New hstories of the mid-eighteenth and mid-twenty-first centuries

I continue to dabble in Bluesky to see what comes up. Notably, two remarkable essays.

First, there's a link to the London Review of Books essay "A Man of Parts and Learning"  It's about a man called Francis Williams, slavery, black culture, art history, global intellectual currents of the mid-eighteenth century, and Halley's Comet, among other things -- and it's a beautiful composition to boot.

Second, a link to an online periodical hitherto unknown to me, BylineTimes, and in it a statement entitled: ‘Europe and Canada Must Forget Trump and Form a Coalition of the Willing to Defend Ukraine’

Most Canadian discourse since the American election seems to have been about how Canada can most effectively surrender to Trumpism in order to avoid some of what the new regime in the United States seems likely to threaten us with. 

"Europe and Canada Must Forget Trump" is not that kind of statement.

It is a declaration by a large number of mostly European politicians and military and foreign policy mavens, plus some Canadians:   Chris Alexander, Margaret Atwood, Ratna Omidvar, Roman Waschuk, Roland Paris, Belkan Devlin, Alexander Lenoska. It accepts that the United States is not going to be the West's partner in world and European affairs in the foreseeable future. It argues that Europe and Canada need to make an independent military and foreign policy independent of what the United States is likely to do. It includes a substantial military buildup.

Media Notes: Bluesky, bigots, bonds

As I started building up a Bluesky social media account last week, some of the people I followed on X could not yet be found there. After this weekend, most of them have joined. The way Bluesky is growing, there's practically no one for whose posts I have to go to X any more

Some combination of revulsion against Elon Musk's manipulations of X and the sense that Bluesky might be a less toxic alternative, with more of the attractions Twitter used to have, had helped send a flood of enrollments there:  a million new ones a day right now, apparently. (It's actually making news.) 

Happy to say, most of the historians I used to follow on X have now moved over. I can probably just delete X altogether pretty soon. 

The rise of Bluesky is new enough still that when new-Blue Ian Mosby posted a note about a  journal article of his and offered to send a copy to anyone who direct-messaged him, there was a flood of replies beneath, along the lines of:  "Help, I'd like to get the article but haven't figured out how to DM in Bluesky yet!" 

In other media, i.e. the Globe and Mail, I admired Bill Waiser's recent article about a curator in Saskatchewan who discovered a cache of KKK robes in the collection of his museum.  I particularly liked how he made the curator, a longtime public history guy, into a central part of the story. Many journalists would have neglected that angle, in favour of some cliche about dusty archives. Archives are rarely dusty!

And in truly ancient media (i.e, books): props to my friend Ian Kyer for his 2023 book The Ontario Bond Scandal Re-examined. It's a good story. See, there was a bond scandal in Ontario in the 1920s, and a politician and a rich bondtrader were actually sent to jail -- which is always satisfying and has been noted in a number of histories. 

But Kyer, who was a PhD in medieval history before he became a corporate lawyer -- there are a few people like that around -- knows more about the working of bond markets than most of the historians who have written about the case. He makes a pretty good argument that there was reasonable doubt, at the very least, of the guilt of the accused, and that the convictions stemmed mostly from the incompetence and mendacity of a good few of the province's judges.  And that some of his mentors in legal history followed the judges more than the evidence. 

Of course, part of what I liked about the book is how he cites me on the legal and ethical shortcomings of the Ontario judiciary of the early twentieth century (and one or two other matters too).

Book Notes: Dutil on Macdonald

Historian Patrice Dutil will be launching his Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885 next Wednesday, November 20, at Yorkminster Park Speakers Series in Toronto.  He will be joined by novelists Gordon Henderson and Roy MacSkimming for a discussion hosted by Lynne Golding. The event is co-sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education.

 

Remembrance

This photo (posted to X by Kate McKenna of CBC News) was a favorite among the Remembrance Day images. 

I was busy on Monday, walking around west Toronto with Katy Whitfield, whose "They Walked These Streets"  puts up small notices, house by house and street by street, of the homes of Canadians who died in the World Wars and other conflicts. 

It's an ingenious marrying of new digital research techniques and traditional, "Their names will live forevermore," remembrances. These days, with digital archives, securing personal details on Canadian war dead, can be quick and satisfying.  And very moving, particularly when you find your own home or one next to it was the home of someone who went away in 1916 or 1943 and did not return. The project started gaining some media attention recently, like this. 

This soldier among those honoured, lived in a house Katy Whitfield lived in many years later:

 

National Indigenous Veterans Day, November 8

 

It's the thirtieth anniversary.  Historica's Memory Project has a seminar about National Indigenous Veterans Day here

Close the 49th Parallel?

 

Greg Curnoe, "Close the 49th Parallel Etc." (1968)

 

Cover illustration of Ian Lumsden, ed, Close the 49th Parallel Etc: The Americanization of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1970), a collection of essays by Canadian historians and political scientists.

Historians against the Fascist Turn

The New York Times Magazine has a long profile of Robert Paxton, 92 year-old American historian of fascism, whose 1972 book “Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944, transformed historical understanding of France and its politics under German occupation 1940-44 and who has remained a leading authority on fascism and its variants ever since. 

