The Atlantic - Google Shuts Down Newspaper Archive Project

This makes me sad, it's a wonderful resource for undergrads and grads especially who can't travel for research. I've used it for research and I know others who have as well. It included smaller papers, like the Ottawa Citizen rather than just huge national broadsheets like the Globe or the New York Times.Hopefully, they at least keep it up and running for good even though they're not adding any new material.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/google-shuts-down-newspaper-archive-project/239239/

ActiveHistory.ca - Sir John A. Uses Twitter?

http://activehistory.ca/2011/05/sir-john-a-uses-twitter/

I love this alternate historical personality trend (see that...I made a Twitter pun) I blogged briefly on this during the election.Some of the tweets are actually pretty funny.

CBC - Tommy Douglas's intelligence report missing pages

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2011/05/29/tommy-douglas-file.html

How's World War II going?

Take a break from the day-by-day history blogging of the Second World War+70 years, and you miss a lot.  They sank the Bismarck the other day, and I didn't even know it had sailed.

Book Notes: McDonald on Mercy Coles

Also at the Writers' Union conference in Toronto, I had the pleasure of meeting Anne McDonald and discovering her recently published novel To The Edge of the Sea, which is set against the backdrop of the 1864 confederation conferences at Charlottetown and Quebec. It includes among its characters the Prince Edward Island diarist Mercy Anne Coles, whose confederation diary is well known to historians of the period.  Anne was kind enough to cite my 1867: How the Fathers Made A Deal in her notes, and I'm delighted to return the favour.

They stood on the grass that had dewed over, Mercy's shoes and ankles wet with it, to watch a display of fireworks.  All of them with their heads back, waited, watched silent with anticipation like children poised for wonder and awe.  And then the sound, which Mercy loved the best, as it echoed off the stone of the building into the ground and into her.  She tasted the smoke in the air, watched it drift across the sky.  So caught up that she did not at first hear Macdonald's voice beside her.

"What worlds we create when we want to."  Returning his flask.  Clouds blew across the lake making it warm, dark.....

Library and Archives issues at the Writers' Union

The Canadian Historical Association and the Writers' Union of Canada tend to be separate universes, but those who sometimes cross the gap were pleased this weekend with word from the Union AGM that it intends to remain involved in efforts to ensure that Library and Archives Canada remains (or becomes) responsive to users' needs and issues.  It was specifically mentioned that the only other organization known to the Union for being concerned about these matters...  is the CHA.

Some of the concerns motivating writers (and historians) were set out in a recent article by the critic and biographer Susan Crean in the Literary Review of Canada,"National Archives Blues" -- still available here.  "Like many writers, I have spent a good part of my life in the archives," it begins.  

History of Democracy at Parler Fort

The people behind the revitalization of Toronto's Fort York and the burgeoning neighbourhood around it have been running a terrific history talks series they call Parler Fort.

Next Monday the subject will be the prospects for democracy in the Middle East and Canada

Dying to Vote in Canada and the Middle East

 May 30, 2011  7:30 p.m. (doors open at 7)

Join award-winning essayist and novelist John Ralston Saul, Professor Thabit Abdullah (Professor of Middle Eastern History, York University) and Professor Peter H. Russell (Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Toronto) as they engage each other and the audience in a discussion of the origins and current state of democracy in Canada, the prospects for democratic change in North Africa and the Middle East, and our nation’s role in encouraging democratic movements in other countries.

$10 (8.85 +HST)Fort York National Historic Site – in the Blue Barracks250 Fort York Boulevard (west off Bathurst or North off Fleet) By TTC: take the 509 streetcar from Union Station, or the 511 streetcar from Bathurst StationFree Parking

History of happiness in America

In 1783 Justus Sherwood was surveying the north shore of the St. Lawrence River westward from Montreal to the future site of Kingston and on to the Quinte peninsula, today's Prince Edward County.  He was surveying ground for the thousands of refugee American loyalists who were going to start settling there the following spring.

He liked what he saw.  Indeed, Justus Sherwood may be the first great prophet of Upper Canadian nationalism and the rise of imperial Ontario.  He would have made a great Torontonian. After surveying the ground, he reported back to the authorities "The climate here is mild and good, and I think the loyalists may be the happiest people in America by settling this country."

