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.

Digital reading of historical documents

An OCR reader -- with printed text, mind you

From Ottawa, Frank Rockland shares some thoughts on whether Optical Character Recognition can or will help with transcribing -- or simply understanding -- handwritten historical documents.   

I went looking for a tool that could help convert handwriting into text for note taking.

I found this discussion on Reddit, From the computervision community on Reddit: 2024 review of OCR tools extracting text from handwritten forms and documents which seems to provide a comprehensive list of the latest attempts at Handwriting OCR. I’ve tried Google Notes which has some Handwriting OCR capability, but it wasn’t very good on some of the documents I tested.

Learning to read the handwriting of French mrechants, officials, clerks, and notaries when researching New France history was a life-changing experience for me.  The idea that you might just set a piece of software to do it for you is hard to fathom at first encounter. 

But there's Google Translate, there's Otter transcription, there's so many other digital wonders, that one hesitates to doubt....  Anyone have any experience with OCR'ing the 18th century?

Prize Watch: Pierre Berton/Stephen Bown

Pierre Berton and Ruby the cat

Pierre Berton (1920-2004) died twenty years ago this week month. I recently noticed in one of those polls taken to prove Canadians know nothing about history that only 57% of respondents could identify who Pierre Berton was. Here's Wikipedia, if you need to brush up.

Also recently, writer Stephen Bown was recently named the 2024 winner of the Pierre Berton Award for Popular History, gradually becoming better known as the Governor-General's Medal for Popular History. Congratulations, Stephen.

He haunts us still? New Macdonald bio at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography

This week, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography's weekly online publication of a new biography has been supplemented by the release of a revised biography: that of John A Macdonald, previously issued in 1990 and now extensively reworked. It deserves attention from students of historiography as well as of history. 

The basic Macdonald biography remains largely the work as published in 1990 and credited to Peter Waite and J. Keith Johnson (both now deceased), but it now has significant additions signed by J.R. Miller on Macdonald's Indigenous policies and by Patricia Roy on his policies and attitudes regarding Chinese people in Canada, plus a concluding assessment credited to DBC staff -- with new bibliographic notes for all of these. In the "Publication History" sidebar provided in the online DCB, the original 1990 text of Waite and Johnson remains available for comparison.

This practice -- is it new? -- of identifying and assigning authorship of revisions in DCB entries seems to me better than the silent rewrites that seem to have prevailed previously. (Again, the originals of those entries can still be found). Many older biographies have urgently needed revision, but how much rewriting of the work of now-deceased scholars can be made before it becomes necessary to wonder if the original authors would wish to have their names removed from the new texts attributed to them? In the Macdonald process, we can see the quality of Waite's and Johnson's scholarship as well as of that in which they had no part.

No doubt the new material will be closely scrutinized (perhaps even reviewed), given the controversies over Macdonald's actions and reputation that have roiled Canadian history in recent years. My own view on a first reading is that the DCB's revised Macdonald entry signals the impossibility of the project now being attempted by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and its partisans: to restore all the Macdonald statues and honours and denounce all who bring forth new assessments of him, particularly with regard to indigenous matters. The standard view here has shifted, and the revised biography reflects and confirms that.

I might have a quibble or two still. 

The repeated invocation of Macdonald's centrality in the making of confederation makes one think Donald Creighton managed to be a ghost author here.  

Also, the respect given to the claim that Macdonald drafted fifty of the seventy-two clauses of the Quebec Resolutions of 1864 grates on at least one reader. Yes, D'Arcy McGee said it, but the setting matters: it was at a partisan tribute dinner in a Kingston tavern where hyperbolic praise was surely de rigueur and the sobriety of all involved was very much in question. There has always been abundant evidence of lively debate and multiple authorship of most of the Seventy Two Resolutions -- and of Macdonald's resistance or grudging assent to many of them.       

