History of the world crisis

I'm not a reader of the National Post, but one of its frequent contributors, the British Columbia writer Terry Glavin, recently had some blunt and uncomplimentary things to say about the United States and its place in the world and on this continent. It came via his Substack, which was linked to by an American commentator I follow -- such are the ways of information flow these days. -- no, in fact it was Paul Wells's Substack. 

The Trump regime is not on Europe's side, or Ukraine's, or Canada's. You don't have to guess whose side the White House is on anymore.

Book Notes: Dutil and Stewart talk prime ministers.

Dropped by the U of T Bookstore in Toronto last night to hear Patrice Dutil and J.D.M. Stewart talk about their recent books, Dutil's on John A. Macdonald, Stewart's on the prime ministers of Canada.

I was happy to be there with a small but interested audience simply because book launches on Canadian historical topics seem to have become scarce and precious lately.  The discussion was lively, engaging, and often enlightening.

I think both authors would acknowledge being defenders and admirers of John A. Macdonald, but I was sorry to hear them suggest last night, as they also do in their books, that those who criticise Macdonald and even support the removal of many of his statues around Canada are simply misinformed and are a symptom of how badly history is taught in Canada.  

I believe in their sincerity, but they do contribute to that attitude that stifles the discussions we need by presuming that indigenous scholars, and minority historians, and historians less celebratory of our first prime minister, are simply wrong and therefore do not need places on platforms like this one. 

And though I don't teach and they do or did, I think by and large our history teachers do a much better job than they acknowledge.  And that young people's views on history are hardly so dismissible.

A previous post on related thoughts

 

  

Donald Graves 1949-2025 RIP military historian

Military historian and prolific author Donald E Graves died on November 11.  His major works cover the War of 1812, which probably no one else has covered so completely, but he also produced regimental histories, biographies, and studies of the Second World War.  Wikipedia has a good accounting of his work.  The obituary is here.

Graves began his historical career in the public service, working for Parks Canada's Historic Sites Service, Library and Archives Canada, and the Department of National Defence before launching a lengthy career as a consultant on military history and a freelance writer on historical topics. 

I did not know him but I once fulfilled my title as contributing editor to Canada's History by recommending him to the magazine during the planning of its War of 1812 bicentennial coverage, which may have led to his article there on the Battle of Lundy's Lane. Recently he was doing a series of military history talks for the History Symposium, some of which are yet to be podcasted. 

Image: History Symposium

History of fighter jet purchases

Wesley Wark, historian and national security/ intelligence consultant has thoughts on the F-35 and Saab Gripen fighter jets choice. TLDR: buy a few F-35s and base them in Norway as our contribution to European security. Defend Canada with the Saab Gripens.

Make it a Red Friday

 

Crossing Borders

 

On the United States' Thanksgiving Day, I fee grateful that I have no need or reason to visit the United States right now. This story presents one reason why. 

I hope my American friends stay safe and stay resolute.

Book Notes: Legal History again. And Buffs

Legal historians in the news. Historian Carolyn Strange's book, Fatal Confession, which we noted here in a recent post on the Osgoode Society publications, got a substantial excerpt in the Toronto Star on the weekend, highlighting the issues of extorted confessions and prosecutorial tunnel-vision in the 1950s and later too!), which led to the speedy trial and eventual execution of Robert Fitton.  Strange is a Canadian historian now teaching in Australia.

Following on the Globe's enthusiastic coverage of Eric Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross on Japanese Canadians repatriated to Japan after World War II, it's not a bad showing for the historian/lawyer partnership that is the Osgoode Society.

Speaking of the Adams/Stanger-Ross review, I jibbed a bit about journalists calling (dismissing?) people who read and take history seriously "buffs."  Russel Chamberlayne writes:

My late 1990s Gage Canadian Dictionary calls a buff a "fan; enthusiast: a hockey buff; a theatre buff."
My Oxford Dictionary of the same vintage has a somewhat more acceptable definition (at least to me) "a person who is enthusiastically interested in and very knowledgeable about a particular subject: a computer buff." It gives as the derivation: "early 20th century; originally applied to enthusiastic firewatchers, because of the buff uniforms formerly worn by New York volunteer firemen."
My Fitzhenry & Whiteside Canadian Thesaurus (2001) lists "aficionado, collector, devotee, enthusiast, expert, zealot" Pick any two of the above.

Enthusiastic firewatchers! 

