From HistoryWire to TCEBlog

There used to be a CanHist blog called History Wire, with a mixed group of contributors somewhat associated with the Canadian Encylopedia and the Historica-Dominion Institute.  It used to mix substantial Canadian history pieces, HDI promotional pieces, and odd personal rants and prejudices. One never quite knew what to expect.

'Tseems HistoryWire is no more. In its place, as of June 30 (at least that's the earliest post found) there is TCE Blog, the blog of The Canadian Encyclopedia.  At a glance it seems to have a strengthened list of contributors, a clearer purpose, and a more ambitious posting schedule.  Notable right now is a series of excerpts from publisher Doug Gibson's about-to-be-published memoir of the Canadian authors he worked with, Stories about Storytellers.

CBC to historians: Drop Dead

CBC Radio's Canada Reads contest has always been Canada Reads (Fiction). You could nominate recommend anything you liked to read, but if it was not a novel, they would not allow it in.

This year Canada Reads is looking at literary non-fiction -- but they are being as controlling as ever. Only non-fiction that, in their view, doesn't really read like non-fiction is likely to be allowed:

We want stories. Books that are page-turners with captivating narratives, memorable characters and vivid prose. Books so riveting you forget they are non-fiction. Books that introduce readers to a brand new world and bring them wholly into it. While we love the work that Canadian essayists, academics, chefs, decorators and self-help gurus do, those books aren't quite right. We want the final five to have stories that captivate the country. [emphasis added]

Elsewhere on the site they cite Margaret McMillan as a model, but last we looked she was a bona fide academic.  An essayist too, maybe.  Not quite the CBC's cup of tea, one might think.

Beneath the tone-deaf illiteracy -- don't they know anything about the non-fiction genre? --  is the complacent arrogance of  functionaries down inside the national radio monopoly.  Why cannot Canadians read what they want to read -- and say so out loud, even on the radio?

Go ahead. Nominate recommend some history for Canada Reads. See what they do with it.  Send me a copy of your choices (cmed@sympatico.ca) and I'll note them here.

Expo '67 officially opened 5 months ago today - in 1967, and will close in one month and one day on October 29, 1967. Today marked the 43rd millionth visitor and they'd been hoping for 35 million visitors. To keep this in perspective, Canada's population was 20,500,000 in 1967.

Things got a bit slowed down by the Montreal Transit strike that started this week. Listen for the - Mao poetry to Expo passports on CBC radio's daily report on Expo "Expodition".

Here listen to Expo's Gates Open to the World (clip 5) for interviews with people who'd waited in line all night to get into Expo with a countdown to 9:30 am when the gates opened to the public on April 28, 1967.

The Western Pavilion, (for Manitoba, Saskatchewan - where I live now, Alberta and British Columbia)which sounds like it was a welcome relief from the 'jungle of steel'  was written up the very first day of Expo in the Ottawa Journal. What I especially remember of the Western Pavilion was the day they had flapjacks on tap.
     Nary a flapjack since.

This month in Canada's History

Amundsen's Inuit family, oral history, Hungarian refugee immigrants, a black Civil War veteran in Hamilton, Ontario, letters about Terry Fox -- this month's Canada's History is eclectic as ever, and never more vividly illustrated.  The cover story features excerpts from the mag's new book:  100 Days That Changed Canada. just hitting bookstores around now


My own column this issue continues the magazine's ongoing participation in the Parks Canada centennial, and I get to ponder the changing ambitions of my old employer through its first century.

Ain't you subscribing yet?

Whose War of 1812?

Active History and the Canadian Historical Association seek participants for a seminar on the War next June at the CHA meetings in Kitchener-Waterloo.  

How did regional, cultural and linguistic differences affect experiences of the war and did they reinforce or conflict with so-called “national” narratives centred on nation building? Can we, in fact, speak of “The War of 1812”

Meanwhile columnist Rick Salutin argues that official commemorations are sure to be shaped by current politics as:

the Harper people try to reframe 1812 as part of a march toward sheer harmony with the U.S. 

