Britain? Written? Constitution?

Mary Beard, Cambridge [not Oxonian, as I first wrote] classicist, telly-don, and TimesOnline blogger, mostly brushes off the debate on whether Britain needs a written constitution. ("There was the question of whether you could compare our constitution to a tennis club.") She's pondering responses to Repairing British Politics, a recent book by British constitutional lawyer Richard Gordon (which is also considered, more sympathetically here).

Archival life

A blogger called Notorious Ph.D has started a series called A Day in the Archives, and it has made me all nostalgic. The link is to Part 1, but in part 2 she gets to the place where you finally have the documents in front of you and you realize that although you (sort of) know the language, you can't read the handwriting. As she says, this can lead to tears and a deep fear that you will have to find another profession.

She has not yet got to the triumphs. The medievalists have all the best stories in this vein, but it can happen in Canadian history too, if you get back far enough. I recall fondly a day when I sorted out that a word that looked like "lorbe" in an 18th century French document was actually the English place name "Tor Bay" (uncrossed T, no accent on the e). And another day when I recognized the words "drap d'Elbeuf" in a very badly written inventory... and actually knew what Elbeuf cloth was. Ah, mastery

Update: April 1. A nice archival triumph story: hardworking grad student discovers the only known printed copy of Haiti's original constitution.

Not an Onion headline

The City of Brantford has decided to completely demolish all 41 buildings with the help of Federal stimulus money.

Brantford, Ontario, plans to demolish a neighbourhood's worth buildings in its downtown, possibly the largest surviving assemblage of Confederation-era architecture. Intended beneficiary: the local campus of Wilfrid Laurier University. And profs who decry this vandalism get hauled in for questioning by the bosses. Karen Dearlove has the story at Active History a couple of weeks ago.

Who gets to write history?

Mike Green takes on the Texas politicians rewriting the history curriculum.

History is always political, and should be, which is why contested, unofficial views and interpretations are often a lot more fun. Maybe that's why I've generally stayed out of writing textbooks (well, also because the big Ed publishers pay diddley-squat and want to appropriate all your rights and produce adulterated crap, but that's another story.) But, as Texas shows, if we keep on electing crazy people, we end up getting crazy history.

Update: Dan Francis, terrific writer, history blogger, and frequent textbook author -- and the guy from whom I learned that Jimi Hendrix is Canadian! -- writes to

take issue with your rather snarky comments about textbook writing, given that I've written several in my time, tho' not so much any more

and of course he is completely right. He's just one of many textbook authors who do terrific work, and get paid, and should not get sidesnarked when I'm being jaundiced about some of the publishers in the field.

Further update, March 27: Not to be missed is John Allemang's Globe & Mail interview with one of the Texas board members who mandated the new textbook. Recalling an earlier post about democracy, I particularly liked this bit:

We're a republic, a constitutional republic. That's why a lot of states are challenging Obama's health-care legislation on a constitutional basis, not on a democratic basis. We're a constitutional republic, so those challenges are not on how many people voted one way or the other.

Schmoozing with historians

Down to Schmooze in Toronto's Entertainment District last night to... well, schmooze with historians.

Canada's History Society was in town big time to launch the new brand: the magazine Canada's History, and also the elaborate new website Canada's History that went live during the evening. Canada's History now has more staff working on its website than the website had pages just a few years ago, editor Mark Reid said last night, and it shows. The site is still rolling out new features, but it's pretty extensive already. Take a look.

The historical imagination

British writer Ian Jack, with remarkable skill and sensitivity, investigates and explicates this famous image of British class divisions (by photographer Jack Sime, Getty Images, from Intelligent Life).

If the voting system ain't the real problem, tinkering with the voting system when real problems emerge is probably making things worse

The Irish Times reports agitation to reform the voting system in Ireland. (h/t Fruits and Votes.)

Ireland's a fiscal-and-economic mess right now. It turns out the extraordinary economic progress that got Ireland calling itself the "Celtic Tiger" was just another bubble based on a tsunami of EEC money, over-optimistic bankers, and regulatory failure.

So they want to change ... the voting system.

In his presentation, Mr Hogan argued that political failure lay at the heart of Ireland’s economic crisis. He said the party was determined to reform political bodies and the electoral system and to puts its proposals to the people by referendum, and also by means of a new “citizens’ assembly”.

Ireland has long been one of the few countries that uses the single transferable vote process that was proposed (and rejected) in B.C.'s recent referendum on electoral reform. I guess if electoral reform is your thing, electoral reform is the solution to every problem.

