What did you do in the war, comrade? Most of it, actually.

The English historian Norman Davies, who has a new book to promote, offers an essay in The Times designed to provoke anyone still complacently assuming responsibility for winning the Second World War should be contested for by the British and the Americans.

There's a detail from The Historical Atlas of Canada (Vol III, Plate 47) that links casualties to forces engaged (not yet available at their online site). The Soviets, Germans and Japanese "win" that grim contest by a long long way, but it's startling how high Canada ranks among the others. Ahead of the Americans, the French, and the Italians, f'rinstance.

April 29: the Frank Slide

The Canadian Encylopedia notes the 106th anniversary of the Frank Slide.
When I was a child in Nelson, British Columbia, my parents knew a woman who was an (orphaned) survivor of that slide. They knew another woman who had an uncanny gift for walking along a shoreline or ploughed field and picking up protectile points she spotted with amazing frequency.

I know these were two different women, but in my youthful mind they fused, and I half-imagined someone whose escape from the rocks at Frank had given her power over another kind of stone.

Picture: from the Canadian Encyclopedia.

The Dead have no internet

There's a lawsuit and a scandal brewing over a story that the polymathic Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse) wrote for The New Yorker about tribal feuding in Papua-New Guinea. (The story is online for subscribers only, but I recall how impressively detailed it was.) Now,the partipants in the feud, with the help of some well-connected American watchdogs, have sued, putting forth their own version of events and challenging Diamond's right to have published his without their knowledge or consent.

One reporter paraphrases the lesson drawn by the anthropologistical blogger Alex Golub:

The rise of the Internet means that whatever scholars write about their field informants—no matter how remote those people might seem—will inevitably be read by the communities they have described.

Golub acknowledges anthropologists should always have considered their ethical obligations to their subjects and to the rigorously established truth. But there's no doubt that the prospect of the subjects actually seeing your work and then hiring lawyers and coming after you must wonderfully concentrate the anthropological mind.

That doesn't happen to historians. Unless you are writing very contemporary history, your subjects will maintain the magnificent silence of the grave. So are we less responsible? Or do other historians, defending their take on the same subjects, do the necessary and expose our flaws sufficiently?

The former. The former.

"Please put us in the History Department"

Thinker and gay activist Larry Kramer, talking to Yale University, argues that what matters is gay history, not gay "studies," queer theory, and gender analysis:

Why is the history department allowing history to be hijacked by the queer theorists? ...I wanted gay history to be taught. ...Please put us in the History Department, I begged.

Not everyone agrees.

History of Whales

At HistoryWire, Daniel Francis reflects on how ideas about killer whales turned inside out in less than half a century -- and how it was done.

File this: new archivist

The prime minister announces -- it's a prime ministerial announcement? -- that the new Librarian and Archivist of Canada will be Daniel Caron, who in point of fact is neither a librarian nor an archivist, but has a stack of credentials.

Ian Wilson, who now retires after ten years and continues to be a big guy in international archives circles, gets to be Librarian and Archivist Emeritus. Congratulations to Ian.

History of the Rich getting Richer

It doesn't just seem that way.

The top prize for young economists just went to the guy who has demonstrated just how much inequality, after declining markedly from the Second World War to the 1970s, started rising again in that decade and has been on a tear ever since.

The top tenth of the American population now controls just about half of American wealth, the largest share since 1917. It was about a third from the 'forties to the 'seventies.

The theory that income equality can be expected to grow with longterm economic development goes by the boards; it's all about political choices. But the data here are for the United States, not for Canada and not for developed countries in general.

Hats and Dreams

A friend gave me Vermeer's Hat, a recent history by Timothy Brook subtitled "The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World." Until then, I had not been aware of Timothy Brook, an internationally published historian of China, but also a Canadian and a prof at my old alma mater even (and Oxford too).