Prize Watch: the Writers' Trust Pize

The Writers' Trust prize (now renamed and repriced as the Weston after a large commitment by Hilary Weston) has one history and one biography on its shortlist:

• Mordecai: The Life and Times, Charles Foran (Knopf Canada)
• Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-planting Tribe, Charlotte Gill (Greystone Books)
• Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, Volume Two: 1867–1891, Richard Gwyn (Random House Canada)
• Adventures in Solitude: What Not to Wear to a Nude Potluck and Other Stories from Desolation Sound, Grant Lawrence (Harbour Publishing)
• Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live, Ray Robertson (Biblioasis)

Ottawa International Writers Festival (Get your Tickets Now)

As the fall fast approaches, so does the ever anticipated International Writers Festival here in Ottawa. With tickets on sale now, I write this in reminder it is best to get your tickets ASAP. One notable event which I recommend to any history lover is the non-fiction Roundtable, October 25th at 6:30pm, headlining some of the best non-fiction writers in the capital, including Tim Cook, Charlotte Gray, Roy MacGregor, Lawrence Martin and Eric Enno Tamm. It is a wonderful festival with events scheduled from now until October 25th. To get your tickets or to learn more about the festival, please visit www. writersfestival.org.

New (to me) CanHist blog...

.. is Plaid Canoe.Always glad to find another one.

John Cabot punch-up

Reviewer-author exchanges have a long history, but nowaways they go on virtually in real time.  On Saturday the Spanish historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in a Wall Street Journal review, lit into a quartet of books on Christopher Columbus and other early explorers, including one by the Canadian writer Douglas Hunter, whose recent God's Mercies and Half Moon were widely noted and honoured.  Within a few hours Hunter had responded with a riposte on his website, defending his credentials and the research behind his new work on Columbus and Cabot.

Readers could decide for themselves about the errors in each other's work alleged by Fernandez-Armesto and Hunter -- except that Hunter's book The Race to the New World is not yet published in Canada.  It's coming from Douglas & McIntyre next spring, although it is out elsewhere this fall.  The exchange has preceded the book itself.  Is this a metaphor for the disconnect between the print speed of books and the electronic speed of commentary?

One of Fernandez-Armesto's claims certainly rang false to me:

Academic historians tend to welcome recruits from other ranks, like owls nurturing cuckoos, and applaud the intrusions of neophytes with a glee that physicians, say, would never show for faith-healers or snake-oil salesmen. 

Physicians and snake-oil salesmen have nothing on the toxic brew of condescension and envy with which trade historians and academic historians tend to regard each other.

Samara on parliamentary disfunction

Parliament reconvenes in Ottawa today, and the Samara Foundation has just released the fourth of its research reports on parliamentary disfunction based on "exit interviews" with outgoing members of Parliament.  They make depressing reading.  The MPs fulminate about the uselessness, impotence, and frustration they felt. Well, so far so good. But the solutions they seek and that the report recommends betray an almost total inability to grasp where the problems lie and how to seek solutions.

The MPs suggested incoming MPs avoid getting caught up in the so-called “Ottawa bubble.” Critical of the ways politics are practiced, they remembered their best work as happening around the edges of political life.

Yeah, that's really going to help fix Parliament.

MPs frequently said the heart of the problem was: 

the uneasy relationship between the MPs and the management of their political parties .... MPs consistently pointed to their parties’ management practices, and the incentives and punishments the parties put in place, as significant obstacles to advancing the “real work” of Parliament. 

Now we are getting somewhere. But Samara's authors declare in response, not that recalibrating the relationship between caucus members and party leaders is the solution, but that we should look outside parliament:

Political parties are organizations made up of citizens. Reforming them, therefore, requires citizen participation. 

That is, Samara and the MPs agree that the problem is in parliament but we should go seeking the solution among the citizenry in general. That's a recipe for failure. The problem, as they clearly show, lie in the relationship between weakened MPs and overbearing party appartchiks.  The solution -- the one solution neither the MPs nor Samara will even contemplate -- lies in a reassertion of the authority of MPs, the elected representatives of the people, against the extra-parliamentary leadership of the parties.

(Warning to serious readers: Samara's website sets up its reports in that maddeningly hip anti-intellectual online fashion.  You cannot skim or search or speed-read.  You are oblige to click endlessly to load each successive page, and if you try to move fast, the site will probably freeze.)

Why to do economic history, young scholar

Economic Principals argues that economic historians -- seen as old-fashioned, traditional, on the sidelines -- did much better than economic theorists -- quantitative, authoritative, influential -- when it came to analyzing the economic crisis of 2008 and how to deal with its consequences:

Why does economic history get such short shrift from the profession – in undergraduate and graduate education, in policymaking and public debate? What are the chances that the relationship will shift a little, in the historians’ favor, now that the importance of their craft has been demonstrated by the way it which the argument from history trumped theory?

EP doesn't say that economic history is about as unfashionable in history departments as anywhere else, but I suspect it's true.