History of the monarchy in Yukon

No king in Dawson City

Recently, the world had a little giggle over the oddity that is the "Canadian" monarchy from this story. (It seemed to get rather less coverage in Canada, judging by search links.)  This is The Guardian's lead on the story:

The council of a town in Canada’s Yukon territory has been locked for weeks in bureaucratic standstill after its members refused to swear a mandatory oath of allegiance to King Charles ....

I'm all in favour of Canadians declining to swear allegiance to foreign monarchs and I do support using Canada's constitutional power to rid itself of the whole thing. But I'm less keen on the reason why the Dawson City councillors have taken this stand at this time. They are doing it: 

citing the crown’s tarnished relations with Indigenous peoples in the region.

I can understand councillors' wish to stand in solidarity with the one indigenous member of the council, who first raised this concern. They mean well, no doubt.

But, you know, for more than a century and a half, deep back into Queen Victoria's reign at least, kings and queens have been purely figureheads in Canadian governance. All that has been done to indigenous peoples and their rights and titles was done by Canadian governments and officials accountable to Canadian parliaments themselves accountable to Canadian voters.  

I'm not enthusiastic for this effort to blame Canada's own failings on oblivious and disempowered foreigners long since (and quite properly) stripped of any real policy-making ability.  Let's stop swearing allegiance to Charles for good reasons, and take responsibility for our own problems at the same time.  In Canada the "Crown" is really us. The Dawsonians and all of us should swear allegiance to us.

Book Notes: Canada in the post -World War II Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

I've been reading in Gary Bass's Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize 2024. There was a Canadian on the panel of judges at the Tokyo trial of Japan's accused war criminals, and I naturally wanted to find out a bit about him.

 He was E. Stuart McDougall (1886-1957, a judge of the Quebec court of appeal and very briefly a Quebec cabinet minister in the 1930s.) Bass has almost nothing to say about him except to note that he, along with the Australian and New Zealand judges, worked in close concert with the British judge and formed the core of the majority consensus on the tribunal. The closest Bass comes to anything about McDougall personally is his comment that in the sweltering summer heat of Tokyo, "the Canadian judge, acclimatized to Montreal temperatures, was especially miserable."

Americans! If a place is north of the border, it surely can know nothing of summer heat.

More about the book itself shortly.  

Update, November 28: The war crimes trial of the Japanese leadership after World War Two was a good deal less successful than the Nuremburg trials that preceded it.  The Japanese defence argued effectively against the charge of waging aggressive war, not only by arguing that such a crime did not exist in international law, but also by arguing that Japan's war aim -- building up its imperial holdings in Asia -- mirrored what the prosecuting powers had always done and continued to do even as the trial went on. And in response the charges of war crimes and atrocities, the Japanese could simply point to Hiroshima. The judge from India strongly endorsed these defences and argued for the acquittal of all the defendants. 

Bass's method is to focus closely on the trial itself, almost a day by day and judgment by judgment recitation.  The part of his title "... and the making of modern Asia" is developed only briefly, in an epilogue.  (The executions of those convicted are given a great deal more space.) It is easy to grasp how the debates at the trial and among the judges would be picked up in anti-imperialist movements across Asia and the rest of the colonized world, but that is mostly implied rather than worked out in detail.

I was impressed by the evidence Bass's book provides of what might be called the historical-industrial complex, faced with materials that took "years and years to get through."  Bass is not a specialist in Japanese history and acknowledges he does not read Japanese or Chinese, But he was able to assign researchers to translate everything of possible interest (rather than make notes or summaries) in the Japanese and Chinese archives, and he read all the translations whether he used them or not.  That takes a well-funded scholar!

Update, December 2:  Gary Bass gets in touch to tell me, gently: 

You had an amusing complaint that provincial Americans don’t know about Canadian temperatures. As it happens, I’m Canadian and grew up in Toronto (also have US citizenship), and have some basis for writing that Montréal summers are milder than those in Tokyo.

I grew in Vancouver and still find summers in both Toronto and  Montréal pretty steamy and sticky.  But I've never been to Tokyo, so I defer to his experience.

