History of Canadian art and history

Went the other day to the McMichael Gallery a little north of Toronto  -- really, in the outer suburbs now, though it when it began there, it was in deep in rural Ontario.  Just about my favourite gallery these days:  still offers beautiful woodland walking on the grounds, and a nice cafe and gift shop -- and consistently fresh and original takes on Canadian art.

WE thought we were there to see a new exhibit about -- who knew -- Impressionism on the St. Lawrence.  But I was pleased and impressed to see a special exhibit there on the (pre-Group of Seven) war art of A.Y. Jackson. And that it was guest curated by the historian Douglas Hunter -- because the whole idea of the exhibition grows out of Hunter's recent biography Jackson's Wars -- an immensely detailed and very readable immersion into what the First World War experience meant to Jackson, and by extension to his whole generation.

Good to know we still have large public galleries fleet-footed and alert enough to pick up on what's going on out there and responding so rapidly and effectively -- to a book!

Small grumble on the theme of war art: Years ago I was one of many historians who were invited to review and comment on exhibition plans for the new and then-developing Canadian War Museum. One large reservation I recall expressing rather vigorously was that the plans did not make room for substantial space within the museum dedicated to ongoing exhibitions from the truly remarkable holding of Canadian war art that it has.  

Back then, the suggestion got about as much attention as most such exercises do.  At the moment, I would guess, the McMichael has more war art on its walls than the War Museum does.  (Though I have not been to Ottawa or the War Museum in some time, and things may have changed.) 

"River of Dreams"  the Impressionism/St.Lawrence show, is pretty terrific too.  

Historians at the Royal Society of Canada

RSC crest

On Twittex, Alan MacEachern salutes historians newly appointed (elected?) to the Royal Society of Canada:  Clio Carstairs, Cynthia Comacchio, David Howes, Mark McGowan, Jim Phillips, Lisa Rankin, Jonathan Livernois, and Heidi Tworek. I might add the writer Lawrence Hill. 

It occurs to me I  know hardly anything about the Royal Society of Canada or what it does these days. It been around for 150 years or so, and it used to publish some notable scholarly journals -- might it still? It gives quite a few prizes, apparently, none of which I seem to have followed in my Prize Watch items here. 

In these name-changing times, could they not come up with a less cringy name for it? It makes me think of another honour I recently heard mention of, about which I am really dubious: The King Charles III Coronation Medal of Canada. I would think Conrad Black would be about the only appropriate "Canadian" honoree for that one.  

But some of these historians now entitled to style themselves FRSC are friends of mine and I recognize most of the others.  They seem like historians worthy of honours -- so congratulations to them.  

History of I Can't Even

Why is this man laughing?

Kevin Falcon, a hugely unsuccessful leader of the British Columbia Liberal Party and the guy who even changed its name to BC United, as if it were a soccer team or something, has now decided he's tired of the whole thing.  So he has closed down the whole thing and decided he will throw in his chips with the BC Conservative Party, to create a united right wing opposition to the ruling NDP.

The party, of course, has MLAs.  It had party members.  It even has  candidates nominated for the upcoming provincial election who now learn not only that they no longer have a party but that all the money they raised now belongs to ... Kevin Falcon.

Is there any depth that the corruption and depravity of political parties in Canada will not reach?  Even Donald Trump, authoritarian supreme, does not have the control of his party that any two-bit Canadian party leader is given. 

Michael Woods at the Vuelta a Espana 2024

Michael Woods takes first place on the thirteenth stage of the 2024 Vuelta a Espana, a giant mountain stage.  Woods, as the Canadian national road race champion this year. is entitled to wear his national-champion jersey throughout the race, and he chose a old-time Hockey Canada look. Looking good for his win today.  His third Vuelta and fourth Grand Tour stage win.

HIstory of Christ Church Vancouver

Architectural historian Hal Kalman writes a heartfelt tribute to a recently deceased and renowned Anglican clergyman, Herbert O'Driscoll -- and also manages to include the story of how Kalman and other architectural preservationists managed to save Vancouver's Christ Church Cathedral, one of the oldest and most admired buildings of the city centre -- against O'Driscoll's detrmination to replace it with a new highrise.  

Kalman's point is that by selling the air rights over the cathedral, as he proposed, the diocese earned enough revenue from a new building just north of the Cathedral to make its demolition and sale unnecessary.  

