’d say there are at least two reasons. First and foremost, the Senate exists to provide regional representation in Parliament.... Second, the Senate’s traditional “sober second thought” function is also valuable....

But we have regional representation in Parliament, from the MPs. The House is and always will be more representative of Canada than the Senate because it is elected on the principle of representation-by-population (manipulated a bit at the edges, true), something that is anathema to Senate reformers. And the regions are also well represented by the provinces, which have vast constitutional powers to represent the interests of their people.

The Prime Minister moves from his second point, about sober second thought, to the argument that since only elected representatives are legitimate, the Senate must be elected.

But that is precisely the legitimacy the Canadian founders wanted to withhold from the Senators, and they were right.The Senate is not a representative house in its present form, and the Triple-E form, with equal numbers from each province, would be even less so. (The discussants here seem prepared to accept the present distribution of Senate seats, so long as they are elected.)

It is not appropriate for the Senate, elected or not, to have the power to resist the will of the people of Canada as expressed by the representative House of Commons, except in the very limited sober second thought way it has today. The Canadian founders created an non-elective Senate not because they resisted democracy, but because they knew keeping the Senate weak would be a cornerstone of democracy. And making it non-elective was the guarantee that it would be weak.

I don't mean to be entirely negative about the campaign for Senate reform. It expresses a frustration with the democratic deficit that I share. But the democratic problem is in the way the House works, not in the Senate, and we cannot fix the House in the Senate. Senate Reform has always been a diversion from the real issues.

Update: In light of the comment (below, and thanks), Paul Wells does specify that this interview is not his own work but something that arrived in his mailbox from "the Alberta Caucus for Senate Reform." He's just letting us see it, I think.

Toronto mayors debate city history

Okay, politicians debate all the time. But to mark the 175th anniversary of the founding of the City of Toronto, current Toronto mayor David Miller will debate the city's first mayor, William Lyon Mackenzie, this Friday, March 6, in the city council chamber.

The fact that Mayor Mackenzie has been dead since 1861 is not going to spoil the proceedings. His late Honour will be re-incarnated by actor Eric Peterson. (David Miller will indeed be played by David Miller.) The whole thing is the brainchild of always-breaking-the-wall actor R.H. Thomson, with support from the city and The Dominion Institute. Details here, if you scoll down a bit to "A Unique Meeting: Past and Present." I'm there.

Radio History: Shadow on Sparks Street

Terrific history radio last night on CBC Radio's Ideas: a repeat of Shadow on Sparks Street (there are links there for podcast and transcript info), a drama, a documentary, and a debate about the assassination of D'Arcy McGee in Ottawa in 1868. Skillfully evoked dramatizations, without all those cheesy recreations televised history is often forced into. Excellent actors speaking letters, speeches, lines of testimony from the trial of Patrick Whelan, who was convicted and executed.

It also had what really makes good history radio: head to head disagreement about the evidence and what to make of it from historians David Shanahan, who thinks Whelen was innocent and the trial a lynching, and David Wilson, who argues Whelen done the deed. Good work by independent producer Sarah Boothroyd. (I'm with Wilson.)

History's Tall Poppies

Niall Ferguson, noted here recently for the recognition he's been garnering as perhaps the most influential historian working today, gets some cutting down and some defending. He is not "what the French call un homme serieux." Peter Blaikie writes in a letter to the Globe & Mail.

He lacks bottom. In fact, Mr. Ferguson is a product of much of what led to the current financial crisis. He is a celebrity historian, a rock-star historian, a 15-second sound-bite historian,

But history prof Graham Taylor fires back, noting all the big serious histories of business he has written, even though it is true that "he has produced a number of books directed at popular audiences."

A list of the books Niall Ferguson has published: here.

How many bloggers put footnotes on their posts?

Well, this guy for one.

The fact that there is a scholar specializing in early-medieval European history who runs a blog -- it just makes me deliriously happy about the world we live in right now. Not a bad blog either, though it works best for those willing to take an interest in, say, the politics of tenth-century Castile, or, right before it, a comparison of the philosophical underpinnings of British and American doctoral program. I'm in. Hat tip, not for the first time, to Cliopatria