Historians as expert witnesses

The Nation looks at historians who testify in the big tobacco lawsuits... on both sides.

Yank historians smacked down, honoured

Historiann on American historians:

The historians who become well known in the U.S. are those who, for the most part, peddle charming myths about the Founding Fathers or other Great Men. Their work conforms closely (if dully, in my view) to a jingoistic Whig narrative that’s designed to reassure Americans that they live in the Greatest Country the World Has Ever Known.

It's a response to an essay on Paul Krugman.

Meanwhile, historians whom President Obama recently honoured with National Medals in the Humanities include Robert Caro (epic biographer of Lyndon Johnston), Annette Gordon-Reed ("The Hemings of Montecello"), David Levering Lewis (biographer of W.E.B. DuBois), and William H. McNeill (global historian and student of plagues). Not a whole lot of charming myths purveyed in their works, I think. American history is doing a little better than it's given credit for. Now, Canadian history....

Labrador Creative Arts Festival 2

Blogging will be light this week -- because when you come to the Labrador Creative Arts Festival, they is after workin' ya's. But I have to give a shout out to my new best friends at Peacock Primary School and Ecole Boréal here in Goose Bay.

Update, Feb 26: And the kids at Queen of Peace Middle School, who found time to talk history in the midst of their Olympic Day events. At QPMS, Belgium won the games, go figure! Also the kids from Churchill Falls, Postville and Mud Bay, all of whom I met when they came into Goose Bay to present original plays in the festival.

This week, kids of Goose Bay and the rest of Labrador are getting bombarded by an opera singer, a clown coach, an Afro-celtic reggae band (!), visual artists, actors, a relationship counsellor, a museologist, and even a writer or two. Meanwhile, the kids are giving back theatre pieces they wrote themselves, many of which grow right out of where they stand. I'm looking forward to Romeo mak Juliet, about that story as it plays out in a conflicted Innu community -- but with a happy ending, because the kids are saying to hell with those stupid old feuds.

History is close to the surface here; it's easy connecting school kids with historical themes in their lives and communities. Them Days, the famous Labrador oral history magazine, gives a taste.

Meanwhile Labrador is making some new history right now. There's less snow and ice here this winter than the oldest trapper can remember. No one can get out to their traplines or hunting grounds, or even just out snowmobiling. One guy who had to travel ended up going through the ice, and had some difficulty getting himself out. "Worst I have seen in seventy-five years," he said.

Labrador Creative Arts Festival

The blogger is off to Goose Bay tomorrow to be a visiting artist at the extremely cool Labrador Creative Arts Festival.

Blogging may be light for the coming week -- or might be heavy if I found time, internet connections, and inspirations.

If not, take this week to explore some of the links at right.

History Blogging around the world

Cliopatria announces it has just added to its History blogrolls a collection of historically-minded blogs in a dozen European languages.

Taking a quick look at the French ones, I haven't found any I urgently need to add to my Favourites list, and those in other languages would be beyond me even if I really wanted to follow the blogging of Bulgarian history. But it's impressive to see the choices out there. Now if Canadian historians could just give Cliopatria's Canadian History Blogs list a little more to work with... (They are listed under "Regional," but what can you do?)

History of Cultural Appropriation?

It's always a dicey topic (and the costumes look pretty tacky, frankly), but I found myself sympathetic to the Russian ice dancers who used Australian aboriginal music and imagery in their performance yesterday. It was a segment devoted to cultural dance styles, and it seemed to me that if the Chinese could use Classical Greece for their inspiration and the Brits could go American west (yeah, the French stayed home and did can-can), the Russians could look to Australia. That is the classical music of Australia; to incorporate all the musical traditions of the world should be homage and respect more than misappropriation.

I once heard the American jazz master David Amram playing at Harbourfront in Toronto. After a run through a range of American jazz classics, he announced, "Now we are going to play some of the classical music of North America." The band's percussionists burst into the rhythmic drumming you usually only hear from a native troop at a pow-wow (or maybe the opening of a Canadian constitutional conference), and the group began the hypnotic high chanting that accompanies it. I was thunderstruck, not only by the power of the music, but also by the realization that this wasn't just a way for First Nations to identify themselves as First Nations: this was amazing music. I've listened to aboriginal music differently ever since.