Everybody else is wrong today

Well, no, they aren’t. But today I find myself disagreeing with a lot of smart people from whom I often take guidance, and so it seems that way.

Why Andrew Smith is wrong

Andrew's blog has interesting thoughts on the origins of the Canadian banking system. I hope he publishes his paper or adds it to his blog soon. But he seems, ah, unpersuasive in his argument that Canada’s strong banking system reflects the anti-democratic culture in Canada. Andrew declares (I’ve added numbers to his sentences) that --

the political culture and institutions of Canada were, in the 1860s and 1870s, significantly less democratic than the United States. 1) Although a higher proportion of adult males in Canada enjoyed the right to vote than in Disraeli’s Britain, politicians in Canada still regarded “democracy” as an American, and therefore suspect, concept. In the northern United States, nearly every white man had the right to vote, but the franchise in Canada was restricted by a variety of property qualifications. 2) Canada’s elites believed in a system that blended monarchy and aristocracy with democracy. 3) Even today, there is considerable resistance in Canada to the idea of direct democracy. 4) Most politicians in Canada and the United Kingdom still look with horror upon the idea of elected judges and the frequent use of referenda in California and other American states!

This seems wrong in every sentence.

Sentence 1. Who votes? I'd guess a larger proportion of adult males voted in Canada than in the United States at confederation. Smith’s assumption that non-white males don’t count in the tally sounds like what the framers of the American constitution believed, and many other Americans were discouraged from registering and otherwise voting. But in any case most Canadian adult males voted. John Garner’s The Franchise and Politics in British North America, 1755-1867 (1969) remains the most detailed study of this topic (alas). In British North America, Garner wrote, “no numerous and important segment of the population was excluded from exercise [of the vote]. The general populace had it within their power to choose general assemblies to their liking.” That’s slightly too rosy a picture, true, but something close to universal manhood suffrage applied in much of Confederation-era British North America. The legend that voting was limited to some imaginary elite has lasted far too long.

Sentence 2. What did elites believe? I’ll add one more newspaper quote to Andrew’s collection:

“We are a democratic people.”

That’s George Brown (or his editorial writers reflecting his views) in The Globe, October 26, 1864. Brown is “elite” if anyone is. When this description of 1864-era Canadians was printed, he was wielding great influence at the confederation conference in Quebec. His declaration of democracy was part of his vigorous explanation of why the Quebec Conference would ensure that the unrepresentative, “aristocratic” Senate would be weak, a mere show pony, while the rep-by-pop legislatures would be the focus of authority in Ottawa and in each province. Still seems a good idea to me.

Sentences 3 & 4. Resistance to direct democracy? Damn right there was and is, and nothing to be sneered at. Actually, the Ameican founders resisted direct democracy too. They preferred “republican” values to “democratic” ones, equating democracy with mob rule, and put in many controls to limit the power of the ordinary voter. It’s worth remembering that as recently as 2000 the "democratic" American system put the candidate who was defeated in the popular vote into the White House, that in the very powerful American Senate the 2 million people of South Dakota and Wyoming have as much representation as the 50 million of California and New York. I won’t belabour the point; those interested in pursuing the degree to which democratic theory prevails in American practice might consult the 2002 work of the distinguished American political scientist and constitutional scholar Robert A. Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? (Hint: not so much.)

But, more to the point, to define democracy as plebiscitary rule is to abuse the language. There is nothing anti-democratic in preferring representative democracy over direct democracy. They are both forms of democracy and, given the disaster that budget-making-by-plebiscite has created in California in recent decades, all those theorists and constitution-makers, both American and Canadian, who have preferred the representative kind as inherently more just and more effective, do not deserve to be called either elitist or anti-democratic.

Why the Mowat Centre is wrong

The Mowat Centre, a thinkthingee at the University of Toronto, declares that Canada’s House of Commons is uniquely unrepresentative.

This claim seems absurd on the face of it – see my note above about the unrepresentativeness-by-design of, to take one nearby example, the immensely powerful American Senate and Presidency. It is true and unfortunate that the House of Commons has drifted away from the rep-by-pop principles adopted by the makers of confederation in 1864. But frankly the slight over-representation of rural Canada in today's Commons hardly poses an existential threat to Canadian government.