Does Victoria Goldiee have some history for you? The spread of AI journalism

The Local, a Toronto-area version of those online newspapers offering coverage that rivals or extends what the more established media have, ran an story recently about the articles now being offered to it -- many of which turn out to be AI creations using fake or borrowed interviews, invented material, and authors who may or may not be real people and may be submitting "Toronto" stories from a base that could be anywhere in the world. Suddenly an editor has to spend a lot more time deciding not just if the story is of interest but if the author and his/her material really exist. As The Local's editor writes:

I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.

In the health/money story he got back, most of the quotations, even from real experts, had been faked, even in stories the "author" had successfully placed in some major international publications.

My own pre-ChatGPT mind screams out, why would anyone bother? Do they know what Canadian magazines pay? 

But if people are making up news and current affairs stories, the potential for AI-created historical writing, both in trade and academic publications, must be immense.  What a world!

Wright on Miller at Active History

Donald Wright drew my attention to his recent appreciation of J.R. Miller in Active History.  Here's the link (also added to my obituary notice of September 25 below).

Book Notes: Globe on Challenging Exile... and about those "Buffs"

Saturday's Globe and Mail included a substantial review of Eric Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross's book Challenging Exile, the account of Japanese Canadian citizens facing the Canadian government's determination to exile them by the thousands to Japan after the end of the Second World War.  (We noted the book here last week in an Osgoode Society roundup.) 

John Ibbitson calls it  "a superb chronicle."

You might read the review for the big picture summary Ibbitson provides about what was attempted in 1945-46. But right off he says the book is:

essential reading for anyone who cares about our country’s past.

Then there is the headline the Globe gives the review. It takes Ibbitson's phrase and turns it into 

essential reading for history buffs

What is a history buff? Are there sports "buffs"?  Economics buffs? Differential calculus buffs? "History buff" always seems essentially condescending and demeaning, a way for the headline writer to tell us he (gotta be he) would not be caught dead reading this stuff, no matter what this guy Ibbitson thinks. Sure, headline writers need to save space, but wouldn't "essential reading for anyone" have done as well?

 

History of Canada's other Charter

The Globe and Mail this morning has a lot of detail about the future of the Charter of the Hudson Bay Company, now that the company itself is no longer around to maintain it. Mostly it seems to be good news, maybe even a story of some billionaires actually doing a not-evil thing.

Decades ago, the Hudson Bay Company donated its immense archives to the Manitoba Archives and its equally impressive artifact collection to the Manitoba Museum, while also using its tax break windfall from that to provide funds to those institutions to handle what they had been given,  About the same time they also spun off their quaint little "Beaver" magazine to become the genesis of today's Canada's History and all its history-related projects, also with a foundational grant to help it launch.

I was drawn into these matters in the 1990s, when I was asked to talk to a few people and draft a report about the conservation of the HBC Charter.  I'm ashamed to admit I cannot recall who exactly wanted the story, and I don't seem to have preserved much documentation of my small contribution, not even a draft text.  But I vividly remember being taken to the HBC corporate offices high above Queen Street in Toronto and shown the famous Charter, by then hermetically sealed inside a protective canister based on technology developed for use in space capsules. 

(I do remember being pleased at my own cleverness when I drafted a lede to the effect of: "How do you protect a 300 year old piece of sheepskin so that it will survive for another 300 years? It doesn't seem like rocket science. But in fact, it is.") 

At the time, the Company leaders had decided not to include its charter from 1670 in its disposition of its historical materials.  I guess they expected they might be in business another 300 years or so and should keep the vital document that justified their existence close to hand. That is why the Charter and its new and impermeable case sat in a corporate office space and not in the museum and the archives that had everything else.

So this year,when the Yank owners drove the Bay into insolvency in a swirl of property speculation and asset-stripping, the Charter, virtually alone among the Bay's historical treasures, ended up being part of the spoils to be auctioned off in a process mostly of interest to real estate investors.   

Fortunately, the dissolution of the Bay is being supervised by the courts of Ontario, and the judge in charge declared bluntly in September 2025 he intended to safeguard the Charter if no one else did:

“I must say I’m concerned, increasingly so, about the process,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Peter Osborne said during that Sept. 29 hearing. “And I am going to keep this on the rails.  ....  We are going to do this right, not fast.”

Move ahead a couple of months, and two parties who might have been among the competitive bidders at a highest-bidder gavelling away of the HBC Charter have gotten together to present what may be both a pre-emptive bid and a sensible solution. 

The Weston interests and the Thomson interests (ie, more money than anybody)  have proposed to put up many millions for the Charter. Their commitment is to make Manitoba its official home while confiding ownership jointly to the Manitoba Museum, the Manitoba Archives, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Canadian Museum of History. The National Council for Truth and Reconciliation, which was consulted in this process, is providing a letter supporting this solution, on the understanding that indigenous voices are and will be fully included.