Vermeer's Hat (the book) considers all the trade links beginning to draw the world together in Brook's seventeenth century -- and does it by following all the many hints about that process that Brook finds in Vermeer's paintings. For instance, Vermeer's hat (the hat, there in the cover painting) was a beaver hat, made from the beaver pelts that had recently begun to flow from Canada to the fashionable heads of Holland. So an early Brook chapter focusses on Champlain and the Canada-to-Europe fur trade.

Like David Hackett Fischer, whose Champlain biography we were considering the other day, Brook argues Champlain had a "dream." But Brook's Champlain's dream is not Fischer's one of French-Native harmony. For Brook, Champlain really only dreams of getting to China, and he'll walk over his native allies to get there.

Vermeer's Hat just won a new American prize, too: the Mark Lynton History Prize, sponsored by the terrific American writer J. Anthony Lukacs.

New Archives of Ontario

Don't get off the Bay Street bus at Grenville Street if you are planning to research in the Archives of Ontario. The new building is open -- on the York University campus up Keele Street in north Toronto.

Drohan looks at the ROM's Diamonds show

Corporate Knights, one of those free magazines that just arrive inside the newspaper sometimes and tend to go pretty directly to the blue box, this month features Madelaine Drohan inquiring whether the Royal Ontario Museum's "Diamonds" exhibit (it closed March 22, actually) was far too incurious about "blood" diamonds and other important issues in the history of the diamond trade -- and if that lack of curiosity relates to the sponsorship of the exhibition by DeBeers.

The private life of R.B. Bennett -- there's more!

Recently we were following the discussion, meagre as it was, of R.B. Bennett's intimate life (meagre as that may have been). Ramsay Derry, who must know everyone, offers new testimony:

some years ago I met an aging Texan ballerina who was twirling out her last fouettés in Calgary and who told me she had met RBB on a cruise to the Caribbean. While not suggesting intimacy, she indicated he was quite lively.

Ronald Rudin on Champlain's Dream

The April 2009 issue of the Literary Review of Canada has a first-rate review of David Hackett Fischer’s big biography from last fall, Champlain’s Dream. Actually, it's so good they are not giving it away online. I’ve just gotten around to reading the book, as it happens.

The editor of the LRC and I have a sort of deal: she doesn't pay for reviews and I don't write them for her. But if I were reviewing Champlain's Dream, I’d be full of admiration for David Hackett Fischer. I’ve admired his work for decades, ever since I read Historians’ Fallacies, the funniest book ever written about historical methods. The Great Wave is economic history that is wise and readable and useful. More recently he’s won substantial sales and acclaim for books on Paul Revere and George Washington and for Albion’s Seed, about the populations that colonized the future United States, no less.

The strengths of a very skilled and very successful historian are on display in Champlain’s Dream. One shouldn’t start reading a book by flipping to the back, but the historiographical essays in his appendices display wonderfully the breadth of Fischer's knowledge of Champlain’s time, the care and insight with which he digests and considers evidence, and the enthusiasm with which he launches into every historical complication.

Case in point: Champlain’s birthdate. The “traditional” date, 1567, has been repeated in book after book. A couple of decades ago, a reassessment of the evidence suggested 1580 was a more likely date, making Champlain perhaps 28, not 41, when he came ashore at Quebec in 1608: a vigorous youth, not a man deep in middle age. The argument worked for me, but it's complicated, and obviously Fischer had to work out a judgment on this question

His marshalling of the evidence is the best I’ve seen. In the end, I’m still rather resistant to his conclusion that 1570 is the most likely estimate (I might go to 1575), but it’s an elegant piece of historical exposition whatever you conclude.

Many more parts of the book show Fischer working like that. He need to know a bit about southwestern France in the late 1500s, about the Protestant-Catholic wars, about Henri IV’s court, about Atlantic navigation and the Spanish Caribbean, about the economics of the early fishery and fur trade, about Iroquoian prehistory, about Jesuit-Recollet denominational rivalries, about…. Well, you get the picture. Time and again, on all these vexed late-medieval complexities, where evidence is thin and theories proliferate, he really seems in command of the sources and all the historians’ theories and explanations. When he has to carry his Champlain story through all these pools of historical uncertainty, he plunges in like history’s Michael Phelps. So far so good.