Insert reference to rendering unto Caesar here.

History of Mackenzie King and Hitler: Ken McGoogan's new book

And we are back. (PEI -- you should go.)

After a couple of decades writing a shelf of books of northern exploration histories, starting with Fatal Passage and concluding with last year's Searching For Franklin, my friend Ken McGoogan has returned to his journalism roots and produced something completely different: Shadows of Tyranny, on how "the recent resurgence of authoritarianism recalls Europe in the 1930s."

On the weekend, the Toronto Star published an excerpt from Shadows of Tyranny. It focusses on Prime Minister William Mackenzie King and his fawning upon German dictator Adolf Hitler, even as late as when they met in 1937, when the nature of the Nazi regime should have been abundantly clear to him.

McGoogan assigns King's blindness to his spiritualism -- essentially to his being a nut: his "intense belief in spiritualism, rooted in his veneration for his mother, probably made him less discerning than he might have been."  

He's right about the bizarreness of King's spiritualism for sure  (and the fawning!), but I'm less sure about the lack of "discernment." King was always good at having his crystal ball and his mother's spirit tell him exactly what he had already calculated.  

In the 1930s King was intensely committed to extricating Canada from the remaining bonds of the British Empire. He understood that a new European war would not only be a long, grim disaster but would renew the old pressure for Canada to march to the aid of old England. And it would once more fire up the profound divisions between English Canada and French Canada that the First World War had produced. King could not prevent a new war, and he did not really need a crystal ball to know its outbreak could destroy most of what his political career had been aimed at. 

I suspect King's desperate hope that somehow Hitler would decide not to provoke a new world war was underpinned by his desperate passion to avoid war,  or  at least to enable Canada to stay out of it. And so his crystal ball told him Hitler could be a great man and a man of peace, not a war-obsessed tyrant.

Hitler was not, of course, the man he hoped for. King got the war he did not want. He spent the early part of it trying to minimize Canadian participation, delaying the Canadian declaration of war and declining any instant dispatch of troops to Britain. Even as Canada gradually became fully committed, King remained alert to any threat to Canadian independence -- and to anything that would encourage French- and English-Canadian factionalism. 

Ken McGoogan's condemnation of King's moral and political blindness  -- matched by that of British appeasers and American isolationists -- is entirely justified. But King was never simply a naive, goofy crystal-ball gazer somehow catapulted into high office.  In 1937, I'd say, he was desperately trying to convince himself that looming circumstances he saw as being disastrous to Canada might yet not come to pass.  

Book looks interesting. Note whose silhouette adorns the cover.  Ken thinks Kamala Harris may be the Churchill for our time.

Update, September 3:  On Twittex, Ken good-naturedly suggests we hold a public debate.  Not sure I really disagree with him on much in this book, but we would would be fun

History of Havre St-Pierre

History is always where you find it.  We've been on holiday on Prince Edward Island, and one day we walked the beautiful dunes trail at Prince Edward Island National Park's Greenwich site, close by the community of St Peter's.

The very next day, I happened to catch the Brock University historian Daniel Samson's post on TwitteX about the French military engineer Louis Franquet's 1751 report on his visit to the very same Saint-Pierre on the island then called Ile Saint-Jean.  Tonight, I'm having trouble embedding the post, but you could find it at https://twitter.com/ruralcolonialNS, for August 15.  Here is a little of it.  (Turns out he had been walking the same dunes a week earlier.)

"There were in this country 11 fishing boats and six [drying] stages belonging to seven fishermen, however several of them pointed out that these agreements were totally in favour of the suppliers and that they often found themselves very happy to avoid [i.e. to smuggle] ...

Blog on semi-hiatus

We're looking forward to Friday, when we start some holidays -- centered on a week at a Prince Edward Island cottage. So blogging will be slim to none for the next couple of weeks.  Maybe an Island photo or two, if the mood strikes. 

Treaty History

The black letter of the Huron-Robinson Treaty covering parts of south-central Ontario is pretty plain: there will be annual payments in exchange for a land settlement, and the amount would be adjusted "from time to time." Since it has not been adjusted since 1875, there's a lot of back money owing. Taking 150 years to sort this out --- really? That's the gist of the recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling.

