Hot Historian

In 2003 I called Niall Ferguson the hottest historian in the world (if historians can be hot) in a profile for The Beaver. Well, the world is catching up. Ian Brown in The Globe & Mail:

Tuesday... was the day Harvard financial historian Niall Ferguson declared, in this newspaper, that the global recession is about to produce blood in the streets, "civil wars" and toppled governments. By Friday it was the No. 1 all-time best-read story on globeandmail.com, and a global Internet tizzy as well.

Brown also quotes a source who describes Ferguson as "a self-promoter and a controversialist."

Newsflash: unions kill capitalism

It's one of those "Huh?" moments in the Report on Business .

Neil Reynolds, the RoB's history columnist (well, sort of) has an elegantly loopy column today, explaining that when Henry Ford paid his workers well, that made America prosper, but when the workers organized in hopes they might continue to be paid well, that was the death of capitalism and doom for the American way.

Premier Danny Williams driven mad by (electrical) power

This is Gros Morne in western Newfoundland, named a World Heritage Site for its pristine natural environment. (Photo credit: Gros Morne Adventures - you should go.)

Okay, now imagine a power transmission line running right through the middle distance of this photo.

Yup, that's the plan.

The terrific Newfoundland blog Bond Papers is on the story. As it says: "That sort of stuff is always good for raising capital and generally creating the image of a place where you’d like to do business."

In related news, National Geographic's story on the Alberta tar sands is being called the "baby seal" moment for that whole development. Hat tip: Canadian Magazines blog.

Taking the Past Seriously

Cannot think of a Canadian politician ever to make a historical reference with the kind of weight and seriousness that President Obama did here:

In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry. From the turmoil of the Industrial Revolution came a system of public high schools that prepared our citizens for a new age. In the wake of war and depression, the GI Bill sent a generation to college and created the largest middle-class in history.

(Quote via Daily Dish)

G-G zips up

After President Obama's visit to Ottawa and the photos of his all-smiles meeting with Governor General Michaelle Jean, an aide to the governor general suggested Ms Jean had been invited to Washington to confer with Obama about Haiti.

Now all is silence from Rideau Hall.

Probably a good thing. But the potential to infuriate the prime minister and his office (Mr Harper hasn't mentioned his invitation to the White House) is only part of it.

Michaelle Jean is an appointed head of state. She has a very limited and specific range of powers, all of them based on taking advice either from the prime minister or from parliament. Yes, it is frustrating that someone as charismatic, popular, and connected may be limited in the ways she can work to improve life in Haiti. But it seems hardly possible that the Governor General could negotiate foreign policy initiatives with foreign leaders without breaching her constitutional obligations to act only on the advice of the people's elected representatives.

It's not surprising if President Obama thought, wow, here's someone who could really help on the Haitian mess. But if any invitation to become involved were offered, the governor general would have to stop being governor general to accept it.

(Photo: Google Images)

Paper of Record, now off the record

Historians' discussion groups are filling with fury about the disappearance of Paper of Record, an online repository of old newspapers from around the world. Researchers, graduate students, and genealogists around the world made Paper of Record (a venture launched by a Canadian company, Cold North Wind) their go-to source for searches through back issues of many major and minor newspapers in Canada, Mexico, Australia, and other countries.

Problem? Paper of Record was acquired by Google late in 2008. Cold North Wind's website now defaults to something in Japanese, and a search for "Paper of Record" defaults to Google News Archives.

And apparently everything researchers liked about PoR has vanished from Google News Archives.

Unfortunately many, perhaps all, of the newspapers previously available cannot now be accessed or even found on the Google website. Google has not been very cooperative in offering advice or explanation as to when the newspapers will be returned for searching and access.

says a user in Australia, and another weighs in:

I am writing a thesis on an indigenous rebellion that took place in Oaxaca on the eve of the Revolution, and now, with this useless Google search I am totally screwed. Way to go!

A third passes on a dire suspicion:

bad news as I suspected is Google bought the whole deal for 3 million dollars, and he thinks they will eventually relist it for a per article fee. Every other paper they list is $3.95 an article which would break me.

(Thanks to the discussion on this site for quotations.)

As far as I could trace, most PoR access was via university library sites, accessible only to university faculty and staff holding library cards -- suggesting PoR was never free, it was paid for by university library subscriptions. Presumably these subscriptions have yet to be replicated through Google. Whether Google will match the searchability PoR apparently provided, or charge per-view fees, or smother the site with ads, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile many disgruntled users are recommending WorldVitalRecords.com or Newspaperarchive.com (for a monthly fee) as alternatives.