I once had a little talk prepared, considering how refugees to Canada in 1784 would have defined happiness and whether this country delivered for them, and it used to go over well. Happiness studies: still an underdeveloped historical field.

Now Justus Sherwood's prediction has come true, it seems.  The new OECD quality of life survey finds Canadians (okay, not just Ontarians) the second happiest people in the world -- and our only rivals are on the other side of the world.   There's the Globe's summary, a bit sceptical, and the National Post's, a bit political

New and Noteworthy

McGll-Queen's University Press has made a special e-announcement for James Pritchard's A Bridge of Ships: Canadian Shipbuilding during the Second World War.

The "bridge of ships" was a romantic phrase used to describe overseas troop transport from North America to Europe, originally in the first world war.

Pritchard's book is more infrastructure, less romance. The publisher's blurb states:

Before 1939, Canada's shipbuilding industry had been moribund for nearly two decades - no steel-hulled, ocean-going vessel had been built since 1921. During the Second World War, however, Canada's shipbuilding program became a major part of the nation's industrial effort. Shipyards were expanded and more than a thousand warships and cargo ships were constructed as well as many more thousands of auxiliary vessels, small boats, and other craft. A large ship-repair program also began.

In A Bridge of Ships James Pritchard tells the story of the rapidly changing circumstances and forceful personalities that shaped government shipbuilding policy. He examines the ownership and expansion of the shipyards and the role of ship repairing, as well as recruitment and training of the labour force. He also tells the story of the struggle for steel and the expansion of ancillary industries. Pritchard provides a definitive picture of Canada's wartime ship production, assesses the cost (more than $1.2 billion), and explains why such an enormous effort left such a short-lived legacy.

The story of Canada's shipbuilding industry is as astonishing as that of the nation's wartime navy. The personnel of both expanded more than fifty times, yet the history of wartime shipbuilding remains virtually unknown. With the disappearance of the Canadian shipbuilding industry from both the land and memory, it is time to recall and assess its contribution to Allied victory.

Wingnuts with doubts about senate reform

Senate reform has always been largely a right-wing agenda.  The Triple E proposal was always code for a Triple R Senate (rich, rural, reactionary): an upper house designed to be unrepresentative of the population, but with real power to confront the more representative House of Commons.  Some progressives have been susceptible to the idea of  elected and equal -- "Hey, those ought to be good progressive things, no?"  but the NDP has been pretty steady in preferring abolition over reform.

But there has also been a subcurrent of conservative opinion that recognizes what a dumb idea a powerful Senate is.  Here's more:

If you want perpetual gridlock in Ottawa, go ahead and beef up the Senate. Make it elected, give it a cause and a swelled head. Let it think it’s been chosen by provincial voters to bring a new sense of regional clout to the federal capital. Give premiers a new ally to support their constant demands for special treatment for their particular corner of the world, even if the demands of one region put it at odds with those from another. Enhance their ability to slow, or stop, anything that smells like it might, in any way, diminish their own parochial interests, no matter how desirable it may be on a national level.  

The confederation makers had the right idea: for them, the most important thing about the Senate was that it be weak. Say whatever else you say about it, it has fulfilled that requirement pretty well.

Rejection of Senate reform was a reliable western-alienation complaint.  Now they are in power, the doubts may emerge more loudly

History of hockey: has George Bush saved Canadian professional hockey?

Some of the public-policy papers of the Mowat Centre, a University of Toronto thinkthingee, have struck me as of the Fraser Institute kind -- where the press release has been drafted before the research has been done.  But its study of the economics of Canadian teams in the NHL -- Canada can support twelve teams instead of the current six, it concludes -- is impressive.  Read or download it from here

It is also instructive on how hockey mirrors national and even world history.  There is reason to believe that the NHL's Southern Strategy was always doomed: demand for hockey in the American South was always thin, and the league was wrong to conclude that providing a supply of hockey would eventually create the demand.   Since the NHL depends heavily on gate revenues (more than most other sports leagues), it has to put its teams where the demand is -- and the Mowat study powerfully demonstrates demand for hockey tickets is far greater in small Canadian cities than in much larger American ones.

But there's also a massive historical trend underpinning the death of the Southern Strategy.