I don't know if the Russian ice dancers opened anyone's eyes that way. I didn't watch it (Hey, this blog will go only so far in its researches!) And yeah, they might have thought to talk to someone in aboriginal Australia or Papua-New Guinea and got a little counsel about the whole thing.

Paul Simon helped make African music the foundation stone of world music (at least for us myopic North Americans) with his Graceland album. When's he going to do his First Nations album, I wondered afterwards. And how about some serious Australian music after that?

Anyway, word is the Russians didn't skate very well, anyway. Canadians Moir and Virtue, who did Spanish flamenco, are currently standing first.

Update, March 1: Jayne from Great Southern Land comments:

Sad thing is the Russians used World music whereas Aboriginal music is really different, can stir all kinds of emotion or can raise the hair on the back of your neck, depending on the style used.
And the dance was nothing like the fab trad dances, could have been a win:win all around if they'd done their homework properly.

and suggests Yothu Yindi as aboriginal music worth listening to,


--

Veterans' Commemoration Day

Last year I was in Vancouver for a Dominion Institute event. When it ended, I headed home but the indefatigable DI warriors Marc and Jeremy jumped in a rental car for the (longer than they thought) drive to Spokane, Washington, to pay their respects to John Babcock, then the last surviving Canadian veteran of the First World War, who had been a supporter of and donor to their Memory Project initiatives. When I heard of Mr Babcock's death last week, I felt I was at one (or is that two) degrees of separation from him

John Babcock and his family having declined the proposal of a state funeral, his bereaved friends at the Historica-Dominion Institute are advocating a national day of commemoration for all who served in that war. Their Facebook campaign page is here.

The Worst Quebecker?

A couple of years ago The Beaver had a lively feature in which it asked a number of historians to identify "The Worst Canadian."

I think this guy deserves a nomination as the worst Quebecker. Even when he was at the peak of adulation leading the Yes forces in the 1995 Quebec referendum, I found myself nauseated by the spectacle of a well-connected lawyer and politician, someone who had made his way in the world on favours from powerful patrons at every turn, putting on the "Nous sommes opprimés, nous sommes humiliés" persona. A less oppressed guy than Lucien Bouchard I never saw in my life, I thought, no matter how well it seemed to go over in Quebec at the time. It was then that I decided sovereignty might still be a political force but was no longer intellectually respectable and was doomed.

The same kind of selfish, insincere, self-important air Bouchard conveyed in the 1990s comes off from his recent cruel and dismissive comments about the party and the movement that raised him so high.

"I don't know what will happen 50 years from now. But I do know that Pauline Marois is not announcing a referendum, because it's not possible to hold one," Mr. Bouchard said.

He said he jumped head first into the 1995 referendum "not even checking if there was water in the pool."

He said Quebec came out weakened in the process. "There's no referendum in sight and I don't want to suffer another defeat. In the meantime, we have a lot to do."

He argued that had Jacques Parizeau followed his strategy, the outcome would have been different in 1995.

Bouchard may well be right about all this -- except the last silly claim.

But his remarks do him no honour. A lot of people devoted their whole lives to that cause; one might think Bouchard would have the decency to think of that. The independence movement is down, but reading his remarks, it seems even I have more respect for it and what it meant for a generation of Quebeckers than their over-protected, over-privileged former leader who has now "moved on." He didn't know if there was "water in the pool"? What the hell was he doing in politics, except serving his own ego, if he did not know what the status of the sovereignty movement was in 1995?

I thought Bernard Landry sounded like a dinosaur when he spoke in Toronto last fall. But at least he believed in something.

Essential historical viewing, it says

The White Ribbon sits alongside Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) and Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946) as one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of history. It is essential viewing.

The History Today blog's take on Michael Hanneke's recent film.

I, um, haven't seen any of them.

Who knew (or needed to)...

... that there was a reason beyond sheer Victorian amazingness for the enormous front wheels on those penny-farthing bicycles. In their heyday, pedals on bicycles were brand-new, and the concept of chains, sprockets, and gearing had not yet taken hold. As long as pedals were right on the wheel and to drove the wheel directly, basic physics determined that the only way to get much speed up without gearing ... was to have the largest possible circumference of wheel. Hence the enormous wheel. Once they figured out chains and sprockets and all, presto, the enormous but unstable (but very cool) penny-farthing gave way to the safety bicycle, or what we call the bicycle.

