History of M-my G-g-generation

There's a big poll out in the US that has Kamala Harris leading in every single age and gender grouping except one:  men over sixty, who prefer the other guy by 12 points. 

Well, the dementia stats are starting to grow in that group too.

History at the Yorkminster Park Speaker Series in Toronto

A couple of historically-connected speaking events coming up at this Toronto speaking series -- one involving me. 

The first features actor RH Thomson talking about his remarkable global Remembrance Day projects and about his new memoir of his family and its many wartime losses.   In person in Toronto, and free via Zoom.

And the second features Marsha Faubert discussing her book Wanda's War, about two young and unremarkable Polish people's hellish experiences during the Second World War and how they happened to survive and to come to postwar Canada, where they met and married -- and eventually became Marsha Faubert's mother- and father-in-law.  

Wanda and Kazimierz (later "Casey") never really spoke about their wartime experiences, and Marsha's discoveries about that make for a remarkable piece of historical research and writing. I'll be interviewing Marsha about that story at Yorkminster Park in Toronto, and free via Zoom everywhere. 

Dodek, Heenan Blaikie: The Making and Unmaking of a Great Canadian Law Firm.

In his new book, Heenan Blaikie, Adam Dodek, offers a detailed and lively account of a still uncommon historical topic: how a prominent law firm can dissolve into non-existence. Dodek, a law professor in Ottawa, delves into the collapse in 2014 of Heenan Blaikie, a law firm that grew from small beginnings in Montreal in 1973 to a five-hundred lawyer business with offices across the country, blue-chip corporate clients, and names like Jean Chretien, Pierre Trudeau, and hockey tycoon Marcel Aubut on the letterhead. Dodek interviewed scores of the talkative lawyers who were left to rebuild their careers while still burdened with the dead firm’s enormous debts, and he is able to enliven his story with first-person quotation throughout.

Heenan Blaikie was a law partnership that believed that having great “culture” and being a fun place to work would guarantee success. Its leaders recruited starry new partners -- hired mostly on instinct – with income guarantees that could not be renegotiated when the partner failed to bring in business. They considered management and administration to be work that smart guys like them could handle in their spare time without professional advice. The firm spent more time debating what street its new Toronto office should face than what lines of work it should focus on. It invested fortunes in vanity-project foreign offices and glossy consultants long after competing firms had proved that such sidelines were costly diversions. Talented and savvy lawyers at Heenan Blaikie continued to bring in enormous fees from well-heeled clients and yet the firm managed to spiral into collapse. It was, in fact, the firm that did everything wrong.

It’s a great story. Dodek lavishes time and attention on all the ethical lapses and failures, all the nasty headlines that decorated its fall. and generally the decline of Heenan Blaikie’s vaunted “culture” into a toxic stew. I enjoyed reading it and learned lots.

If there’s a weakness, it is focussing too much on the toxic culture and the lurid misbehaviours. Dodek shows many things that Heenan Blaikie did badly. But the book doesn’t much reflect on what they should have been doing well: what kind of management had become essential for big law firms with the aspiration to greatness that Heenan Blaikie certainly had.

Heenan Blaikie emerged in the late 20^th century moment when leading law firms in Canada (and around the world) were suddenly changing from local enterprises of a few dozen lawyers at most, to become large, geographically-dispersed operations with multi-million dollar annual revenues. During the last fifty years, the victors in this fight for growth developed a consensus on how big law firms could and must organize themselves. They managed to turn legal practice, long idolized by many lawyers as single-combat warfare for heroic individuals, into a corporate enterprise, driven by empowered leadership, carefully strategized goals, targeted marketing, and a ruthless attention to overall profit and loss.

Dodek makes clear that Heenan Blaikie was clueless and dismissive about all the new ground rules of the corporate law business – which is why its competitors ate its lunch.

But Dodek is hardly more interested in law-business fundamentals that the firms leaders were. 

His book sometimes gives the impression that Heenan Blaikie failed because it did a lot of things badly. It did, and he describes them all. But the book would be stronger with some attention to all the things it never really considered doing – the things successful big-law firms learned to do in order to thrive and survive.

It is still a terrific book, but it occurred to me while reading that Adam Dodek is a law professor. University departments are among the few places that can still attempt to run by the kind of non-management management that doomed Heenan Blaikie to extinction.  But there is room for business historians (not that I am really one) in the history of law firms.

(Despite these quibbles, I should note gratefully that in the book Adam Dodek generously cites my writings on law-firm history and an interview we did during his research. Thanks also to UBC Press for an advance reading copy.) 