Yet at the end I put down Champlain’s Dream with a big resistance and a kind of suspicion growing.

A biography needs a character. A biographer needs to decide who is his character is and to evoke that person on every page. Fischer meets this test. He has decided Champlain was a great soul, a humanist, a lover of science and adventure and humanity. He argues that Champlain’s vision for New France was “harmony and peace.” His colonization policy, writes Fischer, was “Indian and European leaders who met in peace and shared their dreams and lived together.”

It’s a beautiful story, and Fischer tells it well. But I don’t believe it.

Champlain’s New France was a place of violence and risk and brutal competition. Champlain was tough enough to survive in it for three decades. His policy was to bring into being a permanent colony despite all the forces, European and North American, that were uninterested when they were not actively trying to prevent it. He didn’t do that by being nice or even dreaming of nice. He was not particularly concerned about the peace and harmony of the peoples with whom he had to deal. Life had turned him into a pragmatist, not an idealist.

It’s a lovely vision Fischer has of Champlain. But I fear it’s one that he has imposed on the evidence.

Here’s a tiny example, far from Fischer’s central arguments. It’s about Champlain’s marriage. It was a rocky marriage, an arranged marriage, a marriage of alliance. He was maybe forty on Fischer's count, she was twelve. She ran away, her family punished her, sent her back. Once she was a widow with some freedom of action, she became a nun. Fischer knows all this, but it irritates his story of Champlain the great humanist to have this nasty bit of pre-modern grimness so near the heart of Champlain's life. So he seizes on a lonely document from 1617, when Champlain and wife both sign a contract hiring a lady’s maid for her.

What does it mean? It provides a servant for her, but it’s his household, his money. Little wonder they both sign while he’s briefly back in France about his colony-building errands.

Fischer argues the plain notarial document shows the man and his wife “working together at the business of life.” Is this really the evidence of the document or a reasonable construction of it? Or is it more Fischer's need to find the decent, humane Champlain even in the most arid soil?

So I’m left skeptical about Champlain's Dream. I’m not an expert on the man or his period, but I once wrote in print about “the grim single-mindedness of a man who assessed things by their utility to his own projects.” Fischer argues Champlain’s dream was of French-Native harmony; I concluded “Champlain’s determination to claim, settle, and evangelize Canada ran directly counter to the interests of his Native allies.” Fischer’s case for a totally different Champlain impresses me greatly, but convinces me less. (But then I think Bruce Trigger, who really set out the lines I'm following, was a great historian. Fischer, displaying a rare historiographical blind spot, dismisses him.)

Now I’m happy to find someone else who thinks along these lines. The Literary Review found Ronald Rudin, the Quebec historian and historian of Quebec historians, to review Champlain’s Dream, and he offers a first-rate piece of work. (Okay, he agrees with me.) Rudin doesn't buy the dream in Champlain's Dream either. Indeed he has the wit -- it had not occurred to me -- to suggest Fischer has written an American’s biography, creating the great American hero the American reading audience requires.

History of accountability: who looks wild-eyed now?

John Ibbitson believes torture is not such a big deal when you are the good guys. But history seems to be moving faster than he is.

Ibbitson in The Globe, April 21:

the wild-eyed are still trying to get Mr. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity for their handling of the war on terror.

Ibbitson in The Globe, April 22:

Barack Obama is trying to avoid a witch hunt of the previous administration, while still holding it accountable for authorizing the torture of suspected terrorists.

Update: April 23, The Globe editors differ with their reporter on torture and accountability: "An independent inquiry is the best way."

Histories win three Pulitzers

I love it when a book I've actually read wins a prize. This time it's Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemings of Monticello, which I thought pretty terrific both for its story and for its historical methods. I noted it on this blog last spring, and there was some vigorous commentary, and even AG-R herself, in the midst of a busy book tour, took note. Congratulations!!