Thanks to geographer Glen Norcliffe's 2001 book The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada 1869-1900, which made this clear to me. Damn good book, actually, and the photographs are extraordinary and very well integrated into the argument.

... or that "archive" comes from the same root as "archon," the ruler or chief magistrate of a Greek city-state. The archive was the place of residence of the ruler, and hence the place he kept his documents. There's a Derridean trope to be worked here about how documents are power and the printed work is a tool of authority and control, blah blah blah. But I like the derivation anyway... and the OED confirms it, so there.

History and Relevance

Andrew Smith draws our attention to Ian Milligan's query at Active History about the relevance of historical topics -- "Do the topics that we choose, as historians or aspiring historians, help accentuate the gap between the public and the academic?" Smith offers a slew of his own suggestions.

Milligan writes, "I’ve also only met one person who explicitly thinks that their topic was useless and contributed nothing to society." I'm tempted to suggest this proves there are quite a few deluded grad students out there. But in truth, it's never seemed to me that relevance should be a high priority for all scholarly research. If trade publishing markets provided all the history we need, we would not need university history departments at all.

What we need more of from academic scholarships, I'm inclined to think, is more unorthodoxy and less of each generational cohort applying the same fashionable methods and theories to the same kinds of fashionable questions and issues. That a historical tempest-in-a-teapot from the 1990s is still remembered as a "History War" suggests how much little liveliness and debate Canadian historical scholarship actually nurtures. (Actually, Milligan misquotes the key reference in that story. It's "housemaid's" knee, not "milkmaid's knee." The whole phrase was "the history of housemaid's knee in Belleville," and since I was the first to publish the quotation, in a profile of Jack Granatstein in The Beaver in 1991, I want to have the record put straight.)

But this little exchange on historical relevance was fresh in mind when I read of another group offering to plan a program of events for "Canada150." Canada150 is the century-and-a-half anniversary of confederation in 2017. They are holding a blue-ribbon conference on the subject in Ottawa in March. And it seems from the program that historians are thin on the ground.

Blogging von Ranke

Mike Green, arguing that bad history will overwhelm good history on the internet if Good Historians don't fight the good digifight, surveys a number of recent attempts by historians to come to terms with the internet. And a blog named for von Ranke just deserves a shoutout, anyway.

(As they used to say, Ranke ranks, Nietzsche is pietzsche, and Dilte is filte.)

HIstory of International Law

This strikes me as important. If the United States cannot prosecute an admitted torturer, who will?

A light goes out in the world

The inventor of the Frisbee has died.

What country values history?

The New Republic offers a slightly cranky review of what might be an interesting book: Richard Evans [sorry, was "Ellis" at first] on why British historians study Europe and its countries, while historians in all those countries mostly only study their own countries. Is this true? It seems implausible but he claims to have statistics. The reviewer, however, thinks the United States takes history and historians more seriously than Britain does, which seems to me seriously crazy, no matter what statistics he might cobble together. Sure the Fergusons, Schamas, Starkeys, and the rest might come to the US for the money and the exposure, but their careers are made and nurtured in Britain.

Update: For the name correction, thanks to Kenneth Sheppard, who points out the book -- it's Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent -- is based on his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor at Cambridge. Here is a press release about the lecture.

Ancient history, modern science

Heather Pringle at Time Machine has been posting about how sequencing the genome of a Neandertal has led to proposals to clone one, an idea she condemns with some powerful historical comparisons.

Meanwhile somebody is doing a similar genetic analysis on some poor guy who died in Greenland about 4000 years ago. Some of the same ick factor that Heather is talking about is needed here too.

But that world is coming.

The head and the body in British politics

Stephen MacLean draws my attention to this latest column by Daniel Finkelstein, columnist for Times Online, who has been thinking about the conflict between strong leadership and strong MPs in Britain in ways that make most of our Canadian commentators look, as the Brits say, thick as planks. Maybe they are just slow learners; Canada's had this problem for about 90 years, it's barely a decade old in Britain.