Update:  Andrew Smith's blog makes a similar analysis to EP's, apparently quite independently

PBS on 1812; Smith on 1812

With the bicentennial looming, PBS is beating the drums for its forthcoming documentary on the war of 1812, produced by the Buffalo/Toronto PBS station WNED.

This two-hour HD documentary uses stunning re-enactments, evocative animation, and the incisive commentary of key experts to reveal little-known sides of an important war....

sez the press material.   And the associated website offers trailers, links to the DVD and book, essays, maps, classroom materials and much more.

The program airs October 10 at 9 pm.

Meanwhile Andrew Smith's blog ponders historical memory and commemoration: the various ways the war will, and should, and should not, be presented in the US, in Canada, in Britain, in universities, and in popular awareness.

 

ParlerFort speaking series in Toronto

Friends of Fort York in Toronto, as part of their plan to ensure Fort York is a destination for heritage- and history-minded Torontonians, are launching a new season in their Parler Fort speaking series.

This year's Parler Fort launches Monday, September 26 with an Isaac Brock evening featuring historian Wesley Turner and novelist Tom Taylor, both of whom have books out about Brock this fall, and City of Toronto's 1812 bicentennial historian Richard Gerrard.  That's 7 pm at Fort York ($10, free to students).

Future events:

• Fenians night with Peter Vronsky and David A. Wilson -- October 24
• Canadian monarchy night in November 
• Civic architecture night led by John Bentley Mays in December

More info by email: fortyork@toronto.ca

Reasons to get more history OFF television

My mother is spunky and smart and I love her very much. But she’s got this one trait that drives me crazy: she believes everything she sees on The History Channel.

Virginia Hughes counts up the erosion of historical literacy caused by the historical programming on television

History of Jane Jacobs

It's the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Jane Jacob's first and still most renowned city book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her editor Jason Epstein recalls the context here, particularly Jacobs's part in the epic battles against the freeway developments and "urban renewal" led by highway czar Robert Moses.  The story is also told  in a lively journalistic account by Anthony Flint, Wrestling With Moses.

Epstein and Flint both allude to the re-evaluation of Moses and Jacobs lately going on. Architectural historians Kenneth Jackson and Hillary Ballon have recently argued that Jacobs's preservation of neighbourhoods like Greenwich Village and SoHo has mostly led to extremes of gentrification, so that only the very wealthy can live in them (Not, evidently, a problem for Epstein, who now lives in a building where Moses intended a freeway ramp), and that infrastructure such as roads, bridges, parks and pools of the kind Moses provided in abundance are, after all, essential to the modern city.  But that seems no more than a qualification; the influence of Jacobs remains immense.

Jacobs, always an activist and organizer, wanted above all to be a writer -- a fact integral to her decision to move to Toronto in 1968.  Given the centrality of Jacobs to the New York development battles -- which were far from over when she decamped -- both Flint and Epstein seem unsure of just how to deal with that part of her biography.

(image: inspiringcities.org)

What have the historians got for us this fall? -- Cont'd

No Charlotte Gray, no Ken McGooghan this fall, and no Pierre Berton evermore. Fewer Canadian publishers, and a less nationalist mood in the land and the industry generally. Canadian history is not huge in the trade book fall lists this year.

The biggest title this fall must be Richard Gwyn's Nation-Maker, the second volume of his life of John A. Macdonald, from Random House Canada.  With two volumes entitled The Man who Made Us and Nation-Maker, it's clearer than ever that Gwyn is doubling down on the Creighton thesis. But sixty plus years on, at least there is a new biography!

Political biography is on a tear in recent years, even as the total volume seems to shrink  Winnipeg's Allan Levine offers William Lyon Mackenzie King from Douglas & McIntyre. As we earlier noted there's David Wilson's second volume on D'Arcy McGee, Peter Waite on R.B. Bennett and Paul Litt on John Turner..

There's a historical autobiography to look forward to, as well:  Michael Bliss's Writing History: A Professor's Life (from Dundurn).

Also:

• Jonathan Vance Maple Leaf Empire: Canada and Britain in Two World Wars  (Oxford University Press) -- timely, given the prime minister's ready-aye-ready enthusiasm for pukka British royal gewgaws for the forces.
• Chuck Davis's History of Metropolitan Vancouver (Harbour Books) from the late and much loved teller of  west coast heritage.
• Dirk Septer, Lost Nuke: The Last Flight of Bomber 075 (Heritage House), about a crashed bomber in the BC mountains -- a book with its own National Geographic special, and
• from Canada's History magazine, a new photohistory, One Hundred Days that Changed Canada  (HarperCollins)-- to which I have contributed a few items.