Things noted: Blogger discovers Dan Francis

Once in a while, serendipity brings to my attention to a favourable mention, out there in the wide open spaces of the blogosphere, of some work of mine: nice feeling when it happens. It's almost as nice to see good work by people I know getting that treatment too, like this blogger discovering Daniel Francis's biography of Vancouver mayor Louis Taylor.

More Aviation: Silver Dart

Someone once challenged the artist Charles Pachter about his penchant for painting moose and Canadian flags and Governor Simcoe. Why don't you focus your art on universal themes?

What makes art universal, Pachter replied, is promotion and distribution.

What makes some history worth commemorating? What makes some history controversial?

I noted the fiftieth anniversary of the cancellation of the Avro Arrow last Friday, rather expecting to be part of a sizeable wave of media commemoration. Instead, pretty much nothing in the media I follow.

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the first powered, heavier-than-air aircraft in Canada: the Silver Dart, conceived and funded by Alexander Graham Bell and flown off the ice in Baddeck harbour, Nova Scotia. And there has been lots of coverage of that anniversary. But almost all of it flows from the decision of a group of enthusiasts to promote and distribute the event in a media-friendly way. The former Canadian astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason has been flying a replica Silver Dart in the last few days, drawing copious media attention. Will he get off the ice at Baddeck today? There'll be film at 6.30 either way. Well, good for them.

Late Update: even bigger than I thought! CBC sent Peter Mansbridge to Baddeck to do the news from the site of the flight

Ten days ago, I missed noting something that has been interesting me lately: the discovery at oil at Leduc, February 13, 1947, the event that transformed Alberta. It came along with news that the Alberta Finance Minister was projecting a substantial deficit for next year, not so much because of aggressive investment in "stimulus" like everyone else, but simply because oil revenues are plunging. The Leduc story is not such a happy one as we look at how Albert has managed the windfall over sixty years.

In short, looks like they had another oil boom and they pissed it away again.
(Silver Dart photo courtesy CFForces, Department of National Defence, Canada. Leduc photo from Wikimedia Commons.)

The Macdonald-Laurier quiz -- going soon

The Dominion Institute's lively Macdonald-Laurier Days quiz (to which, full disclosure, I contributed a little) is winding up soon. Individual and class participation quizzes available here for a while.

Zeppelins over Toronto

Aviation and disasters (see previous post) reminds me: I've recently been introduced to Historicist (link to a recent example here), a weekly local history column on the lively, well-known-in-Toronto blog Torontoist. Last year Historicist regular Kevin Plummer contributed this nice illustrated essay on the Bank of Commerce Building, Toronto's first skyscraper, and I just like this photo of the airship R-100's visit to Toronto in 1930.

(Okay, R-100 was not a Zeppelin. But I can't resist the opportunity for a dramatic blogpost title. Feel free to make it the title of an alternative history, somebody.)

(Photo comes via Historicist from Wikimedia Commons)

Welcome to Black Friday

Fifty years ago today, Friday, February 20, 1959 (1959 and 2009 calendars right in sync) the order was given to cancel work on the Avro Arrow. Avro Canada laid off 14,500 people at Malton, Ontario, later that afternoon.

I'm persuaded by the arguments that the termination was necessary and inevitable, though we still avait the authoritative history to establish that. But having every completed plane cut to pieces for scrap... no.

(photo source: www.avro-arrow.org)

Best Presidents for Canada?

Aaron Wherry writes this week in Maclean's about the best U.S presidents for Canada. He spoke with quite a range of historians for suggestions, including me. I proposed Franklin Roosevelt, but John English also plumped for FDR, and clearly he gave better quote -- since he actually knows about that era.

English emphasizes Roosevelt's defence views, rightly, but I think of something else, a little more complex. Seems to me Roosevelt's Keynesian, interventionist, "big government to secure the little guy" ideology created space in which the Canadian social safety net, which mostly came later, came to seem possible as a public policy aspiration. We went farther with it, sure, but would it have been possible had the United States been continuously Hooverian with regard to the role of government?

Beaver editorial considers the Plains of Abraham battle battle

My friends at The Beaver sent along a press release for the editorial that will run in the forthcoming issue. I don't usually hit you with long documents here, but it's not up anywhere yet... and it's damned well written.