Slate magazine says the Pulitzers are a joke -- too many categories, too little integrity in the judging. It is odd when three history books win the "History" "Biography" and "General Non-fiction" categories, when any of them might almost be entered in any of the categories. All the winners listed here.

1919 to be a hot doc

Margaret MacMillan's landslide success of a few years ago, Paris 1919, about the great peace conference, has become a documentary film directed by the NFB's Paul Cowan (who got a lot of hate mail some years ago for "The Kid Who Couldn't Miss," his not-so-hagiographical documentary about Billy Bishop).

"Paris 1919," the film, will launch at the very terrific Hot Docs film festival in Toronto on May 1.

The Film Board Paris 1919 page, with clips and stills and much else, is here.

Selecting the Governor General

Adrienne Clarkson suggests that the prime minister's nominee for governor general should be vetted by parliament.

The Globe's editorial writer demurs: too much potential for politicization. Not a bad point, though their alternate suggestions are weak ones. Let a blue ribbon panel select? But an elite committee would lack the legitimacy of representative authority. Let the Queen decide? Oh, spare us.

A third alternate might be to select governors general as speakers of the house are chosen: by a secret ballot of the House of Commons. And who would nominate? Say, any ten MPs. We might see some interesting nominees, and the accountability principle would be established. A fourth: I've made the case for popular election on the Irish model elsewhere.

The link to the British monarchy needs examination even more than the selection process.

Atlantic Book Prize Winner

My old Parks Canada colleague Bill Naftel wins not one but two prizes for his recent history book at the Atlantic Canada book awards, according to The Coast:

William D. Naftel, Halifax At War: Searchlights, Squadrons and Submarines 1939-1945 (Formac Publishing), winner of the inaugural Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing and the Dartmouth Book Award for Non-fiction.

History of Voting

I'd been thinking that B.C.'s May 12 referendum on electoral reform must be another snoozer. The B.C. online magazine Tyee has been raising money by asking donors what provincial election stories they want to fund coverage of, and the voting-reform referendum seems to be way, way down the list ... and (maybe in consequence) barely covered in the Tyee's many election stories.

But Calgary Grit notes a new poll on the subject, and he and his commentators have thoughtful opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of STV and List-PR. STV, the option currently on offer, may be the least bad of the potential changes, seems to be their lukewarm consensus.

History of Piracy

Interesting how much of the analysis of the Somali pirates is history-based. (Interesting also that most of the analysis only starts after Americans are directly impacted.) Historical evidence proves, once again, pretty pliable to anyone with a strong theory.

Neil Reynolds in the Globe goes back to Jefferson on the Barbary pirates in the early 1800s and concludes that while the effete Europeans and President John Adams knuckled under, the heroic American "placed a higher dollar value on national honour" and wiped them out.

Reynolds cites sources, but Fred Kaplan in Slate undermines much of Reynolds's version, emphasizing the international dimensions of that anti-piracy campaign:

In 1815, the great nations of Europe—Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia—assembled the Congress of Vienna to forge a new balance of power in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. (More than 200 smaller states and principalities attended the session, as well.) One of the initial motives for holding the congress was to condemn, and coordinate a common policy on, the European slave trade along the Barbary Coast. It was after the congress formed that the Europeans and Americans stopped paying ransom and took action.

Joshua Marshall, noted American political blogger but also a Ph.D in American history, takes a historical perspective on piracy and state power on his Talking Points Memo site, observing that controlling piracy is a classic state responsibility, not to be contracted out to vigilantes, as U.S. politician Ron Paul apparently suggests. Then Marshall gets taken down as a big-power liberal and apologist for American hegemony by historian Chris Bray at the history blog Cliopatria.

Makes me want to reread Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea on Caribbean piracy c1720s. The classic pirate era -- Blackbeard, Jack Rackham, Bart Roberts, all the names and imagery that inspired Stevenson in Treasure Island -- began with a war, a collapse of authority in the region, and mass unemployment among seamen -- not unlike Somalia? And it ended when the British navy reasserted state authority and the protection of trading interests by recolonizing pirate lairs, and by chasing down every every pirate ship and "topping them in batches" -- a tall order in today's world.