CLGA Re-Post - 2011 Over the Rainbow Book List

I had never heard of the Over the Rainbow Book List (out of the American Library Association) but I'll be looking for it from now on. For those of you interested and in Toronto, I've pasted the a post from the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives blog on a Canadian connection to the list:

"Author Talk and Book Signing

Awfully Devoted Women: Lesbian Lives in Canada, 1900-65 (UBC Press) is the first book-length study of lesbian sexuality, relationships, and community in Canada before 1965. Awfully Devoted Women has been selected for the 2011 Over the Rainbow Book List, a Book List from Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table of the American Library Association.

Vancouver based independent researcher, historian and author Cameron Duder
will give a talk at 6.30pm on Wednesday June 1st, Toronto Women’s Bookstore,
73 Harbord Street, Toronto. Free and open to the public."

I briefly browsed the bibliography and saw that there are some other queer histories (among many other genres and formats,and a few memoirs), including two Canadian titles which stuck out to me. The above mentioned book and one which I recently posted on, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation by Gary Kinsman, Gary and Patrizia Gentile. The list is worth taking a gander at even if you're not a queer books reader.

Happy reading.

Book Notes: Landon Prize for Treaty 9

McGill Queen's Press reported earlier this month that John S. Long's Treaty 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905 has won the Ontario History Society's Fred Landon Prize in Regional History for 2010.  The OHS website says only that its annual prizes will be given at its AGM on June 4, 2011.

The evidence John Long presents in Treaty 9, or perhaps Professor Long himself, may become part of the process in the lawsuit that began being heard yesterday in Toronto, in which some of the Treaty 9 signatories allege that Canada and Ontario failed to live up to their Treaty 9 commitments.

Is this to be Ontario's contribution to the big land claims cases that have begun to transform the state of treaty law in Canada.  So far British Columbia and Quebec have generated leading cases, with the courts explaining to governments that yes, treaty obligations have to be taken seriously, but there is still far to go.

Professor Long, who began his working career as a school teacher at Moose Factory and Moosonee, now teaches at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario.

Three ways to celebrate one hundred years of Parks Canada

If you are not busy with plans to meet your maker in Toronto on May 21, you may be interested in the big shindig at the CN Tower/Rogers Centre celebrating the Parks Canada centennial (the actual anniversary is May 19, but that's not on a weekend.)  Somewhat ironic to be celebrating parks at an urban icon cum mega-auditorium, but of course Parks Canada hasn't been just about parks for a long time, as the list of activities implies.

If you go you can :

• plan your next unique Canadian getaway at the Visitor Centre;
• capture yourself in Viking gear [ed note: ?];
• see Anne of Green Gables herself [ed. note: this one doubtful];
• participate in historic period games;
• meet the new Parks Canada mascot;
• take in the Critters Corner and visit with species at risk;
• keep step with pipes and drums;
• get your face painted and hands tattooed [ed. note: assuming this is henna or otherwise temporary]; 
• collect mementos [ed. note: hmm...] 
• gaze in awe at some of the most unique and breathtaking film footage from across the country;
• have an evening campout in Rogers Centre (purchasing tickets at bluejays.com/campout)
• and enjoy Mud Men, Sweet Thing, Malajube and Apostle of Hustle.

Or if your taste runs to the less frenetic, NiCHE and the University of Calgary Press have just published a book of collected essays exploring various aspects of Parks Canada's history, edited by environmental historian Claire Campbell of Dalhousie University, aptly entitled A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011. So you could celebrate by reading that.

And if you would prefer a yet more passive way to celebrate, you could listen to podcast no. 22 at Nature's Past, which is an interview with Campbell and two contributors to the volume, George
Colpitts and Gwynn Langemann.

Book Notes: from nostalgia to history

Stuart Henderson's new book, Making the Scene, just out from University of Toronto Press, is a history of sixties Yorkville, the heart of the counter-culture scene of Toronto, now an expensive shopping-and-hotels neighbourhood.
The author is a York University post-doc (York is also in Toronto, but a million miles from Yorkville), hence, I'm guessing, youngish and a student of the sixties as history rather than a nostalgic memoirist.  Wonder how his aging doctoral supervisors handled the nostalgia/history nexus?

If the National Business Book Award...