History of ...

David Cronenberg

 ... the Toronto International Film Festival:

You’ll probably run into Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic and TV personality of four decades, at least once in the next 10 days, as he swoops in from his native Chicago to attend the Toronto International Film Festival. 

You know, I probably won't -- and I live in Toronto and frequently work within blocks of the Lightbox, the marvellous theatre that is home territory of the Festival.  But even someone as smart and independent about film as Johanna Schneller is, gets drawn into the festival's gravity well.

... The Macdonald-Laurier Institute:

Janet charges that the new institute with the bold historical allusion in its name may be "selling Canada out."

... Treaty Seven:

At the Canadian Encyclopedia website, editor James Marsh has a thoughtful analysis of the negotiation of Treaty Seven between Canada and the Blackfoot Nation, whose deliberations began on September 12, 1877

... September 11, 2001:

What struck me most in the coverage this year was the number of responses that, with the perspective of ten years, found themselves reflecting on two disasters:  the great disaster that happened that day, and the decade-long disaster stemming from the fact that George Bush and his clique were in power at the time.The second now shadows and influences many efforts to contemplate the first.

Book Notes: Miller and Ross on The Junction Shul

First book launch of the season, I went up to the Ontario Jewish Archives at the Lipa Green Centre in north Toronto for a celebration of One Hundred Years at the Junction Shul by Lorne S. Miller and Neil Ross. The Junction Shul is the oldest purpose-built synagogue in Ontario, apparently. It was the centre of a small Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto that thrived in the early 20th century and has now almost entirely disappeared  -- but descendants and enthusiasts who mostly live elsewhere in the city keep the shul open and operating, even though it has only had one rabbi in the century. The launch seemed like one of those little triumphs for local and community history that happen all over the country.

I was impressed by the depth of community feeling for this nearly-abandoned synagogue among the children and grandchildren of the people who were actually raised in and around it. There was equal enthusiasm for the book aboutit.  For some occasions, there really is nothing like a book.  No one lining up for a signature last night was asking for the ebook version.

My heart went out to co-author Miller, who was ill and unable to attend his own launch party. Miller did almost a hundred interviews for this small book, and transcribed every one -- creating an archive as well as drawing on one. Get well soon.

The book is handsomely produced by ECW Press of Toronto but not visible on their website right now.

Celebrating the 70th Anniversary of The Canadian Women's Army Corps at the CWM

Saturday September 17th the Canadian War Museum will be putting on display Mr. Douglas Townend's collection of memorabilia in celebration of the 70th anniversary of CWAC. The CWAC were a key to the wartime efforts during the Second World War as non-combatant roles both at home and abroad. CWAC allowed women to serve in the Canadian Military for the first time and was later integrated into the Canadian Armed Forces during the 1960s.

September 17, 2011
Le Brenton Gallery
11am- 3pm

Also Check out this CWAC recruitment advertisement from the 1940s!

Careers in history?

It's that back-to-school end-of-the-summer -job season, and even without being around a school I'm encountering students with that pensive mood and "Can one work in history?" question just below the surface.

Here from the Canada's History website is an Ottawa museum curator's take on her career progress. Other material on the subject there too.

Twitterstorians -- not only a neologism but a whole day

Apparently it is Twitterstorians Day.  Respond as you think appropriate.

Or, read Brett Holman's take on the historico-tweet here.

Pirates and Publicists

“Would you like to do an online interview for your blog?”  “Can we interest you in a review copy for your blog?” Somebody takes webstats seriously, because unsolicited queries from digital publicists for new books have become more common in the past year or so here. 

I tend to decline these invitations a lot. They are scattershot: most concern books and topics pretty remote from the interests of this blog.  But I admire the effort. I cannot help noticing that the approaches are entirely from American publishers and publicists. Canadian history books are pretty much all we cover here, but I don’t think I have ever had an unsolicited approach from a Canadian publisher or publicist.

Recently, I declined an offer of a review copy of Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the 17^th Century Mediterranean by the British writer Adrian Tinniswood. I do have a certain weakness for pirate history, but it really is not on my blog’s turf, I said.  I’ll send you a copy anyway, no obligations, replied Heidi Richter of the Penguin Group USA.  There it was, by UPS a day or so later.