You, me, and the LRC

Do you need and deserve a complimentary subscription to the Literary Review of Canada? I could be your go-to guy.

The Literary Review of Canada has an angel who had promised to underwrite 100 one-year print subscriptions to the LRC for the kind of lively, interesting Canadians who ought to be reading it. In turn, the LRC is asking friends and contributors to nominate up to ten people to receive such subscriptions. I've just become one of the nominators.

I can't help thinking that my friends who should be reading the Literary Review are smart enough to have discovered it for themselves. So I'm unleasing the power of the blogosphere. If you read this blog, surely you are the kind of person the LRC wants to reach.

So, if you would like to be one of my nominees, email me with your name and mailing address (email address at right). (No strings, no complications, no use of the information other than the subscription.) We've never had boodle on this blog before, but who knows where this may lead?

Gay prime minister?

Robin Sears, once a national director and campaign manager for the New Democrat, now one of those political consultants, and currently doing hard time as Brian Mulroney's official media spokesman, reviews Bob Plamondon's Blue Thunder in the National Post. He picks up on Plamondon's too sly hint ("questions about his private life persist") that R.B. Bennett may have been gay.

These historical possibilities ought to be aired rather than nudge-nudged. There has actually been an interesting and sometimes serious discussion in the United States of the possibility that Abraham Lincoln was gay (sorry, no links because I have not been keeping track -- suggestions welcome) and how that might influence interpretations of him. My own (slight) acquaintance with the Bennett story has always given me the impression that he was about the most celibate person who ever lived.

Plamondon's Blue Thunder is a history of the Conservative prime ministers. Sears treats Plamondon as a professor (pedantry, bad writing, etc), but Plamondon's publisher's website calls him "author, historian, consultant and public policy specialist," and only then "a full- and part-time professor at three Canadian universities." (In history? Doesn't say.) He seems to have been principally a Conservative political activist, and he's certainly been effective in promoting this book -- getting the Globe to report on statements about Mulroney that Plamondon got from Conrad Black (that Black soon corrected) and effectively launching the recent story of a Mulroney-Harper spat. Not clear if the coverage of the Bennett thing is another publicity gesture (hey, an author has to move the book), or Sears's contribution.

(Hat-tip: The Idea File)

History of blogging

In a profile of one of the most interesting bloggers around, the online magazine Intelligent Life considers, among much else, how political blogging took shape.

Making historical documentary

On The Daily Beast, a new American superblog I've been trying to avoid, Michael Korda reviews a new documentary series on the American Second World War general George Patton -- only available on American television so far.

Korda suggests it's full of technical innovations that show great promise for historical documentary, mostly by applying computer graphics rather than running that old stock b&w footage from WWII cameramen over and over -- but he regrets it is marred by, well, bad history, and simply is not very judicious about Patton's strengths and weaknesses. He concludes it is:

old stuff warmed up by a couple of bright kids with a computer, rather than a new way of looking at the man or the war.

Why is it so hard to get good filmmakers and good historians working on the same film?

University of Western Ontario Law School at 50

The Law School at University of Western Ontario turns fifty, and as if to prove what local newspapers can do that no one else does, the London Free Press comes up with a nice little history of the school and a profile of its founding dean, the legal giant Ivan Rand.

New Life for the Dead, or at least their resting places

Time was when every religious congregation in rural Ontario needed a church within buggy range. Result: a lot of small churches across the rural landscape. (I was married in one of them, so I notice.)

Today many of those small country churches, if they survive at all, are available for conversion into summer homes, or country restaurants, or just about anything else. The congregation, what's left of it, commutes forty k or whatever to the big church in the local centre. Well, they do it to shop, and bank, and for medical appointments, and to get the car fixed and see a movie, so why not to pray too. It's the dispersed city theory: rural people have all the services city people have, but they have to go a bit further to access them all.