Prize Watch: Nominees that might have been

Last week (see October 8 below), a friend of this blog lamented the lack of history books among award nominees (again), In response I asked for them suggestions:  a few that might have merited some attention. The reply:

• Hillary Doda, Fashioning Acadians: Clothing in the Atlantic World, 1650–1750  ("I kinda liked this book."
• Dimitry Anastakis, Dream Car: Malcolm Bricklin’s Fantastic SV1 and the End of Industrial Modernity.  "Simply wonderful."
• And next year, maybe this book by Laura Madokoro:  Sanctuary in Pieces: Two Centuries of Flight, Fugitivity, and Resistance in a North American City
• Or this one: Daniel Macfarlane, The Lives of Lake Ontario An Environmental History

I myself have not read yet any of these, mea culpa. 

Maybe other readers can suggest other authors and titles. The criteria: newly published books by or about Canadians, of sufficient heft, scope, and literary quality to be worth consideration by the Governor General's Literary Award nonfiction jury next year.

(I note there are other prizes for history books, not least all those of the Canadian Historical Association. And literary merit and historical merit are hardly identical.)

 

 

Donald Smith In Hindsight -- a historian's podcast

In the process of adding some podcasts to the list (at right) of sites worth following , I discovered that Donald Smith, longtime professor at the University of Calgary and noted historian of indigenous histories long before they were fashionable ... has a podcast.  

I have not listened to it yet, but it seems to be an original mix of historian's memoir and historian's historical reflections. There are 21 episodes to date, "relaxed, with an abundance of anecdotes," and most run less than 30 minutes. It's called "In Hindsight" and it's on the Ontario Historical Society website.

The OHS's other podcast is about the glories of the Canadian crown... but I'll let you find that one for yourself.

Doug Ford in one sentence

"The Ford government wants sewer pipes that send raw waste into Lake Ontario to be diverted into a channel used by swimmers and rowers, the Star has learned."

                                                        -- Toronto Star, October 9, 2024, page 1.

Prize Watch: The GG Nonfiction Nominees UPDATED; and the Cundill History Prize shortlist

The Cundill finalists for 2024

The Canada Council has announced the shortlists for its Governor-General's Literary Awards. The nonfiction list is... mixed.  Heavy on memoir and strong in indigenous context, it has a couple of issue- oriented books, though nothing that would count as history (again).

[Update, October 10:  A friend of the blog writes:

I caught your blog post and laughed out loud at this line: “…it has a couple of issue- oriented books, though nothing that would count as history (again).”

It’s sooo discouraging.

It’s a bit different on the French side, and I’m not sure why. Different juries, I guess.]

Strangely, the GGbooks website presents cover photos of the nominated titles, but no description or jury statements about why they were nominated, nothing about the authors at all, no links. Three PenguinRandom titles, two from indie Canadian presses. On a quick glance, Winipek and The Age of Insecurity (the 2023 Massey Lectures) look substantial, but it's a literary prize: here's hoping the jurors have been assessing on that basis.

Two of the books use that lazy trope "the age of ....[fill in the blank]" but that might be on the publishers.  Congratulations to all the nominees,

• Danny Ramadan, Crooked Teeth: A Gay Syrian Refugee Memoir
• Helen Knott, Becoming a Matriarch
• Petra Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Surveillance
• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart
• Nigaan Sinclair, Winipek: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre

Over to the Cundill History Prize which announced its three finalists recently.  Looks like a list of big serious straight-up history books this year -- a good thing for that neglected category! Three American nominees for a global prize, however.

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass – A landmark history of the post-World War II trials of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, which has shaped relationships throughout modern Asia.

Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal – A sweeping 1000-year history of the power of Indigenous North America, from ancient cities to fights for sovereignty that continue today.

Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights by Dylan C. Penningroth – Stretching from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system, to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life. 

History of October 7

Readers here will know this is not a political blog.  But the day deserves attention

Has this been the worst year ever for news from the Middle East?  Not that there have been a lot of good years for a long time.

Lately I have heard more people alluding to Ireland and the Troubles to deal with current events.  There was another forever war, two sides seemingly prepared to go on killing each other pretty much forever.

And then it burned out. That particular generation of stone killers seemed to age out. And they failed to bring on another generation to succeed them. Given an option of (mostly) peace and (some) prosperity, people on both sides seemed ready to grasp it.  

Could that happen in the Middle East? I rather think the Israeli population could accept it pretty quickly, and could dispose of those in government who might want to keep fighting wars they think they will not lose. It's pretty clear the United States, principal guarantors of Israeli strength, would be happy enough to see all that happen. 

The other side? I can believe there are lots of people willing to live without endless war, without absolute victory or vengeance. But the decision-makers on that side seem absolutely committed to victory and vengeance, however remote the prospect of achieving it -- and they are not accountable to the people they lead. Steps to peace in the Middle East before the collapse of the Iranian state that sustains the war? Hard to imagine.

And the crisis is not just in the Middle East any more. We have Islamophobes among us, for sure, and mostly we identify them and isolate them as fanatics if not psychopaths. But the surge in anti-Jewish attacks in Canada and other western countries, and the seeming righteousness that underlies it, seems new. Do our neighbours really think that chanting "From the river to the sea" might lead to an acceptable settlement anywhere?  