What is most striking about the Mowat study is how the critique of the Commons seems mostly advanced to support the authors’ true goal: Senate reform. For the Senate is spectacularly unrepresentative of the population, and most reform proposals (Triple-E) are intended to make it even more unrepresentative. How serious can the authors of this study be about representation if they want to shift power from a slightly unrepresentative Commons to an entirely unrepresentative Senate?


Why Patrick Monahan and David Schneiderman are wrong

The two constitutional scholars were on As It Happens Tuesday night (audio may be here, though I have not listened to it all to check) discussing the cabinet’s refusal to yield to Parliament’s demand for delivery of certain documents. Monahan seemed more supportive of an unaccountable executive than Schneiderman, but both men seemed to take it for granted that Parliament is and should be largely decorative. Both believed, as legal scholars often do nowadays, that the important contest was not between the executive and the legislature, but between the executive and the courts. If Parliament could pass the right laws, Schneiderman ventured, then the courts might be able to enforce them on the executive. But the idea of an executive directly accountable to an elected legislature seemed entirely foreign to both legal scholars.

Why Janet Ajzenstat is wrong, maybe

Mostly I agree with Janet’s argument about free speech traditions in Canada. And I’m not sure if she is actually arguing that Ann Coulter’s failure to speak in Ottawa last night was a blow to free speech.

I have doubts, to say the least, about most of our hate-speech laws and regulations. But the solution is to work to get the laws amended, limited, or off the books.

When controversialists comes to Canada specifically to practise polemical hate-speaking, I’m inclined to let them. But I don’t think it’s improper for a host university to point out to one of them that anti-hate laws do currently exist in Canada and her stock-in-trade remarks might fall afoul of them.

More on early voyages

Doug Hunter expands on my note about his John Cabot/Alwyn Ruddock article (see below):

Thanks for mentioning the Ruddock article, skepticism and all. Once the latest issue of Canada's History is off the newsstand, I will post a longer version of the article on my own website. Most of the additional material involves Ruddock's life story and other research that vanished.

Pre-Columbian exploration history theory as you acknowledge is full of mystery and allegation and plenty of theorizing. Records unfortunately are spotty, with Bristol customs records for example having big holes in them. It's not easy to find evidence of voyage financiers because merchant bankers in London overwhelmingly were Florentines and Genoese, not Englishmen, and records are either missing altogether or squirreled away in a private archive somewhere. The latter seems to be what Ruddock tapped into in Italy when she figured out that Cabot was (quite logically) funded by
Italian bankers. She never identified them, but in reading her early published research and cross-indexing her surviving book outline and notes, I have a pretty good idea of who they were, and the names of the partners in the London operation.

We'll never know for sure until somebody stumbles on the same unindexed private archive that she did. She is to be credited for almost singlehandedly pursuing the integration of the English maritime economy with the European financial system that was in the hands overwhelmingly of the Florentines and Genoese. One of the elements in the expanded story I'll post on my website is the fact that she devoted considerable time every spring and fall to touring the Med and visiting public and private archives in her research as an economic historian.

I've been looking into crypto-history for a little while, mainly as a sociocultural phenom, but also dealing with legitimate discovery history, and am now working on a book about Columbus and Cabot. Some of what Ruddock proposed about Cabot is currently unprovable, and there are things she didn't pursue with him (based on her surviving book outline) that surprised me. A lot of what has been published about Cabot is either wrong or missing significant connections between him and the Columbus enterprise. I've been synthesizing known Cabot documentation with more recent research in Spain on Columbus materials, as well as having an important Spanish letter relating to Cabot retranslated (it was botched badly in the standard translation in a significant way).

The people I've dealt with on Ruddock have emphasized to me what a careful archival researcher she was, and that if she said she had found something, then she had. How far back the discovery timeline ever can be legitimately pushed is an open-ended question. D.B. Quinn argued the Bristol sailors were in Nfld by 1480, but had no hard proof. Ruddock said she had proof, possibly from Spain, that could push that back to before 1470. I have an unpublished translation of a paper by the Icelandic scholar Thorsteinsson (and a letter he wrote Quinn from Quinn's papers in the Library of Congress) which says English mariners were most likely in Nfld by about 1425, almost certainly by 1450. But Thorsteinsson has never been published in English translation, and he was also operating on a lot of circumstantial evidence. Much pre-Columbian voyage theory is culturally relative. Portuguese (and even Spanish) scholars are far more accepting of what we would consider incomplete evidence of pre- Columbian voyages to Newfoundland, for example.