Meanwhile the cemetary just down the road from the abandoned country church -- often it was originally just a piece of field severed from the farm of a generous parishioner, remains behind.

Unless, that is, someone is moved to convert it into rural development.

Jim Coyle in today's Toronto Star covers the Ontario MPP who wants to safeguard the orphaned cemetaries of Ontario and the historical and cultural treasures they contain. The MPP Jim Brownell has been an activist in the Stormont Dundas Glengarry Historical Association and the Lost Villages Society of Eastern Ontario.

Oh, and Coyle reports his bill got unanimous consent at second reading

This just in: Czar still dead

DNA confirms again that the last czar and all his family were indeed killed at Ekaterinburg in 1917. Too bad about all that Anastasia stuff....

History of Nelly Bly

I thought Nelly Bly was the other woman in "Frankie and Johnnie" ("Bartender said, Miss Frankie, I cannot tell a lie/Johnnie left here 'bout an hour ago/With that tramp named Nelly Bly.")

That's more the blues than ragtime, but my friend Ray Argyle has a new book just out, Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime, and he's posting bits of it on his blog, including this essay on Nelly Bly the journalist who went around the world in 72 days.

Book looks pretty interesting too.

Maurice Careless 1919-2009

About twenty years ago, when J.M.S. Careless's Brown of the Globe was republished by Dundurn Press, a reviewer (Royce MacGillivray, I think, but I'm working from memory here) praised it for, among other things, its "crunchy sentences."

I've never heard sentences called crunchy anywhere else, but I knew just what the reviewer meant. He was drawing attention to how well written Brown of the Globe is, what an excellent piece of writing it is. That's the right thing to remember and the important thing. Brown of the Globe endures as an extraordinarily good piece of historical writing, one I'd still rank among the very best history books written in Canada.

I saw somewhere an historiographical appreciation of Careless that emphasized his theories of metropolitanism and limited identities, and treated the Brown biography as principally a fleshing-out of the theoretical ideas. This seemed to me to have it precisely wrong. I always found those theories rather thin and contrived, not particularly useful. For me the important work was the biography.

Maurice Careless was overshadowed by the more flamboyant Donald Creighton. His Brown was overshadowed by Creighton's Macdonald. And indeed the historical Brown himself was overshadowed by the historical Macdonald. But if you wanted one book to understand the confederation period, I'd suggest Careless's balanced, precise, penetrating Brown over Creighton's heroic Macdonald. (Well, I'd suggest my own 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal, but we're talking the historiographical fathers here, the 'sixties group.)

The biographical sketch of Careless in Old Ontario, a book of essays in his honour, reports that he typically worked all day, came home to have dinner and spend the evening with his family. Then when everyone went to bed, he went to his study and wrote well past midnight. Then he'd relax for an hour or so before bed. And still go to his university office first thing next morning.

Maurice Careless only had one arm, the result of a childhood accident. I've always liked the idea of a historian who would never say, "On the other hand...."

Update (April 14):Sandra Martin's elegant obituary for the Globe & Mail is here. Somewhat to my surprise, several of Careless's near-contemporaries make roughly the same Creighton-Careless comparison I was making.

HIstory of Tech: Is this why no one returns my calls anymore?

I thought it was newspapers and music CDs and all that were underthreat from new digital technology. Turns out it's voicemail too.

History as craft: the Rebellion boxes

Chris Raible, scholar of the 1837 rebellion, was telling me once about Rebellion boxes -- hand-carved wooden boxes created by prisoners of the 1837 Canadian rebellions as passtimes, as mementos, as heirlooms.

Now Chris and the York Pioneer and Historical Society are launching his book From Hands Now Striving to be Free: an inventory of boxes crafted by 1837 Rebellion prisoners on April 26. Details here. No less than 94 of them have been identified.