... going to Ezra Levant's Ethical Oil  (essentially, we are not Gadaffi, so anything goes with energy extraction) made you throw up a little, what are you gonna do?
Well, you could read this instead: Andrew Nikiforuk,   Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent.
Or this   William Marsden,  Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and doesn’t seem to care)  which actually won the Business Book Award in 2009.
Or this: David Finch, Pumped: Everyone's Guide to the Oil Patch a readable primer, and an award-winner in Alberta.

Or even this: my Beaver column on the history of oil and Alberta. 

The National Business Book Award website is here.

Blogging is ephemeral

Blogger, the software that runs this blog, was down for a while yesterday, and while it announced all lost posts would be restored, Thursday's posts seem not to have returned.  You know what, I think I'll let em go, and not even try to reconstruct what there was... one about Niall Ferguson, I recall, maybe another...  Let it be proof that blogging is ephemeral.  Go away for a day, and hey, you might miss something.

Update, May 16: Hey, now it is back.

Big History: Gray on Fukayama

There's an almost subliminal theme in my From Then to Now about how humans govern themselves and the rules and codes they/we have made to live by over the last 50,000 years.   It's not something pushed hard, there; I'm writing for 12 year olds (and the significant number of adults who prefer history at that reading level, maybe). But the topic continues to percolate with me.

So I've been intrigued by the new book by American big-thinker Francis Fukayama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (it's only volume one of a two-parter) which is precisely about forms of governance throughout history. Not that I'm much of an End of History theorist, but at least someone is struggling with the big question.


In the Literary Review, however, writer John Gray dismisses Fukayama's study as warmed-over Whiggism, more an argument that his preferred form of government is the best and only one than a plausible study of history and its alternatives.  


Update, May 16:  In the Guardian Online, David Runciman is more respectful but not convinced.

History of Beer

Report on Business observes that these days nothing sells beer like history: from Alexander Keith to John Molson, all the leading beer labels want to develop your thirst for tradition.

Beer companies, especially Canadian ones, seem to stand alone in the frequency and consistency of how they use their heritage in marketing.

Jack Granatstein, call home

Niall Ferguson tells New Zealand that when it comes to history, Canada is the worst.

Ferguson is critical of the left-wing perspective that he claims has become institutionalised in most Western schools. "It varies from place to place but Canada is the most politically correct, with everybody cringing about their Imperial past," says the father of three, who was inspired to embark upon Civilization after concluding that his children were taught less history in school than he was when he was growing up.

1866 US Annexation Bill....

Well, this is quite interesting. From historian Andrew Smith's blog.

Text of 1866 Annexation Bill:
http://andrewdsmith.wordpress.com/2011/05/11/text-of-1866-annexation-bill-2/

History of book promotion

"Can we interest you in taking a look and possibly doing a review about this beautifully done children's book about Abraham Lincoln when he was a child?" emails the publicist for Robert Bloch of Kansas City.


Well, it's fiction and American, so it's a little far from our turf.  But I can't help noting the vigour of the American book marketing machine, which delivers this kind of offer fairly regularly now. This blog has been noting Canadian books about history pretty constantly for years now and has pretty substantial pageview numbers to show for it.  I can't recall the last time a Canadian academic or trade publisher tried to bring anything to our attention.   



Update, May 12:  Brian Busby, of the remarkable booksblog Dusty Bookcase observes:

 In these two-plus years blogging about the forgotten, neglected and suppressed in Canadian literature (and music and film), I've yet to hear from a single Canadian publisher. I include here those that I have credited and praised in returning worthy works to print. I wouldn't think twice about the silence were it not for fairly regular queries from American publishers who wonder whether I might do a post on an old pulp novel or once-popular 19th-century novel that they are returning to print. 

Prize watch: Parr on Sensing Changes

The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences has announced the 2011 Canada Prize in Social Sciences goes to Joy Parr for her innovative history of the human experience of megaprojects Sensing Changes.

In the book, Parr studies

"situations in the recent past when state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and environmental changes forced people to cope with radical transformations in their work and home environments. The construction of dams, chemical plants, nuclear reactors, and military training grounds; new patterns in seasonal rains; and developments in animal husbandry altered the daily lives of ordinary people and essentially disrupted their embodied understandings of the world. Familiar worlds were transformed so thoroughly that residents no longer knew the place where they lived or, by implication, who they were. 

