History of honours and titles

History and historians are well represented in the February 2025 Literary Review of Canada: e.g., Jack Granatstein and Donald Wright (reviewing), Tim Cook and Richard White (reviewed). My fave is Patrice Dutil's lively review of David Roberts' Boosters and Barkers (noted here last March, may I say).  It's a study of how Canada financed its immense First World War expenditures -- especially by inventing the concept of war bonds that were not addressed to banks and financial houses but the the great Canadian public as a patriotic duty.  

They were an enormous success. To the surprise of the bonds' inventors, Canada raised some $2.5 billion during the war (when a billion still meant something) from hundreds of thousands of individual Canadians.

Thomas White

Dutil admits the book is an important study but not an "easy read." He focusses on the life and career of  one of its central figures, Thomas White, the Canadian finance minister during the war and the architect of the War Bonds -- and later of the income tax. Dutil, one historian who is unashamedly interested in Canadian politics and politicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, observes that White is little known or remembered, and he uses the review to plunge into his life and its oddities: a Liberal and an Empire devotee who became a Conservative but could not stem the rising tide of Canada's ties to the United States. 

I liked it. If you don't read the book, read the review.

A peripheral thought: the article did get me thinking again about retrospective foreign honours. Should Canadian historians routinely note titles held by Canadians that they would not now receive?  Dutil notes that White received a knighthood in 1916. No doubt White deserved recognition for his accomplishments as wartime Finance Minister, and "Sir Thomas White" makes the man seem dignified, and important. But by 1916 knighthoods and other titles had become controversial, even scandalous, in Canada. Joseph Flavelle, a non- politician made a baronet and then dubbed "the bacon baron," was pilloried for accepting the honour. The great corruption that too often surrounded the granting of titles would provoke the 1917-19 Nickle resolution against titles for Canadians, moved by one of White's fellow Conservative MPs.  

Long before then, it had become customary that most Canadian Liberal politicians declined knighthoods, while many minor Conservative luminaries continued to accept them. When historians juxtapose Sir Thomas White (knighted Conservative finance minister) against William Fielding (never knighted Liberal finance minister), are we putting a thumb on the scale by suggesting the former, by accepting a controversial title, was more worthy, more distinguished, than the latter who declined all such offers (according to his DCB biography).  

This Month at Canada's History

The February-March 2025 issue of Canada's History, now reaching subscribers (and newsstands if you can find one) has a terrific blues-tinted cover honouring Oscar Peterson, born one century ago, and a Peterson profile by music journalist Jason MacNeil.  

Also: "Saving Sweet and Sour," a terrific article by history grad student Koby Song-Nichols on the survival and revival of Toronto's downtown Chinatown after two-thirds of it was expropriated and demolished for the building of the new city hall and public square.  Moira Dann on Kathleen, the spendthrift heir to the Dunsmuirs of Victoria.  CH stalwart Nelle Oosterholm celebrates Trinity, Newfoundland, and the Rising Tide Theatre Company that makes it home there. And notes on the history teachers recently honoured in Winnipeg with the Governor-General's History Medals.

Nothing from me in this issue, but I'm working up a feature story for the fall of 2025. Subscribe. 

History of the border

Did you see the clips of the Fox News spokesthingee saying he was personally insulted that some Canadians might actually not want to be Americans? Personally! You have to laugh. 

So many Americans live on Planet America, oblivious to the universe beyond. They have always heard that the US is the greatest country in the world and that USA is freedom. Who wouldn't want that? Even benign progressive Americans are imbued with this cant, and would vaguely assume the guy has a point: everyone else ought to be American if they can.

For his recent column about why Canadians will eventually realize they would be better off as Americans, Ross Douthat, the New York Times commentator, has at least swotted up some information about current Canadian politics. But in the end, his argument just mixes some anti-Trudeau snark into generic Planet American myopia. 