Brave letter in the Globe & Mail today from a local museum curator about cuts to the big provincially-run historic site in his neighbourhood:

You note that Michelin will be reviewing the historic re-enactment program at Morrisburg's Upper Canada Village in its Canadian guidebook (Guidebooks: Michelin Launches In Canada - Travel, April 4). They had better get there soon. This year, 24 of the village's 92 seasonal re-enactment employees will not be hired; instead, there'll be audio-visual presentations and faux events such as medieval festivals to turn what was once one of North America's top historic tourist destinations into Disney World North.
-- Ian Bowering, Curator, Stormont,Dundas & Glengarry, Museum/Archives

When I worked at the Historic Sites Service of Parks Canada, there was a slight sense of competitive superiority. The feds had more money, more research apparatus, more authenticity. But I've always been a fan of Upper Canada Village. A historical geographer I know fumes that they refused to lay the place out the way actual Upper Canadian villages were organized, so it has this complicated rural sprawl, farms and shops all together, but it seems to work for me.

I don't mind multiple use at historic sites, either. Using one as a dramatic background for a music festival doesn't offend me much.

But Ian Bowering is absolutely right. Historic site recreations live and die on the detail, on the level of effort. They are labour-intensive or they fail. Trying to do a Michelin-worthy historic site and make these cuts is so evidently self-defeating.

UCV Photo: Georgio Zanetti via Google Images.

History of Language: oil and tar

Talking to David Finch, historian of the Alberta oil industry and author of Pumped, an effective handbook to the whole subject, and I mention the tar sands. "You know," he says, "really you should say 'oil sands.'"

There's a language war here. Critics of that petrochemical megaproject around Fort McMurray say "tar sands" and argue that "oil sands" is a euphemism being pushed by the industry. It's not oil in the sands, after all, at best it's stuff you can make oil from.

It's not tar, either, Finch tells me. It's bitumen, and nobody wants to say 'bituminous sands."

Looking a bit further, I find tar comes from pine trees. Those tar pits in Los Angeles full of sabretooth tiger bones -- they should be asphalt pits. Hmm. This is getting technical.

But David describes for me the history of how the name "oil sands" was brought into use: not in the midst of the big developments, but in 1951. It's in his book. He thinks the revival of "tar sands" is mostly a product of the last ten years. He doesn't think it has taken, except specifically with critics of the development.

Persuasive. But not everyone agrees. Andrew Nikiforuk gave an enthusiastic blurb to Pumped, but his own (terrific) book Tar Sands is called ... well, yes.

History of Blogging: How many posts can a blogposter post?

In the spirit of this age of economic restructuring, I will simply declare how often people may blog. Most of you should average four to six posts a day. If you’re a group blog, you may post once an hour.

In your dreams!

Historians at the Donner Prize

The big book prize for public policy wonks, the Donner Prize, has its shortlist out. Winner: 30 April.

The prolific northern historians Ken Coates and William Morrison, with Whitney Lackenbauer and Greg Poelzer, represent the history profession on the list. Also notable is Widdowson and Howard on the "aboriginal industry," a controversial book that has generated a little war among political scientists.

Courtesy of cbc.ca, the nominees are:

Arctic Front: Defending Canada in the Far North, by history professors and academics Ken S. Coates, P. Whitney Lackenbauer, William R. Morrison and Greg Poelzer.

Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State, by Tarek Fatah, host of CTS-TV program Muslim Chronicle.

Fixing the Future: How Canada's Usually Fractious Governments Worked Together to Rescue the Canada Pension Plan, by journalist and policy analyst Bruce Little.

The Limits of Boundaries: Why City-regions Cannot be Self-governing, by political science professor Andrew Sancton.

Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, by policy studies professor Frances Widdowson and former government consultant Albert Howard.

Provocative list, when you add Sancton and Fatah. Gotta wonder if recent economic events have tarnished the optimism expressed in the title of Little's pensions book.

The Donner Canadian Foundation's own page on the nominees is here.

Anniversaries

Here's to Newfoundland and Labrador, sixty years a Canadian province today, and Nunavut, ten years a Canadian territory today.

And to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Handel (okay, yesterday, but news of his death is just getting around, you might say), an elegant essay on his life and origins, tied to a couple of museum exhibits in Europe.