Sensing Changes comes with its own website, Megaprojects New Media.

Other Canada Prize winners (French/English, Humanities/Social Sciences are here

Even the shortlists were pretty good to historians.  Historian Bryan Palmer and Alan Gordon, and John Borrows, legal historian as well as lawyer, completed the list.

Canadian history not boring? Who knew?

From the web-based community newspaper Perth EMC (sorry, couldn't find what EMC stands for) on May 5th the following headline: Canadian History Far from Boring, says local author. 

The local author referred to has written a book on the history of the CCM.

From the article by Chris Must:

When local historian and author John McKenty set out to research and write a book on the history of CCM, he never suspected his book would include tales of desperate financiers traveling to Italy to ask the Mafia's banker for a loan....

The book, 'Canada Cycle & Motor: The CCM Story', is McKenty's third self-published book of Canadian history. The story of how a fierce boardroom battle for control of CCM in the '60s and '70s led the combatants to look for financial backing in the most unlikely places is just one of the fascinating tales to be found in its pages....

Canadian nationalism played a key role in the founding of the company at the end of the 19th century. Rumours began circulating among Canadian bicycle manufacturers in 1898 that the American Bicycle Company (ABC) was planning to expand to Canada. Walter Massey of the Massey-Harris farm equipment company had begun producing a line of bicycles when he took over the business in 1896. When he heard that ABC was company to Canada, Massey decided the only way to overcome the competition would be to merge several small Canadian cycle makers into one large company. As a result, CCM was founded in 1899.

CCM's advertising was a straight appeal to patriotism, urging Canadians to buy a Canadian-made product. "They worked the patriotic angle real hard," said McKenty. The strategy paid off, and by 1903 the Canadians were in a position to buy out ABC. By that time the American company was itself in financial trouble as the availability of cars sent bicycle sales plummeting.

In other news, dog bites man. (Sorry, I was trying hard not to be a condescending over-educated urbanite, but I couldn't resist.)

It does sound like a good story, and reminds me of The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company: Sunday Streetcars and Municipal Reform In Toronto, 1888-1897 by Chris Armstrong and Viv Nelles (Oxford University Press, republished 2010) which is also a good story, good history, and far from boring, despite being Canadian, local and business history.

Mckenty's book can be ordered online at http://www.vintageccm.com/. The article says a portion of the proceeds will go to the Ottawa chapter of Bicycles for Humanity, a grassroots initiative that provides bicycles to disadvantaged communities in Africa. Which sounds like an exemplary cause.

Maybe there are perks to this post...

Last summer, when I went looking for a few volunteer contributors to this blog, I stressed there would be no pay, no perks, no payoff.  But maybe I was wrong.  Jordan Kerr, whose contributions you have been seeing weekly since last fall, is looking for work.  Can this blog find him a job?  (And indeed, I'm still open to new contributors.  Send me an email.)

So, summer has begun and with it the student job hunt. For those of you who remember your student days (or who are still in the midst of it) this is a rather...stressful time as one tries to find a balance between jobs which are easy to get but low pay or jobs that that pay better and suit your training and education and ultimately help you gain experience in the field you want to work in. The ultimate paradox for students. 

Long story short, I'm looking for a summer (or longer) job that fits my experience so far and will help build towards a career in historical research, archiving, library, or museum work.
 I've completed my 4 years honours degree from Carleton University and have so far successfully completed several archival projects through course a practicum and private employment. I also, from my history degree, have extensive research and writing skills. This coming fall I will be beginning my Masters studies in Information Science from the University of Toronto, following the archival stream. Chris has been kind enough to allow me to post this on his blog. I would be more than happy with any paid historical research or archival project. I can, of course, send any one interested my CV with both academic and employment references. Even if there are no specific research or archival positions I would still enjoy working within an academic environment in any capacity that matches my skills. I am not afraid to test uncharted waters when it comes to research or archival projects. Pushing myself into uncertain territory has guided me towards what I hope will be my future career. I look forward to new challenges and learning curves with excitement.

 If interested, please feel free to contact me directly:  jkerr3@connect.carleton.ca

History news beat, mostly via the Globe today.