We may be joking that Americans should beg to be the 11th province (the healthcare, rights for women, respect for diversity and immigrants, sane gun laws, life expectancies...). But for Douthat, all that is just anti-Trumpism and obsolete liberal-democracy talk. All that matters is what happened lately on Planet America, which must be the model for the world.

A month or so ago a wise historian of Canada told me that that the more closely connected to the United States Canada becomes, the more strong the Canadian identity becomes.  Close enough to see what the United States fails to be -- and far enough away to identify what we are seeing. Only Americans can still think the USA is the beacon unto the world, that's harder to grasp.

On the same theme: everyone considers the New York Times the great liberal newspaper in the US.  But glancing at the Times' list of opinion writers (a glance is often enough), a Canadian can't help noticing that in Canada, most of them would be most at home in the National Post.  

HIstory at Canada Reads (updated)

Horse trading for book prizes? I've never really been inclined to follow CBC Radio's Canada Reads contest, where various contestants scheme to have their chosen book selected as the book all Canadians should read. (Fat chance!)

But it is surprising and impressive that one of the selected books this year is a serious work of political history co-authored by a history prof, When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance by Katsi’tsakwas Ellen Gabriel with Sean Carleton  (he's the prof). It's published by BTL Press, which must be delighted by the sales prospects.

The lore of Canada Reads is that because the contestants are playing to win, the advocates of the weaker titles will generally gang up to eliminate the books with the strongest reputation first. Since Canada Reads is mostly for fiction readers, it might be that a serious title like When the Pine Needles might be allowed to go forward for awhile. I'm not promising to listen, however. 

Update, January 12:  I'm informed that only the longlist has been announced, so not this is not among the contenders yet. Given the extreme rarity of nonfiction works at Canada Reads, I would not be confident it will be in the contest. 

History of Middlemarch

My text, Penguin English Library, paperback

For Christmas, I requested and received a copy of Middlemarch.  It's eighty-four chapters,  Read a couple of chapters a week, and I could be done by the end of the year even if I skip a few weeks.

Not yet two weeks in, and I'm almost on schedule. The preface is off-putting, but I warmed up to the first chapter. 

It is amazing what writers could get away with in the nineteenth century. Long rolling complex sentences that go on for lines and lines before you reach the conclusion and find out what the sentence is all about, endless paragraphs without dialogue, and of course a cast where everyone is rich and leisured. (It's catching.) It wouldn't survive a moment in a 21st century editor's hands.  

But already George Eliot is delivering sentences that make me laugh and want to read them aloud. I'll carry on.  

Plotwise: I have already encountered Dorothea Brooke and had a glimpse of Mr Casaubon, who I knew without having read a line is the ideal type of the historian who is (therefore?) a pedantic windbag and a bore. Well, I have met some of those IRL.

More to come. Maybe I'll deliver a report on progress every few chapters.    

History of the business of history

Bloomberg News is not one of my regular reads, and current news is mostly paywalled there, but its recent story "The Business of History" is now generally available. It's about the popularity and profitability of history podcasts. It also makes note of the rising sales of books about history. Bloomberg speculates it may all be related to the decline of history studies in universities.

I happened to be gifted a copy of Henry V, the new book by the very popular British historian/media personality Dan Jones (not to be confused with the other very popular British historian/media personality Dan Snow).  It's a good example of the thriving state of popular historical writing in Britain right now: very skillfully done, solidly researched and highly readable. I went rocketing through its several hundred pages.

I could not help noting one (not-much-noted) aspect of Jones's work that is also evident in "The Rest is History," the British podcast from historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, upon which the Bloomberg story is focussed. In books and broadcasts and podcasts, the new popular British history tends to take for granted a complacent little-England historical chauvinism in which British is always best and other breeds are mostly subjects of fun.  

I first noticed this when I listened to a "Rest of History" series of podcasts about the Cathar heresy in medieval France. The Cathars are central to the historical work I may admire most of all in the world, Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. so I was already interested.  But I discovered that every single historical expert on the Cathars featured or quoted on The Rest of History was English. Since all the leading historians of Catharism are French (if they are not Italian), it did seem an odd omission. 