See, it works, Heidi.  I’ve been reading Pirates of Barbary. It’s less about Barbary and its pirates than about Englishmen and other Europeans who fought them, joined them, or were plundered and captured by them over the years, but it’s still an lively read about Europe and western North Africa in the 1600s, and it’s not without its parallels to the Somali coast piracy of recent years.  Possible Canadian relevance too: as Tinniswood notes, the reach of the Barbary pirates extended to Newfoundland.

Tinniswood is a prolific writer on English heritage and recently the biographer of the aristocratic Verney family, one of whose 17^th century scions turned pirate and converted to Islam – hence this book’s inspiration.  His website is here. Pirates of Barbary is coming out in paper and ebook from Penguin’s Riverhead imprint this month.

[Note to publicists -- we do book notes more than book reviews here, so we don't need copies of books much, but we are glad to hear of new work of interest to Canadian history.] 

CBC Readers Choice Contest for the Giller - winner nominates To the Edge of the Sea

Literary 'Democracy' Fun with the CBC and the Giller Prize

Earlier in August I posted about the CBC Readers Choice Contest for the Giller Prize. My novel, just released with Thistledown Press, was one of the eligible books to be voted on. And I’d said there were pretty cool prizes to be won – well, the winner of the Grand Prize, announced today, nominated my novel – To the Edge of the Sea!  Here is one of the comments below and a link to the Grand Prize winner in the Readers Choice contest

 

I love history and To the Edge of the Sea has inspired me to want to read Mercy Cole's diaries. The book kept me turning the pages to the very end. The characters were interesting and amazing with a twist at the end I had not expected. Sir John A. Macdonald (who has on his tombstone in London, England "A British subject I was born and a British subject I will die" was made more real to me. A strange Epitaph for the Father of Confederation I always thought. Great book, great cover, great bookmark. Loved it all.    By Lana

All the comments for the nominated books can be read here

More info on the book can be found at http://www.totheedgeofthesea.blogspot.com/

What have the historians got for us this fall? -- Cont'd

Noting what history titles some of the Canadian publishers are offering this fall; today UBC Press whose titles include:

• Elusive Destiny: The Political Vocation of John Napier Turner by Paul Litt
• Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law, and the Making of a Settler Society [the Canadian West] by Lesley Erickson.
• Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788–1920s: “We like to be free in this country” by Patricia A. McCormack.
• Janice Noakes and Jeff Noakes, both historians in the federal public service, Acts of Occupation, Canada and Arctic Sovereignty 1918-25, which argues that early Canadian assertions in the Arctic were driven by the fears of J. Bernard Harkin (principally known as the father of Parks Canada) about what Viljalmur Steffansson was doing up here.
• Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada by Donica Belisle.

Canada's First Big Party

Thursday September 1^st, 1864 – I always like it when days across years line up – so exactly today, another Thursday in history, was a momentous day in Canadian history – the start to one long sun-drenched and warm, champagne and circus filled party.

Today the Fathers of Confederation landed in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to almost complete indifference, to talk about the possibility of a union of the British Provinces – or Confederation.

There was certainly political indifference, as it was the Canadians themselves who had wrangled an invite to the Maritime conference discussing a Maritime Union. The Maritimers weren’t interested in that union either, but were forced to consider the proposal by Arthur Gordon, the then Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick (in 1867 How the Fathers Made a Deal, p 37, Moore describes Gordon “just thirty-five in 1864 and unshakeably certain he was meant to rule New Brunswick as an Imperial potentate.”)  Gordon assumed he would have more power if the Maritime provinces united. He was definitely not interested in a union of all the British provinces.

The other and more exciting cause of the indifference was the Slaymaker and Nichols’ Olympic Circus – the first circus in 20 years to the Island. The circus arrived Tuesday August 30 and was leaving September 2. (The circus was there in the first place because it couldn't travel up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States because of the Civil War - too many warships.) All the hotels, carriages, everything had been booked by the circus goers, leaving the Canadians, the famous Fathers of Confederation – John A Macdonald, George Etienne Cartier, George Brown (founder of the Globe and Mail), D’Arcy McGee and the others to stay out on their ship The Queen Victoria – with their $13,000 worth of champagne mind you. Now that’s a party.

For all the historical details and more photos see The History of Canada Online here

Donald MacKay 1925-2011 RIP

Donald MacKay, the prolific and popular historian of the Maritimes, was twice nominated for Governor-General's Awards in non-fiction for works such as Flight from Famine and People of the Hector.  He took to history book writing after retiring at the age of fifty from a successful career in journalism.  Death notice here.