During Donald Trump's term as president of the United States, Paxton remained reluctant to label his regime as "fascist." The Times Magazine profile is mostly about his turn, on and after January 6, 2021, to become a confirmed advocate for labelling what is going on in the United States as a fascist movement.

Historians have been influential, one might say, in the evolving analysis of Trump and MAGA and what it means. Think of Timothy Snyder, historian of Central Europe and author of Bloodlands, about that region's experiences during the Second World War. Snyder has been one of the leading opinion makers, first, on Ukraine and its resistance to Russian conquest, but equally importantly on tyranny and freedom in the United States (and other democracies). 

Think of Anne Applebaum, student of the history of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia and its neighbours, whose Autocracy Inc is a current bestseller.

And let me add my friend Ken McGoogan, best know as the chronicler of 19th century Arctic exploration in six successful books, whom the Trump phenomenon has turned into a political sage. His Shadow of Tyranny is hardly about current events at all -- except it totally is at the same time.  It's a collection of portraits of individuals who confronted Fascism in the interwar years of the 1920s and 1930s, during the war itself, and in the postwar period, bringing us up to the near present: writers, politicians, reporters, spies, resistance fighters opposing autocratic rule 

Murray Sinclair

Mizanay Gheezhik, (Murray Sinclair) 1951-2024

Never met him. But I can't think of anyone who did more to change the sense of what indigenous history and culture mean and have meant and should mean.  Not just as the prime mover of the Truth and Reconciliation report (2015); in everything I heard of or from him

Prize Watch: Cundill to Kathleen DuVal

Kathleen DuVal, historian of indigenous America, has been announced as the 2024 winner of the Cundill Prize for History for Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.  As far as I can tell, DuVal is not indigenous, but the citation says she has been working on its account of a thousand years of indigenous history in North America for over twenty-five years.

Runners-up were Gary J. Bass for Judgment at Tokyo, on the post World War Two trial of Japanese war crimes, and Dylan Pennington for Before the Movement, on antecedents to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

I'm not reviewing the Cundill shortlist for the Literary Review of Canada this year, so you will have to form your own opinions of these works.

For consolation, here's one of my previous group reviews, on a particularly interesting (I thought) group of histories.

Update, November 6:  I have to dissent from Ken White's recent suggestion, in his ever-lively booktrade SubStack "ShuSh," that the Cundill Prize is too academically-insular and needs more input from generalist nonfiction writers/jurors. Generalist nonfiction writer that I am at heart, I have to say nonfiction book prizes are a dime a dozen, even in Canada. Big, ambitious, deeply researched historical writing need the kind of attention that major book prizes can provide. The Cundill is one of the few in the world that hits that niche.  There was a journalistic tilt to last year's nominees, and it was not their best year.

Subway to the Archives

I had a day at the Ontario Archives recently.  I've been to the Archives' new digs on the York University campus several times, but this was the first time since the opening of the YorkU stop on the extension of the University line subway. Goodbye to the "Jane Rocket" (ie, the bus).

I was kinda delighted to be greeted by this (above).  As far as I know, I have never before been to an archives with its own subway signage before. It's really close too -- steps away once you get to this spot.

Speaking of the Ontario Archives, there was a document I needed but was not sure how to find and to order. I sent an email to the Reference Help email address and got a reply back promptly with all the guidance I needed. I confirmed a date to be there, and I arrived to find a desk booked for me and my documents waiting on a trolley beside it.  Nice crunchy tangible paper documents, too, looking like no one had opened them since they were created fifty-odd years ago.

There have been a lot of problems with the conversion of archives to the digital world. But when it works, it's pretty good.  Sad to say, there was only one other person in the spacious and well furnished Reading Room all day.

Book Notes: the Osgoode Society launch

It's the season for book launches. (Book prizes will follow in a little while.) I went down last night to the annual book launch the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History puts on.  Big lively crowd and four books that suggest the great value of the work the Society does, now 125 books into a publishing program that started in 1981.  (Full list here, including a couple by moi.)

The lead book (be a member and you get one) is Adam Dodek's Heenan Blaikie, about a law firm that blew its own brains out and went out of business in 2014.  (Previously noted here.)

The other new books are two lawyers' legal history of the Canadian income tax, volume 2; a philosophy professor's exploration of a early 20th century Saskatchewan murder that practically no one has paid any attention to since the execution of the perpetrator, who was probably wrongfully convicted (tho' he did kill the guy!); and historian Ian Radforth's exploration of a celebrated nineteenth century murder in Ontario.

A close and serious exposition of income tax law is not a pageturner, as the author wryly admitted last night, but damn useful if that is precisely the thing you need to know.  Histories of bankruptcy law, of adoption law, of the Torrens land holding system, and others similar in kind preceded it -- and how many would have been written and published without an effective legal history publishing organization like the Osgoode. Two strong historical accounts in criminal law, and a contribution to law firm history -- not a bad haul. 

Nice to see lots of friends and colleagues too.  Well catered as ever, too.

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.