If you get a chance, please check out my new blog, Age of Discovery News.
It's definitely a labour of love.

This month in The Bea... sorry, in Canada's History, cont'd.

I noted Douglas Hunter's lively article below. My own column this month is "A (pro) rogue's gallery" -- and I thank editor Mark for the title. I try to write mostly history, not current events, in that column, but I couldn't resist noting that the first time Canada's parliament was prorogued, it stayed out 327 days. And the second time, only the constitutional obligation that the house must meet once every twelve months brought them back a couple of days before the deadline.

But mostly, I'm working the theme that "if premiers and prime ministers knew that legislatures would rebuke them for abusing parliament, we would not have to worry about rogue prorogations." The problem is not in the laws or rules of procedure, it's in the reluctance of legislatures to control executives.

I'll put the piece up at my website shortly. Meanwhile I'm impressed by Reg Whittaker's recent opinion in the Toronto Star on a related subject.

We all seem to love and trust judges, so there seems to have been a good deal of acceptance of Prime Minister Harper's announcement that retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci would mediate the cabinet's dispute with Parliament over the release of documents the legislature has demanded to see and the executive continues to keep secret. Well, that seems like the kind of thing judges could settle, doesn't it?

Reg Whittaker says no, very forcefully. The accountability of the executive to the legislature is a constitutional foundation stone, he observes. It's not a negotiable thing. It's not something to be determined by an outside referee, and in this matter Iacobucci is not even a court of law, but really only a private citizen hired by the executive to advise the executive. As Whittaker puts it:

Iacobucci has accepted a task which neither he nor any other person of however high repute and qualifications, has any business doing. Not the Prime Minister, nor the justice minister, nor a Supreme Court judge, can be the appropriate arbiter of what papers Parliament can order, and enforce release, from the executive.

He continues:

Besides wasting money, the Iacobucci ploy stands the fundamental notion of responsible government on its head. There can be no responsibility to Parliament when it is the executive that decides what Parliament can know.

The whole article is worth reading (thanks, Stephen for drawing my attention to it), but I think he's on the same idea as I was in my column. Remedies for these problems lie in the legislature, and in legislators.

Hunter on early voyages.

A blogger unable to link... a bird unable to sing.

I wanted to note the Globe & Mail's "On the Stand" feature from last Saturday, recommending Douglas Hunter's "Rewriting History" in the current issue of Canada's History (aka The Beaver, as I guess we will be saying forevermore). But On the Stand is not included in the online Globe, so there's no link. I thought I'd link instead to Hunter's article itself. But the Beaver website (it's still called the Beaver website) has not yet updated. It's not on Doug Hunter's own website either. So, print still rules; only magazine subscribers can see it so far.

Hunter writes about Alwyn Ruddock, an elderly British historian who died in 2005 after a lifetime of writer's block. A dedicated and respected scholar, she had accumulated a vast collection of evidence on the history of early Atlantic voyaging, with particularly reference to John Cabot. But she never published. At her death she left instructions that all her manuscripts, research notes, and correspondence be destroyed. It's all gone. Hunter endorses the views of British scholars who believe that Ruddock had sensational new evidence about more voyages and earlier voyages, When Ruddock's lost evidence is recovered by someone willing to duplicate her lifetime in the archives, he argues, "the early exploration of the New World is going to require a rewrite."

Well, maybe. Or maybe Ruddock had only clues and possibilities, and could never work it into a conclusive argument. I've been following early Atlantic exploration ever since I first went to Atlantic Canada as a little baby historian, and these amazing new discoveries about pre-Columbian voyages have always been just over the horizon and just about to pan out, but never quite getting there. I'd say we are still waiting.

About 1500, the minor, local archives of the coastal authorities of western Europe began to collect a growing pile of boring and routine documents. There's no glory in them, no narratives of new discoveries across the seas. It's just merchants notarizing debts, shipowners filing insurance contracts, captains registering crew hiring papers, and sailors recording their wills. But these routine transactions start to concern fishing or whaling or trading voyages to "tierra neuva," "terra nova," "terre neuve," "the new land," "the new isle."

If there were lost voyages a generation before Columbus and Cabot, one would think the merchants and sailors involved would have needed to borrow money, insure vessels, sell their cargoes, provide for their families. And that all these little transactions would leave traces in the registers of notaries and port authorities. Instead, according to every scholar who has looked into it, these routine and peripheral references to that new world out here blossom suddenly and sharply just after the famous voyages of discovery.