Beaver Magazine Editor responds to cancellation of reenactments on the Plains of Abraham:

“Remembering the Past should transcend Politics”
(WINNIPEG February 18, 2009)
Mark Reid, Editor of The Beaver: Canada’s History Magazine has used his regular editorial page in the upcoming issue of the magazine to reflect on the decision to cancel the reenactments on the Plains of Abraham. A transcript of the editorial follows:

It was a crisp winter’s day in Winnipeg and Fort Gibraltar was abuzz as visitors at the Festival du Voyageur enjoyed a host of historical activities.
Ice carvers were finishing their frosty creations, while nearby, two women swathed in woolen dresses bent over an outdoor fire cooking pemmican.
As I walked with my family through the old North West Company fort — located on the Red River in the largely francophone community of Saint Boniface — I noticed a crowd gathering along the aspen-lined riverbank.
Suddenly, gunshots ran out. My son and I scrambled down the embankment to investigate — and were transported back in time.
Before us, two bands of men were engaged in a firefight.
On one side were voyageurs from La Compagnie de La Vérendrye, muskets blasting as they hid behind trees and snow-dusted knolls. At least two voyageurs lay wounded or dead on the ground. Through the trees, we could see their enemies — the forces of Lord Selkirk. As the crack of the muskets echoed, they too sacrificed lives for this frozen patch of earth.
After several more volleys, the voyageurs put the run to their English opponents. For a few moments, all was silent. Then, as if on cue, the “slain” men from both factions got up, dusted snow off their period costumes, and gave each other a friendly nod. The crowd cheered.
A little later, the re-enactors gathered in a nearby bunkhouse to share a toast. Coming on the eve of Louis Riel Day, it seemed a poignant and fitting way to celebrate the province’s rich history.
As we headed back inside the fort, my seven-year-old son brimmed with questions. He knew a little about the background of the Red River Colony — that’s what passes for bedtime stories when your dad runs a history magazine. But this was different. This was history come to life.
Colin Mackie, Fort Gibraltar’s heritage program manager, isn’t surprised. He says historical re-enactments of battles and of scenes from everyday life capture our imaginations in a way the written word cannot.
“It personalizes history,” he says. “You come to our site, head to the blacksmith shop and see the sparks flying as he hits the metal. Your ears ring. Here, you smell the stew cooking over a fire.”
As I write this, federal officials have just been forced to cancel a planned reenactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham meant to mark the 250th anniversary of the event in September 2009. The two-thousand-plus people who had hoped to take part in the event are looking for another venue outside of Quebec, but it’s clear there will be no re-enactment at the actual scene of the battle. Should the re-enactment go ahead? It’s a difficult question — one that provokes intense emotions on both sides.
All I know is this: in Winnipeg, on a crisp winter’s day, a seven-year-old boy saw dry, dusty history come alive before his eyes. Later that evening, as the boy sat with a crayon, trying his best to recreate “the battle of Fort Gibraltar,” a certain history magazine editor understood that there is an intrinsic value to remembering — nd reenacting — our shared past that transcends politics or personal agendas.

For more information or to arrange an interview contact:
Mark Reid
Editor, The Beaver
(204) 988-9300 ext 218
mreid@historysociety.ca

The Beaver's own online newsline is called News Splash. Worth bookmarking. 'Course when you subscribe, you get beauty things like the big flight poster in the current issue -- copied here in teeny-weeny form.

Who named The Great Depression? (and what'll they name this one?)

Noah Mendel, an intern at History News Network, explores the origins of the term "The Great Depression" as applied to that unpleasantness in the 1930s. Nice piece of research. In the end, he credits the British economist Lionel Robbins, but (as often at HNN) it's pretty Americano-centric. Didn't the Brits call that long slowdown in the 1870s the Great Depression?

Speaking of depression, David Warsh at Economic Principals quotes someone who ought to know saying:

the United States increasingly looks to world economists like a much poorer country headed into the grip of a severe crisis, one in which a relative handful of ruling rich interests are determined not to lose control – a familiar enough story in Russia or Indonesia, Thailand or Korea, but not the way Americans are accustomed to thinking of themselves.

My draft version of the economic history of the early 21st century has been that we probably needed this serious correction, and that when we work through it, prosperity will reassert itself. Some smart people are suggesting that is optimistic.

Where will the next generation of historians come from?

Paul Wells scrutinizes how funding for graduate-studies scholarships is allocated.

So if you want to pursue study in a field of human endeavour that plainly terrifies Stephen Harper because it’s weird, like anthropology, literature, social work, linguistics, history, political science or comparative religion, you can be sure this hard-headed, no-nonsense government won’t be wasting an incremental dime on the likes of you.

Bronzing R.B. Bennett

It is finally time for Canadians to make amends with R.B. Bennett.

Arthur Milnes suggests it's time for Richard Bedford Bennett, prime minister of Canada 1930-35, to get his statue on Parliament Hill.

I'm a little dubious of the notion that the electorate ever needs to "make amends" with those we elect to represent us. But let that go, for the larger questions are interesting:

What are the rules for bronzing prime ministers anyway?