Saving the census.  Bill Waiser makes a valiant case to persuade Globe & Mail readers to tick the census box that will make census data available in a hundred years.  But it's hopeless, I fear. As long as eternal closure is an option, the census will be fatally flawed as a source for history.  And this time it's not even the Conservatives and their ideological foolishness to blame, but a few misguided and deaf-to-all-reason legal advisors inside Statistics Canada.

Bombing the bridge. A foot- and bike-bridge to link the reviving historic Fort York historic neighbourhood  to the rest of downtown Toronto is threatened by Ford and Forder, who now dominate Toronto City Hall.  Who needs historic preservation when there is the NFL and monorails?

The End. Also, have you noticed that history and the world are scheduled to come to an end on May 21.  That's a week Saturday, in case you have plans.  Do you have those billboards in your neighbourhood too?  (This one come from the Globe & Mail, but there's one right outside our local Loblaws.




Perfect historian.  Also in the Globe, proof that our Mary Stokes is perfect.  Here, if you scroll right to the end of the second page.

Review: The Canadian War on Queers

Perhaps a good book is one that shocks you. In high school, for example, I began reading my (now) favourite fiction writer (Timothy Findley) with a mixture of disgust and insult. Now, I can't get enough of Findley's works. Similarly, though not to the same extent, my sheltered and polite undergraduate academic bubble was shocked when I began to read The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation, recently published out of Carleton University. Though I'm not finished the book I think I can still make the comments below.

The content of the book does not shock me, but the approach does. It doesn't shock me to hear anti-establishment, quasi-marxist,  militant gay liberation and generally leftist railings inequalities that exist within social, gender, political and sexual structures. These are not new ideas, and certainly ones that occasionally sound pretty good in my ear. Don't think I say these things because I'm conservative. I don't attack these ideas, they've been around for quite some time. That's the problem, the book openings of the address, for example, the contemporary split between the left and right of queer politics in Canada (liberationists vs. equality/integrationists) with ideas straight out (no pun intended) of the 1970's gay liberation movement. As history undergrads we were taught that historical marxism was all but dead. This work seems to defy that, and its militant and activist approach frankly shocked me. It is so blatant in its condemnation of political, military, and social structures that it runs against the academic grain for this history student. Obviously, in social history there is often an agency vs. structure base. This book, however, is militant, it is politically contemporary. In the early pages it clearly outlines that the authors believe that while gains have been made for LGBT Canadians there still exists a war between social and political establishments and the LGBT community.


I end with saying that while I dislike the activist approach I don't necessarily disagree that there are still gains to be made and struggles for Canada's LGBT community. Perhaps what disturbs me the most is the blatant politics of the book in what is clearly a use history for activist purposes. In this, the book sorely lacks historical distance. Its tone makes me view Jack Granasteins ideas in Who Killed Canadian History? with a bit more sympathy then I did before. Maybe a book that shocks makes it a good book, but I do question whether this type of shock belongs in Canadian history.


Happy reading,


Jordan

History of anti-Americanism

Conrad Black summarizes United States history as a big tax dodge:

The United States began life as a bold confidence trick. The British had skillfully played the balance of power in continental Europe from the rise of the nation-state in the 16th century, enabling them to focus on maritime strength and to build and maintain a greater overseas empire than their continental rivals. This enabled them to remove the French from Canada and assure the security of the American colonists, but British national debt rose from £75 million to £133 million in the Seven Years War (1756–1763). The Americans had almost 40 percent of the population of Great Britain and a higher standard of living; and when the British tried, very clumsily, to get the chief beneficiaries of the removal of the French from Canada to help pay for it, the Americans splendidly improvised the argument that they would not be taxed unless they voted for it themselves (which no sane people ever does unless it has to).

He also believes "guarantees of due process and access to impartial justice have been shredded" there.


In the same issue of The Literary Review of Canada, Ken McGoogan celebrates Farley Mowat, recalling his misadventures at the American border, and defending his controversial works as "creative" non-fiction.

King, Ghosts and the CBC?

So, I was reading one of my favourite blogs the other day, Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, and came across this post on William Lyon Mackenzie King's spiritualism. Dr. Beachcombing, I believe, is British, and true to historical form I got all excited that someone in Britain was interested in Canada! ( debatable whether we've ever really shaken the colonial itch ie. Royal Wedding fever). Lovely post, but nothing new to most students of Canadian history. However, as I so very often do, I read the blog and immediately began wasting my time searching through the CBC online archives. Anyway, while surfing I found this, which seems out of place for today's CBC...