Maybe Alwyn Ruddock found evidence to the contrary. But 'til someone finds it again and publishes it, I'm not ready to rewrite history.

Great article however. Good issue.

Update, March 22: Yes, I'm mostly a sceptic on pre-Columbian voyages. But not on the Norse. Heather Pringle today has a fascinating post on ongoing Norse travel to Baffin Island to trade for ivory, and on all the evidence they left behind.

Today in History

... the killing of Robert-Réné Cavalier de La Salle, big dreamer, in 1687. The Canadian Encyclopedia Online features his life today.

Women don't blog...

... which is why you couldn't possibly follow my frequent links here or here or here or here or here or here, and that's sticking close to historyblog turf. That Huffington person must be a guy, too.

Margaret Wente says bloggers are male. Women can blog, but there's something wrong with them if they do.

But then she offers another option: that Margaret Wente is an idiot.

These days, you don't even have to start a blog to get an audience. All you have to do is write “Margaret Wente is an idiot” and hit send.

I'll see how my traffic stats respond. She cannot be wrong about everything.

Always a nice day, when you hear a thump on the porch, and find a big box full of crisp fresh copies of YOUR NEW BOOK.

Amazon is on the case already. More info here too. And the page from UBC Press's website here.

Macdonald and Laurier not PC anymore?

Andrew Smith, in his blog and a letter to the Globe and Mail, goes to town on a new Ottawa thinktank for naming itself after John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier.

Holberg Prize to Natalie Zemon Davis

I'm probably one of thousands to feel a personal satisfaction in the award of the megabucks Holberg Prize to historian, writer, activist Natalie Zemon Davis. I interviewed her once, many years ago, but I remember her as if she were a personal friend. It was perhaps the most enjoyable of all the interviews I have done over the years with historians about their work. NZD managed to be profoundly serious and alive to the moral issues of scholarship -- and at the same time to convey more sheer laugh-out-loud pleasure in the doing of historical work than anyone I ever met.

Globe story on the prize here. Apparently she has a memoir in the works too.

1812 and community building

Next month the Niagara 1812 Bicentennial Legacy Council will host a "Creating 1812" conference in Hamilton, Ont., -- -- "commemoration, national identity and role of the arts." Looks impressive.

Andrew Stewart [not "Smith" as I originally wrote], chair of the Fort York Foundation in Toronto, who drew this to my attention, notes:

I think it's interesting how cities are learning to combine heritage and the arts - and not just heritage generally but specifically the War of 1812, which might be considered difficult and obscure, but is a seminal event in southern Ontario's history. Also interesting and encouraging that First Nations (specifically the Six Nations) are part of this effort given their important role in the war. The idea of commemorating the bicentennial is leading to renewal of historic alliances between First Nations and other Canadians -- at least on the creative and arts front.

Print on Demand Cover Art

Following up my note about the oddities of PoD publishing, Brian Busby made my day with a link to his collection of classic printed-on-demand Canadiana book covers. As he says,

The industry has yet to complete its second decade and already these firms are responsible for a great percentage of the ugliest books in existence. Blurred scans, scored texts and missing pages only add to the unpleasantness.

The full series of unintentionally hilarious covers is not to be missed.

World o'Bookbuying

Not long ago via Abebooks, I bought a copy of Alexander Mackenzie's biography of George Brown published in Toronto in 1882, two years after Brown's death. It arrived in a day or two, a marvel of the publisher's art, a match for anything published today: crisp pages, handsomely designed and bound, in excellent condition, full of details not included in Maurice Careless's authoritative biography from the 1950s.

It's 128 years old, has never been republished, cannot be all that common, and is, after all, the life of an important Canadian political figure by a former prime minister. Did it cost, like $100 or something?

Ten bucks.

Today I bought Getting into Parliament and After, a funny and charming memoir by one-time Ontario premier George Ross, published in Toronto in 1913. (You can see where my interests are running these days.) Now, if I wanted I could read Ross's memoir as a free download. But again it's ten bucks for the real non-virtual book, and it will be in my mailbox in a day or two.

I confess I am stunned by the cheapness of what ought to be collectible Canadiana -- and also by the sophistication and liveliness of the Canadian writing and publishing scene a century or so before it was supposed to exist at all.

But the other oddity is this. On the Abebooks site, along with the listings of two or three booksellers offering first editions of Ross's memoir, come several others offering it as a new book!