HIstory of fandom

Probably not the TFC guy (right) winning this year

Can you be a sports fan and be content that your team is out of contention? Maybe you can.

I was a fervent supporter of the Canadiens around the time that the Toronto Maple Leafs were winning Stanley Cups by beating them.  Then I grew up. Since then I've been a pretty casual sports watcher, not much invested in winners and losers.  It would be fun in Toronto if the Leafs won a championship again. But I can wait, you know. I do follow the Tour de France and to root for the Canadians in it, but I follow the show more than sweat over who may win.  

A few years ago, to my own surprise I did drifted into watching soccer regularly, occasionally at the stadium, more often on television.  Soccer has two big attractions for me. The pace is such that you can actually follow it, and after a while one begins to see how teams develop their attack and plan their attack.  The strategy can be comprehended -- and observed as it plays out.  The other thing: unlike hockey and football, at least, you can follow a team and quickly find that all the individual players are bareheaded and can actually be identified and followed.  Also you can see them play live without taking out a mortgage for the tickets, and the crowds are small enough to make it kinda homey.

So I've become a Toronto FC supporter. If you are going to follow a team, it might as well be your hometown team.  Happily, I got into this just as they became the best team in the league and brought home all the trophies.  

They don't do that now.  

Watching TFC means watching them lose... a lot.  In the last week or two, they desperately tried to win one or two games to clinch, not even a real playoff spot, but a chance to join a "play-in" to determine the final entrants to the real playoffs. I felt for them every time they controlled a game and failed to score.  Or got blown out. Or blew a lead by starting fights and getting their stars thrown out of the game.  

If they somehow qualified, they were going to be eliminated fast  They really did not look like a playoff team. So what the hell, why pollute the real competition.

I'm not much disappointed that their last loss -- allowing a goal in the dying moments of extra time after dominating Inter Miami for most of the game -- eliminated them and ended their season before the playoffs started. They ought to be out. They ought to start improving the team now, not in another month or so.  

I hope enough of them get to stay around that when next season starts, I can still identify most of their players on the field. Meanwhile I'd do something else Saturday nights.

History Sites Come and Go

Borealia's canoe: out of the water for a while

Borealia, the Early Canadian History blog from (but not exclusively about) Atlantic Canada, has announced a sabbatical. For the time being, I've deleted it from the list of History Blogs at right. The editors say:

It has now been almost a decade since Borealia was launched with the intention of amplifying scholarship on northern North America before the twentieth century. We hoped it would be a forum where historians of different sub-fields could make connections, and to bring this great work to educators, non-specialists, and an interested general readership. We are grateful for the community of contributors and readers who have encouraged us and made this a worthwhile venture.

Much has changed in the landscape of digital scholarship and social media since 2015, yet we remain convinced of the ongoing value of an online forum of the sort Borealia aspires to be.

But ten years is a long time, and for a variety of entirely normal professional and personal reasons, we need a break. We have decided to take a year-long sabbatical, until summer 2025.

 Well, I can understand all that.  Best wishes to all who have served -- and may again!

Most of the sites listed at the left have been been going quite a while, but all still seem to be active -- and I do use my own links to look around from time to time.

Podcasts have been the new blogs for quite some time now. So my list is now titled "History Sites of Note", not History Blogs, and I'm about to add to the list a few history-centered podcasting sites. (Update, October 4:  Additions now started.)

Prize Watch: Chalmers Award to Ian Radforth

The Champlain Society announces that the 2024 winner of its Floyd Chalmers Award for the best book in Ontario history is Ian Radforth for Expressive Acts: Celebrations and Demonstrations in the Streets of Victorian Toronto, a study of: 

occasions when crowds gathered in the streets of Toronto to demonstrate, contest, or celebrate. Vividly written and richly researched, his accounts include rowdy election days, beleaguered religious processions, rallies for troops who subdued the North-West Resistance, Street Railway Company strikes, and Viceregal and Royal visits.

This month at Canada's History

Nearly a year after the sudden disappearance of longtime editor Mark Reid -- and never a word to readers or members about what transpired there -- Canada's History's October-November issue introduces new Editor Jacqueline Kovacs (hired last June, also without comment at the time), and still no comment or explanation.  Magazines shouldn't be in the secret-keeping business, should they?

Still, a lively mix of stories in the issue, for sure. Canada's first chess grandmaster Abe Yanovsky of Winnipeg.  The sinking of a Canadian troopship off Singapore.  The profound and lasting significance of the Treaty of Niagara 1764.  Surveying the Canada-US border, with copious maps.  And a cover story on the prairie tipi.  A note on a new play in Halifax about Rocky Jones, Afro-Canadian activist and historian.  Letters about lighthouses.  Nothing from me  in this issue, but looking for great things from Jackie Kovacs and her team. Stay tuned.  And subscribe, like ya oughta.