Finkelstein, however, has come to despair, concluding Britain has to move to an American system of an independently elected executive and a separate legislature.

Flag debate down under

New Zealand is debating whether to have a new flag to replace the one that has a) too much Union Jack and B) too much similarity to Australia's. The New Zealand Herald's coverage of the debate includes comments from me. 'Tseems they asked all the Canadian historians they could find online to comment on the Canadian flag debate, and I was the only one who replied.

And here's gratitude for you: they left out the link to this blog I specially asked for.

Update, February 12. A kiwi, a koru, a tiki?

Asked what they preferred if it did change, 53 per cent of those surveyed said they would like to see a silver fern on the design. The next favourite was the kiwi, with 18 per cent support, 13 per cent for the koru, the southern cross 12.5 per cent, and the tiki with just 1 per cent.

. And younger people are the most likely to support retaining the Union Jack. A bunch of suggested designs are available here -- and they are as weird and wonderful as you might imagine.

Anniversaries you might not have noticed.

2010 marks the 300th anniversary of the death of Pierre-Esprit Radisson and the 125th anniversary of the death of Louis Riel.

But joking aside, these people have connected the two events with a pretty imaginative conference theme: voyageurs and Metis from Radisson to Riel.

Comment on comments

I had an email chat about comments on blogs recently, and thought some of it might be worth quoting here, slightly revised:

I prefer having comments via email over a comment function on the blog. When I had Comments, I did not get many comments, I had to police a lot of spam and semispam, and when a flurry of comments did develop once in a while, it seemed they often went off on tangents that had little or nothing to do with the blog itself. Get yourself your own damn blog, I found myself thinking, don't crud up mine.

Some popular/populist blogs thrive on being reader-driven. But mostly I read blogs from an interest in the blogger and skip the comments as much less interesting. The blogs I like best post comments received by email when they seem worthwhile -- and I've imitated that process.

That's not to say I do not value or welcome comments. I greatly appreciate them. I still post all worthwhile comments (virtually all of them, since comment by email seems to have eliminated spam and crazies).

Comments welcome.

Historians in the news

Reviewing Niall Ferguson's Empire some years ago, I wrote: "If historians can be “hot,” the hottest one in the world today is Niall Ferguson." Little did I know.

Ferguson has just splashily left his wife Sue Douglas, a politically-connected journalist in Britain, for Somali-born writer and feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. This follows, allegedly, a string of affairs for Ferguson, whose historical income is said to run at $10 million a year, and of whom a fellow historian said, ‘He has the kind of face you want to punch.’

Hirsi Ali? A "friend" said, "She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys."

Daily Mail story here -- first time we've linked there.

The Elgin Marbles are everywhere

Heather Pringle tees off on the Vancouver Museum's mistreatment of petroglyphs. And again.

RIP The Donnelly family

. . . news of a most atrocious murder . . . perpetrated last night at Lucan 17 miles from London the victims were the Donnelly family. Father Mother two sons and one niece and then their house had been set afire to cover the crime four of the bodies were burnt to a cinder. The people in the city were terrified to hear of such a diabolical and lawless crime.

From the Dictionary of Canadian Biography's life of James Donnelly, done to death a hundred and thirty years ago, 4 February 1880.

Five years ago, I reviewed Peter Edwards's Donnelly book for Law Times, where I do a column. Since it's not online, I'm including the whole thing here.

After the Air India acquittals, we know somebody got away with murder -- and that dozens of people must know who planted the bombs. Peter Edwards’s new book, Night Justice: The True Story of the Black Donnellys, investigates another unpunished mass murder: the infamous Donnelly murders of 1880, where the identity of the killers was well known and no one was convicted.

The Donnelly family had lived since the 1840s in Biddulph township near London, Ontario. They had contributed their fair share in bringing about Biddulph’s degeneration into near-lawlessness, a place where assaults, arsons, and killings went on regularly. The Donnelly boys usually gave as good as they got, but gradually the family became scapegoats for the community’s rage. In February 1880, a lynch mob of the community’s leading citizens stormed their home and beat to death old James Donnelly, his wife, two of his sons, and a niece who had recently come to join them. Then they burned the house down around them.

But a hired boy who hid under a bed throughout the slaughter bravely identified the killers. So why was no one convicted?