Book Condition: New. Brand new print-on-demand paperback book produced in the US and delivered from our US warehouse in 7-10 days. Check out our low worldwide delivery costs! Please note: we only take orders through ABE - NOT DIRECT!.

This is becoming standard in the "used" book market. Some printer takes the digital scans that are now readily available for most out-of-copyright books and offers to print a fresh copy on demand and send it to me.

Oddly enough, the new print-on-demand edition, in a nasty, cheaply-bound generically-labelled paper cover, goes for about $30 -- triple the price of the first edition.

Strange new world.

Medieval History gets controversial

The number and range of lively medieval history blogs often surprises me. Now Cliopatria calls our attention to a dispute among medievalists as to the blogging ethics of some enterprising students who have turned their scholarly interest into a large (and ad-subsidized) medieval history newsblog, allegedly by reposting the work of others without attribution or linkage. The comments and responses are fascinating, with vigorous justification by the bloggers concerned and much prevarication about whether "academic" or "journalistic" standards and ethics should prevail in history blogging.

In the comments, Medieval News's principals defend their practices, but a look at their site suggests merit in the criticisms they face. Obvious linking opportunities are conspicuously absent in nearly every post. Here for instance is their report on a medieval symposium at Brock University next Friday. Useful -- but it lacks this easily available link to Brock's own announcement and contact info, which I found in a couple of minutes and which anyone interested in attending would want to have.

Linking isn't mandatory, I'd say, but credit and acknowledgment generally are. In any case, linking, as the unique characteristic that distinguishing blogging from most other media, ought to be seized not as an obligation but as an opportunity.

This week The Historicist at the news-of-Toronto blog Torontoist features some terrific caricatures of prominent Torontonians c1900 -- and some perceptive commentary about the goals and talents of caricaturists in that era.

The one copied at right is patent lawyer Frederick Fetherstonhaugh ("We protect the inventor.") by Newton McConnell, 1905.

Executed... well, yesterday, actually

The irresistable Executed Today yesterday noted the execution of Britain's Admiral John Byng, for "failure to do his utmost" or as Voltaire put it, "pour encourager les autres." The little video clip provided has some nice images of Louisbourg at the beginning, and a sharp naval-historical point at the end.

Byng was an ancestor of Governor General of Canada Julian Byng, politically executed by Mackenzie King in 1926 for refusing to be a prime ministerial patsy.

Has history got past "revisionism'?

How long has it been since you heard someone called a “revisionist,”[?] .... I think it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve heard these terms in serious conversations.

Historiann hopes that serious historians have mostly got past the idea that history is about establishing Unchanging Truth. Are we now in a position where what used to be assailed as "revisionism" is now accepted simply as inevitable differences in interpretation? Or is it just that historians are now so tribal that they hardly bother having discussions across ideological barriers?

The comments are many and interesting. But no one seems to note how attitudes to the label "revisionist" were affected by Holocaust deniers, whose attempt to position themselves as revisionists (as if they offered a legitimate re-interpretation of the historical evidence) did a lot to tarnish the term itself.

A little more from International Women's Day

Following up on Monday's IWD post, Merna Forster draws our attention to heroines.ca, a website to promote women's history, and to the book 100 Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces.

Globe and Mail sez:

If you don't know who any of the following are—Isobel Gunn, Anna Leonowens (hint: Think Siam), Asayo Murakami, Mary Travers (not of Peter, Paul and Mary), Gudridur Thorbjardottir—then this is the book for you, or your daughter, or your son, for that matter.

Isobel, Anna, and Gudridur I'm good with, Mary and Asayo not so much.

Cohen Prize to John English

John English's much-nominated Trudeau biography Just Watch Me won the Shaugnessey Cohen prize for political books last night in Ottawa. Globe story here. Daniel Poliquin's Réné Lévesque, also much nominated, was once again among the runners-up

Who writes history?

The wife of an admired American historian of baseball, now dead, demonstrates pretty convincingly she made a major contribution to "his" work and is honoured along with him by SABR, the baseball historians. She says, "He just couldn’t share credit. And I didn’t say anything at the time, because at the time, wives just didn’t do that.”

History of Public Health

The Canadian Public Health Association, marking its hundredth anniversary in 2010, has up a centenary website with quite a bit of public health history. The anniversary will also be marked by Christopher Ruddy's history Constant Vigilance: The Story of Public Health in Canada. More info here.