A seance at Laurier House

I do wonder if done when the recent election began if King could have forseen the 'Orange Crush'? 

Also, as a side note, I visited Laurier House for the first time a few weeks ago. I found it amusing, and quintessentially Canadian, that the room that King conducted the seances in is now...a utility room.

CLGA - Doors Open Toronto

For those interested, the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives is open for Doors Open Toronto. Here's their blog link for more details...

History of Cinco de Mayo

Today, the Cinco de Mayo, the big Mexican holiday, turns out not to be so much Mexican as Mexican-American.  According to Mexico Online, the Cinco de Mayo has long been celebrated primarily by Mexican American in the United States, rather than by Mexicans.

What happened on the fifth of May anyway?   The Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862. At Puebla a French invasion army on its way from Vera Cruz to Mexico was confronted and defeated by Mexican forces.  In the end Napoleon III of France sent a new army, which did conquer Mexico and occupy it for a few years.  But the victory of the smaller and less professional Mexican forces stiffened Mexican resistance and national pride, and Mexicans in California apparently soon launched the tradition of May 5 celebrations there.  More here at About Latin American History.  (Cinco de Mayo is observed, apparently, in Puebla State.)

American sites often suggest that the delay in the French conquest of Mexico caused by Puebla prevented Napoleon III from giving material support to the American Confederacy, as he had planned.  By the time he had Mexico under control, it was too late to stem the collapse of the American South's resistance. With the re-united United States able to assist the Mexican resistance, the French were run out of Mexico in 1867.

From Then to Now

I love book launches. My favourite kind of party. It always floors me when I tell a non-academic friend that I'm going to a book launch and he or she makes a face. I do admit the launches I'm invited to that don't feature anyone I know or a book I'm likely to read are less appealing, though I still like to get invited. Partly because it makes me feel like a real academic--grad students have inferiority complexes. Partly because it is a great book alert system.

This week I'm thilled to be going to the book launch for Chris Moore's new children's history, From Then to Now.  I am looking forward to catching up with Chris in person, and I intended to buy the book in any case. Kids books are the best, and good kid's histories few and far between.

Though I do wish Chris had taken my advice and that he and his illustrator had done a graphic history book, which I think would be a terrific medium for introducing kids to history. When I was in high school, we used a graphic history of France in my French class one year. I think it was written for primary students in France. It had the Sun King on the cover, and I remember the pictures and the stories to this day.

The downside of the Sun King book, as I recall, was its extreme chauvinsim (in the original sense). I like the global, inclusive focus of From Then to Now:

From Hammurabi to Henry Ford, from Incan couriers to the Internet, from the Taj Mahal to the Eiffel Tower, from Marco Polo to Martin Luther King, from Cleopatra to Catherine the Great, from boiled haggis to fried tarantulas – this is no less than the story of humanity.

But just as important is the emphasis on chronology. Something the history curriculum in Ontario is sorely lacking, as well as the kind of history as story focus of the French history for little kids, is any sense of when things happen: as my friend Donna points out, kids go from the middle ages to pioneers without any sense that anything went on in between. Now I can see the curriculum designers may have wanted to stay away from linear Whiggishness, but some kind of temporal context or time-line is the essence of history. I hope there are many kids who are given copies of From Then to Now by their parents and grandparents--for their sakes as well as Chris's pocketbook.

PS:  Chris's interview with Erin Knight of OpenBook Toronto about this book is up today here.

What makes your big head so hard?...

... Caledonia!   "The Calamity of Caledonia," my 2010 essay in The Literary Review of Canada, available here,  is nominated for a National Magazine Award in the best essay category . (All nominations here.).   Canada's History, meanwhile, is up for the very top prize, Magazine of the Year!

History of Youth, Voting

If you need motivation to get out through the rain or whatever to vote today, take a look at this: It's just a  video of a "vote mob," but I like it.  It should make you smile.  Also, two members of my family are faces in this crowd, and I'm proud of them.

Update:  Or you could try this:  Helen Forsey, channelling what her father might have thought of the current situation.  [Thanks Stephen MacLean for the link.]