I hope my American
friends stay safe and stay resolute.
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!
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!
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).
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?
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
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.
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.
Downtown last night to attend the annual book launch of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, "the most successful legal history society in the common law world," as Editor-in-Chief Jim Phillips never misses a chance to say. Pretty good evidence he has, too: 130+ books in Canadian legal history published in not quite fifty years. Four more this year, and a big crowd of lawyers, judges, law profs, and historians to salute the society's four new books and their authors. I'm just copying a big slab from the society's website below.
University of Toronto Press. As the title suggests, this book is a personal reflection on Robert Sharpe’s long, varied and influential career as a lawyer, scholar and judge, which incudes a decade as the President of the Osgoode Society.
University of British Columbia Press. Eric Adams is Professor of Law at the University of Alberta, Jordan Stanger-Ross is Professor of History at the University of Victoria.
University of British Columbia Press. Carolyn Strange is Professor of History at the Australian National University. In the mid-1950s most Canadians still believed that murder merited the death penalty.
University of Toronto Press. Jim Phillips is a Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Department of History and the Centre for Criminology and Socio-Legal Studies.
When Canada went to war in 1939, the goal was to provide the British with the ships, planes, and weapons that it desperately needed to defend their island against Nazi Germany. But at the time, Canada had little to offer in terms of military hardware. That was when Canada recruited top business leaders to take charge. In six years, they turned Canada into one of the greatest military powers in the world. They helped to win the war, and in the process they turned Canada’s economy into a modern industrial one. What’s more, they served the country for a dollar a year, or even nothing. This is an inspiring and patriotic story for Canadians in a time of crisis.
Same friend tells me Allan even cited a long-ago piece of my ephemeral journalism for something I said long ago about one of his people. I don't think I have a copy of it anymore.