Thinking about parliaments

Janet passes on a mini-review of Adam Tomkins' Our Republican Constitution and its analysis of how parliaments work and how they should work. My own longer review in the Literary Review of Canada, which introduced Tomkins to Canadian discussions, is here. I have another essay on another topic forthcoming in the LRC - don't miss the April issue.

Breckenridge is shortsighted, in my view, in his prescription for change in Canada: the parties' authoritarian rules (even when cemented into the Elections Act) are a symptom, not the problem. But his doubts about Tomkins' prescriptions are worthwhile, even allowing for the note of professional jealousies being exercised.

British historians on deficits and budgets

History and Policy is a British website in which historians attempt to influence public policy discussions with historical information. A case in point is the recent argument by historian Glen O'Hara (supported by 19 other scholars) that an analysis of historical levels of British public debt suggests that deep and immediate "cuts" in public spending are unnecessary and unjustified. Agree or disagree, it's an impressive example of historians using specifically historical information in public policy debate.

Here in Canada, Active History espouses some of the same ambitions, and cited History and Policy as a model. Currently, it is featuring Foucault and the politics of memory for first year undergraduates. Chacun à son gout, I suppose.

Five Canadian histories for International Women's Day

Just from a quick shelf-browse. Further nominations would be posted.

* Jean Barman, Sojourning Sisters. Two Nova Scotian women go teaching in 1880s British Columbia

* Elizabeth Goudie, Woman of Labrador. Trapping family memoir.

* Alison Prentice et al, Canadian Women: A History. The standard work.

* Robert Sharpe and Patricia McMahon, The Persons Case. Story well told.

* Audrey Thomas, Isobel Gunn: A Novel. The furtrade re-imagined.

Update, March 8: And a list of women's history blogs from Tenured Radical.

The words to the national anthem

When Peter Mansbridge's people called looking for a historian to pontificate on the proposal to change the words of the national anthem, I suggested they should find some women historians to talk about it. They did, and now I'm in the clear, and just as happy about it. There must be better subjects on which to go National.

But I heard a woman saying she hasn't sung "all thy sons command" anytime in the forty years. And that seemed to suggest the way to go on this anthem thing. Those who feel that way should sing louder. Sing the anthem the way you believe it ought to be sung, and the rest of us will listen. If we build some consensus around "in all our hearts command" or something, then Parliament could easily follow. I'm a House of Commons, representative government guy on most things, for sure, But having the politicians tinker with all the national icons whenever they need to create a diversion seems all wrong somehow. Let the people speak on this one.

The wording to the national anthem seems like a ideal subject for a Facebook uprising or something. Any politico-techno geek type out there want to take it on?

Carl Benn on Toronto history

The St George's Society of Toronto, a mere 175 years old this year, is hosting Carl Benn in a lecture on the history of the city, tomorrow February 5. Details here.

The City, meanwhile, is looking for a historian to direct its War of 1812 bicentennial activities.

Churchill Society on Parliament and Prorogue

The Churchill Society for Parliamentary Democracy, often teetering on the brink of being too Anglophile for my taste, comes on home to offers a forum next Monday in Toronto where some promising speakers will discuss the post-prorogue state of parliament and such. Details here.

Lawrence Martin in the Globe this morning offers the standard nostrums about reining in prime ministerial powers. He still seems to imagine that party strategists, the principal beneficiaries of such powers, might offer a solution. Fat chance. Earlier, Adam Radwanski was regurgitating the "every journalist loves a fascist" approach, condemning Toronto MP Gerard Kennedy's efforts to represent his constituents as troublemaking, treason, and disloyalty, since he's not actually in some leader's pocket.

History of Happy Valley

"Happy Valley"? Who would name a town Happy Valley? The town was founded by civilians who came to work at the new airforce base at Goose Bay in the 1940s, when the military insisted the civilian town had to be located at least 8 km from the base. The name Happy Valley was adopted more than a decade later.

The two communities merged as Happy Valley-Goose Bay in 1974, and today an unplanned sprawl of commercial enterprises and suburban-style housing links the original communities together in such a way that no one goes anywhere in this town of 7500 except by car or, in colder winters than this, by snowmobile -- and most of the cars are trucks or four-wheels. There's only a couple of traffic lights in town so far, but the lineups to turn into the Tim's can be substantial.

All these trends look to rocket forward now that, as of this year, it is possible to drive from Quebec not just to Happy Valley-Goose Bay but on to the coast, down to the Strait of Belle Isle, and across by ferry to the island of Newfoundland. As the road is paved, and as Parks Canada starts to ramp up development in the brand new Mealy Mountains National Park along the south shore of Lake Melville, .... well, they have built it, and people will come.