 

  

History of Aotearoa

Protests at the New Zealand parliament.

Do you follow political news from New Zealand or, as it is also called Aotearoa?  Following is actually tricky -- New Zealand has absorbed so many Maori words and phrases into daily life ("haka" being perhaps the most famous) that you need Google translate to understand almost anything. Here, from Wikipedia, is an example, part of a recent Ministry of Justice statement:  

The Bill "does not accurately reflect Article 2, which affirms the continuing exercise of tino rangatiratanga. Restricting the rights of hapū and iwi to those specified in legislation, or agreement with the Crown, implies that tino rangatiratanga is derived from kāwanatanga."

Okay.  But the message is clear: indigenous issues are live issues in New Zealand, as in Canada. 

There is a treaty process in New Zealand as in Canada, with the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi there more-or-less standing in for all the myriad Numbered Treaties, Peace and Friendship Treaties, and other agreements here in Canada. For a long time the Maori have had a pretty good run in asserting that Waitangi guarantees them both a substantial measure of self-government, and influence upon Crown governance of New Zealand as well.

Now there is a bill under debate in the New Zealand parliament, The Treaty Principles Bill (Wikipedia summary here). It declares that the Government of New Zealand rules all New Zealanders, and all New Zealanders are equal. This is widely understood to mean: "Forget Waitangi. The majority rules, and equality means we pakeha (white people) can do what we want." The bill is very controversial in New Zealand, with disruptions inside the legislature and tens of thousands marching in the streets outside.

The bill got majority support at first reading in the legislature the other day. But oddly (to a Canadian observer) its introduction and only real support comes from a party with only eleven of the 120 seats in Parliament. The prime minister says he actually opposes the bill entirely, supports Maori rights, and will eventually have his party change its vote to side with the opposition to prevent the bill from coming law.  But until then, he's voting for the bill, because those eleven votes keep him in power. It may also be that the governing party finds that passage of the bill politically risky, but is glad to have its junior partner raising doubts about -- and stirring up tensions over -- indigenous rights.  (See this recent New York Times analysis). 

A recent AP story in the Toronto Star explained all this by reference to "a quirk in New Zealand's political system that allows tiny parties to negotiate outsized influence for their agendas.

The "quirk" is proportional representation, specifically the MMP variant that is used in New Zealand. 

New Zealanders' votes mostly split between a left wing party (Labour) and a rightwing  party (National), and all New Zealand prime ministers have come from one or other. But since MMP was adopted in the 1990s, there have always been a few minor parties led by populist cranks or celebrities. (Imagine a Rob Ford party, or a Don Cherry party, or perhaps a Drake party in Canadian politics.) One small party leaders in New Zealand has held the balance of power often enough that he has been Deputy Prime Minister in both Labour and National governments. It's not that his beliefs shift wildly from right to left, just that he likes being deputy prime minister.

Right now the minority splinter propping up the government is ACT.  It initially demanded  a binding referendum that could impose something like the Treaty Principles Bill upon the nation. Now it has apparently settled for this phony and temporary support from the prime minister --- but in exchange it has gained tremendous publicity for anti-Maori views and for the idea that indigenous treaty rights can simply be voted away when a voting majority is prepared to.  No doubt ACT calculates publicity surrounding of the Bill's failure will help polarize opinions within the electorate and perhaps boost its electoral support next time.

I think (I'm not sure) that a supporter of proportional representation would say this is normal, this is how proportional representation is supposed to work. PR theory suggests that if some people want to support small parties with unpopular and perhaps hateful views that cannot win in constituency elections, those parties ought to have representation in proportion to their cumulative vote -- and maybe even "outsized influence" in parliament.

Apply all this to the NDP or the Bloc in our non-PR parliament as you will.  

New histories 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 by all the participating countries.

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.

Update, December 2: in The Globe, John Ibbitson likes it.

 

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.