And gradually I realized The Rest of History applies the same cheery Brit-boy disdain to all historical subjects who are not English.  Listen, for example, for the root-for-England style of Rest is History's series on Nelson at the Battle of the Nile. Classical types from before England existed get some respect, but I can't find their series on, say, the victories of Napoleon. 

Dan Jones has grasped that the audience of a biography of Henry V is probably not there to put up with criticism of Henry's darker aspects.  

When Jones's Henry V finds the defenders of a besieged town called Montereau too slow to surrender to him, he threatens to execute ten of his French prisoners of war. The defenders do not yield to this blackmail, and Henry has all ten hanged.  It's a clear violation of the rules of chivalry, the laws of war, and Christian ethics -- but Snow places the blame "squarely on the obstinate Guillaume de Chaumont" for surrendering too slowly.  When a French commander commits similar acts in another siege, Jones berates him as "a callous bastard" (well, he is apparently of illegitimate birth) and "singularly vicious." Anyway, he is eventually forced to surrender, and Henry hangs him too, along with a trumpeter who played some mocking tunes during the siege. 

Is the double standard a deliberate flag-waving -- or just instinctive in this generation of writers?

One popular British historian who takes a different approach -- and goes unnoted by Bloomberg -- is David Olusoga, the history professor, author, and television presenter who focusses on black Britain and Britain's relations with Africa and Africans. Olusoga sometimes needs bodyguards and police protection when he speaks in public nowadays.

A muscular defence by public figures of a traditional English history of the glories of empire and all the great English heroes has inspired actual threats to historians who practice the history of empire and slaveholding from a different perspective. 

Maybe also worth mentioning here: the recent book The Truth about the British Empire, edited by Alan Lester, which includes a Canadian chapter by Adele Perry, Sean Carleton, and Omeasoo Wahpasiw. From the British publisher's description:

Colonial history is now a battlefield in the culture war. The public's understanding of past events is continually distorted by wilful caricatures. Communities that long struggled to get their voices heard have, in their fight to highlight the hidden horrors of colonialism, alienated many who prefer a celebratory national history. The backlash, orchestrated by elements of the media, has generated a new, concerted denial of imperial racism and violence in Britain's past--a disinformation campaign sharing both tactics and motivations with those around Covid, Brexit and climate change.

 

 

History of the artist as a jerk

We enjoyed the Bob Dylan biopic "A Complete Unknown" over the holidays. You should go, though it may help to be of an age to have lived through a lot of the Dylan era. But the music is terrific throughout, and the acting too.

It also made pretty clear that young Dylan was a self-centered, arrogant, inconsiderate asshole most of the time -- as well as being some kind of genius. The creative life came first, all others were secondary.

I was also reading the long article in the New Yorker about Alice Munro and the sexual abuse of her daughter. I met Alice Munro a few times, always with groups of writers, and she always seemed a lovely person to be around. In Rachel Aviv's New Yorker story, Alice Munro comes out as kind of horrible, too. Indeed, the Robert Thacker biography of her, which I read about a decade ago, made quite clear that when she left Victoria and her husband Jim Munro in the early 1970s, she also left behind her three daughters -- and motherhood, pretty much.  She was going to write, and there wasn't room for children in that plan.

The New Yorker article makes clear, without specifically saying so, that when her new partner began abusing her youngest daughter, she pretty much held to her earlier decision: not my problem, I have to write.

Reading the article, I reflected that never have I read a story in which I have some personal acquaintance with so many of the people interviewed or discussed. I like and admire almost all of them. Few come out very well in this story  -- human failings, not artistic ones, mostly.    

History of Celsius

Happy New Year.

It has been fifty years since Canada began the transition to the metric system, with the adoption of Celsius for temperature leading the way. 

The story in that link above refers to the Tory MP goofuses who opened their own "freedom to measure" gas station when gas prices went metric, soon after the change in the weather reporting.  Was "everyone can have their own measuring system" the beginning of the right-wing movement that led to vaccines being optional and Daylight Savings proposed to become a matter of personal choice.