But as far as I can tell from reading contemporary thinking about treaty implementation, the more promising solution is to assume that all these treaties were and are agreements to share the land. On that basis, First Nations should be able to draw revenues from their share of taxation and other land revenues sufficient to cover their own self-government and administration. That seems in all ways better than simply enlarging the payouts from Mother Ottawa.

But it still feels that Canada is a long way from that understanding -- the recent Haida land title agreement notwithstanding. Pending it, there will be bills like these to be paid.

Summer podcasts, summer reading

I'm sometimes a sucker for the podcasts led by lively, funny, engaging talkers, even when they don't have much to say and take an hour to say it. But when I want a little more meat on the bone, I often log on to what Tides of History, a podcast by an American named Patrick Wyman (Ph.D in history, former sports journalist!), is offering.

When we were planning a trip to Italy, I went to the series Tides had done on the history of Venice, particularly his long interview with Dennis Romero, history prof at Syracuse University and recently the author of Venice: the Remarkable History of the Lagoon City. Wyman likes to rely on -- and often to interview -- serious scholars inclined to go deep into the weeds of their topic, often something in medieval or classical fields or historical archaeology.

After we got back from Italy, I requested Romero's Venice from the library, and -- God bless the Toronto Public Library system -- they ordered a copy and told me I might have to wait for a while. It came through this week, and indeed it's a very good book (pristine copy, too!). Romero has spent a long time in Venice and its archives, seems to know everything about the city, and tells his story pretty well, from prehistory to the "global Venice" of cruise ship bans and depopulation.  

It's eight hundred pages of pretty small print, and I probably won't read every word, but everywhere I dip in, I'm impressed and enlightened. Romero's a dab hand at starting or ending a chapter with a vivid vignette or two: a liberated slave who became a shipowner and enabled his descendants to join the Venetian nobility, or a num writing a furious tract about the cruelty of fathers who imprison their extra and ill-favoured daughters in convents. (Wyman uses a similar technique in his podcasts, always starting with a brief and vivid imagined scene before turning to the solid history; Romero's, however, are all straight from the archives.)

On the strength of that find, let me recommend Wyman's recent "summer readings" episode: in which he proposes seven substantial histories worth reading, mostly recent, only one or two of which I had ever heard of, and skewing to the serious and academic, while also including a couple of more general-market types.  Not all American either!

What's the lively, funny podcast, you ask?  I'm thinking of The Rest is History, a very popular British podcast featuring Tom Holland and Domenic Sandbrook, two hyperarticulate polymath Brits who are pretty entertaining while also being startlingly little-England. (Their series on the Cathars, in which every single scholar they cited was an Englishman writing in English!) Also Empire, with William Dalrymple and jounalist Anita Anand.

Suggestions for history podcasts worth a look out there? 

This month at Canada's History: Parks Canada on Canada's History

 

Features

THE UNSETTLED PAST

In a stature-toppling era, Parks Canada adapts its retelling of this country’s complex history. by Christopher Moore

This month, the August-September Canada's History leads with my article "The Unsettled Past," investigating how Parks Canada is seeking to shape a new narrative for Canadian history at its sites and plaques all over Canada.

Update, June 23: The full story is now available at the Canada's History website.

Parks Canada's historic sites agency, like other Canadian museums and historical institutions, was put under tough scrutiny by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC's 2025 report shone a painful spotlight on the pervasive neglect of Indigenous history and historical perspectives at Parks Canada's hundreds of sites and thousands of historic plaques, and it called for a fundamental reassessment. 

 And of course there was backlash.

Nearly a decade into that reassessment, I talked to Parks Canada historians and planners, to administrators, to Indigenous consultants, and also to the critics hotly opposed to what is happening to Canadian history at Parks Canada's sites. I think it's an important story, and a hopeful one too. Subscribe, and it should be in your mailbox already. (The online version will come along a little later.) It's a beautiful issue too: Parks Canada's sites photograph well, let us say.

Also in the issue: David Frank on child labour and neglect in New Brunswick; Sophie McGee on our tangled history with orcas; Nancy Payne's spectacular text-and-picture spread on historic lighthouses; and Enid Mallory exploring historic Yukon roads. The lead in the review section features Gerald Friesen's new and important The Honorable John Norquay, about the remarkable career of the 19th century Indigenous premier of Manitoba.  

And more.