Sounds better that leaving the HBC Charter buried in a corporate HQ somewhere, or shipped away to adorn some Saudi prince's private cabinet of wonders.

Update, November 19:  On Bluesky, commentator Taylor Noakes is drawing attention to his August 2025 essay in Ricochet raising alarm about the selling of HBC heritage that should belong to all Canadians.  It's worth reading, and some significant scholars are quoted.

However, the article is dominated by fears that the material "could be important," "could include documents," "could be of indigenous significance," and so on.  I have long understood that the historically significant materials were long ago acquired by the Manitoba Archives and Manitoba Museum -- certainly many books and theses on the furtrade, settler/indigeneous contacts, and many other topics have been built from the HBC papers already in the archives. 

The existing HBC collection -- beyond the Charter, at least -- seems to be mostly materials of a much later vintage that decorated its offices or served to illustrate the "Beaver" magazine. Press coverage of items held for sale by Heffel Fine Arts showed a lot of mid-20th century artists' images of historical events and the odd painting by Winston Churchill (donated to his friends on the HBC governing counsel) and the like. Not without interest, but a lot of equally impressive Canadiana circulates in the private art and collectibles market.

Those responsible for rehousing the HBC's remaining material culture might be more open about what they are doing, but I doubt the survival of Canadian historical knowledge is at stake here.   

Image: Google Images

New look Canada's History

Jacqueline Kovacs, who took over as Editorial Director at Canada's History magazine some time ago, has been working on a redesign of the magazine, and her new look is on show with the December-January issue, now reaching subscribers.

It's thicker for one thing: a solid 122 pages this issue -- though thickened some by the annual "Great Canadian Gift Guide for History Lovers" which is mostly book ads, but a useful display of a lot of the current history releases, including many local works from small publishers not widely publicized elsewhere.  There are more feature stories in the new look:  nine of them in this issue.  And Kovacs, a veteran of the Toronto publishing scene, seems to have recruited some notable names from the southern Ontario freelancer community.

The cover story, by Toronto journalist John Lorinc, a longtime planning and heritage writer, is about "the birth of modern Canada," following the end of racial quotas in immigration in the late 1960s and the start of mass immigration of diverse peoples from the Caribbean, South Asia, East Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Lorinc has interviewed many experts on this topic for his story, and it is heartening to see how many are themselves from the multi-cultural mosaic. 

Lorinc notes multi-ethnic immigration has always been controversial in Canada.  For a long time mass immigration was popular with all major political parties and with Canadians in general.  Yet right from the beginning, and flaring up regularly since, there have always been claims that immigrants bring crime, take jobs, and fail to "fit in."  As Ujjal Dosanjh, former premier of British Columbia, tells Lorinc, "It's hard to measure the impact of these things... But it happened, right?"  

Much more:  museums, a new series on heritage buildings, Saskatchewan musicians, Charles Dickens in Canada. You should subscribe.  

Prize Watch: Cundill Prize to Lyndal Roper

Lyndal Roper's Summer of Fire and Blood: the German Peasants' War was announced recently as the 2025 winner of the Montreal-based Cundill Prize for the best history book published in English.

Summer of Fire and Blood is the very model of a Cundill winner.  That is, it is a big, widely-acclaimed narrative history on a topic both substantial and relatively neglected (at least in English), readable but deeply researched, from a distinguished professor at a leading university (Roper, an Australian, is Regius Professor at Oxford, and the first woman ever to hold that chair -- Hugh Trevor-Roper may be rolling in his grave), and published by a major press  -- though in this case not actually an academic press by Basic Books).

Roper makes much of the simultaneous explosion of the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants' Revolt in Germany,  both of which were at fever pitch in the early 1520s.  It's not quite that the reformation inspired the peasants or that the peasants inspired the reformation, but how they overlapped and influenced each other.  Luther's demand that Christians be allowed to think for themselves, keep their pastors accountable, and read and pray in their own language definitely resonated with the peasants, in ways Luther, a mine owner's son and friend to many German princes, came to loathe and denounce).  The peasants had issues and crises of their own that made them receptive to religious reform as well as social revolution.

Spoiler alert (and I haven't got to the end yet myself):  it doesn't end well for the peasants, as pretty much always in peasant revolts.

Update November 17:  I was clever enough to read the tealeaves and borrow this from our public library before it won.  But it's a big book, and I was not diligent enough to finish reading it before the renewal date came up. And with the news out, they would not let me renew: too many requests in line.