Probably not.  When Britain caught up to the Gregorian calendar reforms in the early 18th century 1752, there were rioters out demanding "give us back our eleven days!"

When gas prices went metric in 1975, the price of a gallon of gas was just reaching $1.00.  Many gas stations signs only had room for three digits for the cents per gallon (.ie, 99.9).  Some had to put up a big cardboard "$1" at the left of their sign, so it would read, for example, $1.025.  The switch to metric at about 0.22 cents a litre solved that problem.  

22 cents is worth about $1.30 today, apparently, so gas prices have not gone up nearly as much as they should have, given the carbon price that ought to have been factored in.

It's all another reason why the US would be better off as the eleventh province rather than us being "the 51st state."  Not only health care, rights for women, and gun laws, but fewer obsolete measuring systems as well.  (But do you know your metric height and weight?)

History of residential school denialism

The TVOntario blog TVO Today, which carries historical essays from time to time, has a recent post by broadcaster Steve Paikin on a Toronto event of the newish culture-wars organization CIHE. 

It featured American political commentator David Frum discussing settler colonialism, defined as a term "often used as an accusation against Canada." 

According to Paikin, Frum drew attention to doubts about alleged deaths at residential schools:

“The allegation that hundreds and thousands were done to death has been accepted as a fact,” Frum said, adding that the House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution equating the residential-school system with genocide.

... To be clear, Frum isn’t justifying “the horrifying numbers” in which Indigenous people died after first contact with “European colonial settlers.” He pointed out that, throughout history, different groups have conquered lands, then redrawn borders and redistributed the wealth, as they felt entitled to do.

Paikin reports that Frum called for "a battlefield of ideas." However, no indigenous spokespeople seem to have been invited to join in this discussion, nor anyone familiar with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report or its statistics on death rates at residential schools.

American residential school children

Update, December 22:  Meanwhile more material to rationalize away somehow: the Washington Post conducted its own count of indigenous burials at residential schools in the United States: 3100 and counting. 

I don't have a Post subscription, so I'm linking to a summary and long quotation at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Honours Watch: Order of Canada

Not much attention to historians at the Order of Canada yesterday, but congratulations to Mark Zuehlke -- the appointment citation makes him officially "Canada's leading writer of popular military history." Sylvia Bashevkin, honoured for her contributions to gender and politics studies, is a political scientist, not a historian, but close enough....   

A pretty thin list of writers, too, but honours to Maureen Jennings, author of the Murdoch Mysteries and a host of other mystery series.  

History of Cabinet government

Can't help thinking that if Chrystia Freeland had stood up for Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott when they were dismissed from political life for having stood up for cabinet government, she might be in better situation today.  And us too.

Emmett Macfarlane: "More than electoral reform, perhaps even more than gov't transparency, the idea of 'cabinet government' is possibly the most blatant broken promise of Trudeau's tenure. It's unfathomable that - as reported by ppl like Garneau and JWR - his ministers simply couldn't reach him, barely ever saw him." — Bluesky
 

We have had a century-long consensus among political scientists, political journalists, and political consultants that a prime minister must be strong, and that it is "democratic' to choose party leaders by an extra-parliamentary process, specifically to insulate them from accountability to cabinet ministers and other elected representatives. Electoral reform will not help that. Nor will a new leader chosen by a vote-buying orgy "leadership convention."

Change will come when a caucus removes a sitting prime minister.  And chooses their replacement.

Wot no posting?

The classic diaries of the diplomat, author, and bon vivant Charles Richie, a dedicated diarist all his life, had occasional stretches that simply said "Work... work...work."

Probably we are not quite so burdened here, but blogging has been slow for a week or so. "Distraction... distraction.... distraction?"  

We'll be back.

Canada's History holiday gift guide.

 ... maple leaf socks and much more for the historian in your life in Canada's History's annual gift giving guide.