Why no one was convicted for the Donnelly murders is one of the questions that interests Peter Edwards in Night Justice, surely the best and liveliest and most comprehensive account of the Donnellys yet. A Toronto Star reporter who has previously written about the wrongful conviction of David Milgaard and the shooting of Dudley George at Ipperwash, Edwards smells politics behind this failure of the justice system. Specifically, he fingers Ontario premier Oliver Mowat.

Most of the Donnellys’ neighbours were glad to see the Donnellys dead. They were either complicit in the murders or willing to shelter the killers. Local people who stood up for justice for the Donnellys risked sharing the Donnellys’ fate. A coroner’s jury drawn from local farmers and townspeople declined to point to any suspects. The first jury to try the killers deadlocked. The second jury voted for acquittal.

The acquittal frustrated London lawyer Charles Hutchinson, who prosecuted the case. But Edwards suspects acquittal was the result Premier Mowat (who was Hutchinson’s boss as attorney-general) hoped for and even connived at. South-western Ontario Catholics were important to Mowat’s electoral base. The Donnellys were Catholics, but it was also Catholics who killed them, cheered the deed, and acquitted the killers. Vigorous and successful prosecutions could only antagonize Catholic voters, Edwards suggests, so Attorney General Mowat helped prevent a change of venue to help give local Catholics the acquittals they wanted.

Actually, the evidence Edwards provides is pretty thin. Mowat was not likely to feel very threatened, no matter how the Donnelly verdicts came out. And it was federal judges, sustaining a long tradition that justice must be local, who refused the crown’s repeated petitions for a change of venue for the Donnelly trials. Edwards’ allegations about Mowat may reflect the instincts of a political reporter habituated to political conspiracy-hunting.

The true failure of state and justice in the Donnelly case seems to have been more systemic. It was little wonder that brutality, arson, and eventually mass murder took hold of the Donnellys’ neighbourhood over the decades, since local constables and magistrates were leading participants, and the larger justice system typically looked the other way. When it was only the bog-Irish brutalizing each other, Ontario didn’t much trouble to defend the rule of law and the authority of the state in Biddulph township.

Maybe the way we didn’t much trouble ourselves more recently when it seemed it was just East Asians threatening each other over Kalistan or Tamil Eelam.

Update Feb 11: Merna Forster reminds me of the Great Canadian Mysteries Donnelly material -- worth a look.

History of Drug Addiction Policy

Best, most informative, most aware coverage I have seen of Vancouver's drug-addiction treatment experiment, the place and program called Insite, is on the generally lite American online magazine Slate. It starts here, but seems to be running all week. Have any Canadian media even in Vancouver, matched this?

History of Bank regulation

History is where you find it. In the Globe and Mail letters columns, Joe Martin responds to a Globe editorial with a succinct history of banking regulation in Canada since 1817, via the Quebec conference of 1864 and the panic of 1907-8.

Update, February 4: Roderick Benns writes in:

it's so interesting that during the Great Depression, the Canadian banking system stood up well, then, too. This was before a central bank was created to regulate credit, but Prime Minister Richard Bennett was already on the task at that time. Pretty much the only people at the time who didn't like the idea were those who ran the chartered banks, since they had to give up their profitable issue of bank notes to make way for a truly national currency. (Not to mention they were forced to move their gold reserves to the Bank of Canada....)

Thanks for the post!

The unthinkable idea is beginning to be thunk

Political scientist Nelson Wiseman, at HistoryWire (which has too much politics and too little history, but never mind) considers "how to empower MPs":

let party caucuses determine once again their leader. Leaders would have to court and listen to their MPs rather than vice-versa. Having popularly elected MPs select their leader is arguably more democratic, accountable, and transparent than having “instant” party members elect delegate slates at manipulated constituency meetings.

When the caucus of a major political party adopts and enacts this program, I promise to write a memoir called "How I Saved the Country." But it may be a while yet.

Afua Cooper for Black History Month

Multitalented Afua Cooper -- Ph.D scholar, GG-winning popular historian, much-published poet -- has a couple of children's historical novels out too, exploring the lives of notable African-Americans: My Name is Henry Bibb and My Name is Phyllis Wheatley.