But I was wondering about the name Happy Valley. I was told around town the name was coined by military personnel at the air base when they discovered there were girls down there in the civilian settlement. The story sounds almost too good, but neither The Canadian Encylopedia nor Wikipedia offers enlightment.

I note, however, that the Canadian Encyclopedia, though online, is badly out of date in its entry on Happy Valley-Goose Bay. The low flying military exercises it mentions ended years ago, and the European airforces are almost completely gone from Goose Bay. Wikipedia is more detailed and much more up to date. TCE Online is a great resource, and I use it constantly. But these days the standards for updating are scarily high -- I hope TCE has the resources to compete.

Woman of Labrador

There's an Elizabeth Goudie Building in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador. But for that, kids I was talking to at the high school here knew nothing of her.

Elizabeth Goudie (1902-1982) wrote a memoir, Woman of Labrador, of the life of a Labrador trapping family. With the help of a visiting anthropologist, it was published in 1973. Memorial University archives offers a manuscript page from it online here.

Elizabeth Goudie only had a couple of years of schooling, but she wrote notes of her life in moments seized from the endless toil of the trapping family's annual cycle. In 1942, as construction on the airforce base at Goose Bay began, her people first saw trucks and electricity, and many other things.

They treated the children with chocolate bars and gum and they turned off the lights and turned on the show. When it came on we couldn't believe our own eyes and ears, hearing people talking and seeing them moving on the screen. I thought a lot about it after I got home.

But she is astute about the other side of contact.

We were bothered with heavy colds and flu and a lot of us got quite sick. The doctor said it was because of the new people...

She knows, too, that for all her pride in Labrador, her people, the settlers and Métis trappers, were not the first there. She describes her husband's father and uncles, the first white trappers to venture beyond Grand Falls (now Churchill Falls). They

were the first white men who went in there to trap among the Indians in the early 1900s; they didn't like it. They tried to drive us out in every way.... They were so cross about us stealing their trapping.

That territory is now mostly the reservoir created by the hydro electric project at Churchill Falls. Ownership and control of it continues to be contested between the Newfoundland and Labrador government and the Innu Nation.

Discover Canada again

Most read story in the Globe & Mail online right now is the one about Heritage Minister James Moore's edits of the "Discover Canada" manuscript to remove references to gay rights. Amazing the legs that story has.

This story makes me glad I declined to get involved in what was obviously a political process. I'm also glad that historians who did participate -- working hard in good faith to make the thing better, I do believe -- allowed themselves to be identified. We make these choices to participate in politically-driven processes or not, and we ought to be open about them.

Hockey Night in Sheshashui

All week in the schools of Goose Bay and surrounds I've been selling the message that we can make our own history and history is what we make of it. Today in a classroom of Lake Melville School at North-West River ("'Striver," we Labrador old hands have learned to call it) I had an experience I have never had in any other school. I often talk about personal histories with school classes, and I asked how many of these kids, maybe fifteen of them, had not been born here in Labrador. Not a single hand went up. (It's not like that in Toronto.)

Historical moment: North West River is one of the few towns in Labrador still largely focussed on trapping. Donald Smith, the guy in the famous photograph hammering down the Last Spike, spent years running the HBC post here. No red mittens in his day, I think. Update, March 4: He lived mostly at Rigolet down the bay, I'm told. But Smith's DCB biography shows links to North-West River too. They take such things seriously here.

Here in the territory of the Labrador Innu, I also went today to Sheshashui Indian School, a spectacular building with a magnificent view of Lake Melville. We were talking about the land and resource issues of the Innu and how they compare to the Haida and the Mohawk and others around the country. I was arguing, based on a passage from The Story of Canada, that the Innu have claimed a place in Canadian history by insisting they are there, they know who they are, and they have their claims to attention. And aren't we all doing that? Communities get to be in history by valuing who they are and declaring it.

The kids in schools today, the boys in particular, were still pretty pumped from the hockey results from last night. I had been reading all week from "The Greatest Goal," a vignette from The Story of Canada about the 1972 Canada-Soviet Union series. Hockey is part of our history because we make it be. And all week I had been saying that when Sidney Crosby scored the winning goal on Sunday night, that would be history too.

School kids all over Goose Bay may think I know the future as well as the past.

(Chris O'Meara photo from www.cbc.ca)