And, how much space is there to keep adding prime ministers? Well, actually, quite a bit -- Lester Pearson's statue is way over at the Supreme Court of Canada building. There are various non-prime ministerial statues on the hill as well, including Queen Victoria and (collectively) the five women who won the Persons Case in 1929, plus pre-confederation luminaries Baldwin and Lafontaine. So the statuary customs seem to be flexible.

Milnes puts forward what looks like the worst possible criteria for erecting statues of eminent Canadians: political string-pulling. The Conservatives should put up a statue of Bennett, he says, because the Liberals have got statues of most of their dead prime ministers up, and the Tories are falling behind in the statue race.

Either Bennett deserves a statue or he does not. Arthur Milnes makes all the points he can in Bennett's favour (hey, he started the CBC). But his idea that the Conservatives should fling up Tory statues when they are in power and the Liberals should put up dead Grits when they come back is a terrible one. Honours should relate to... well, to deserving honour.

Late Update: Arthur Milnes gently reminds me that Lester Pearson's statue is on Parliament Hill. Louis St-Laurent's is by the Supreme Court Building. Thank you, sir.

Further update (Feb 19, 2009) Reader Brian Busby has weighed in, and I've promoted his ideas out of the Comments ghetto:

Is it not a policy that all former PMs be honoured with statues? I’ve certainly read as much. If not, let’s make it a policy, and rid ourselves of the sort of politics – the playing of ‘historical sweepstakes’ – that Arthur Milnes appears to be supporting.

I should add that Mr Milnes isn’t being entirely accurate in placing Meighen amongst those who have not received ‘their due with a statue on the Hill’. In fact, the old Tory party blocked Meighen’s statue.

In his biography, Ottawa Boy, the late Lloyd Francis recalls a visit to a Public Works warehouse to see statues commissioned of King and Meighen:

‘The statute of Mackenze King was conventional and posed no problem. The one of Arthur Meighen was grotesque, with his arms spread and his face turned to the sky as if he were contemplating Armageddon. The plight of a Liberal minister of Public Works [Jean Richard] was clear: If he caused the statue to be erected, there would be an outcry, but if he did not, he would be accused of slighting the memory of a distinguished Conservative prime minister.’

According to Francis, Richard found a way out of his quandary by seeking the recommendations of senators Eugene Forsey and Grattan O’Leary. Both advised against erecting the Meighen statue.

The statue now stands in St. Marys, Ontario. I can personally vouch for the accuracy of Francis’ description.

The rules on statues of dead prime ministers get ever murkier. But PMs are guaranteed a flag and a plaque by their place of burial if they wish: full prime ministerial gravesites tour downloadable as a .pdf from here.

Charles Taylor Prize Buzz

On a network of non-fiction writers that I follow, there's some disgruntlement over this year's Taylor Prize. Not so much about the winner as about the rules of the game. More than one notable Canadian writer has observed that all the nominees this year were research-heavy, academically-supported histories, and they conclude that just good writing, the literary part of literary non-fiction, has gone by the boards. I would say, rather, that the Taylor Prize's criteria for non-fiction have always been in flux, and writers ought to participate in setting them. Making these kinds of criticisms, driving this discussion, in public might shift the balance once more.

On a network of academic historians, by contrast, there's very warm praise for Cook and particularly for his achievement in reaching a non-academic audience. I sense the ground shifting. Canadian historians in recent decades have been particularly uninterested in, even hostile to, non-academic audiences. There really have been no publicly prominent history professors since the era of Ramsay Cook, Jack Saywell, Laurier Lapierre, and Desmond Morton waned. And the younger generation of professors, technically-oriented micro-specialists all, seemed to like it just fine that way.

They even retreated from the idea of Canadian history. They would cite Benedict Anderson on imagined communities and be ashamed even to be thought of as propping up so old-fashioned an idea as the history of "Canada."

But the fashion has been shifting elsewhere. American historians have been rediscovering narrative history and the pleasures of the bestseller list for quite a while now. (I think of John Demos moving from very technical American colonial demographic history to The Unredeemed Captive, which starts with the heretical sentence "I wanted to tell a story.") The Brits never entirely abandoned the field. And we have seen some feelers here in Canada too: Brian McKillop's The Spinster and the Prophet may come to be seen as an early example of a return to academic writing with some literary sense.

The sense of shared triumph and sensed possibility with which a number of history professors have saluted Tim Cook's Taylor Prize suggests there may be more. There must be other professors sensing they can have it all: the academic job and the prize money and the media attention.

Hope we get some good books out of it if it happens.

Is any Canadian doctoral history program thinking like this?

I don't know the answer. I'm just asking.

Happy birthday Charles and Abraham

Historians who are aware of the long eclipse endured by Darwin’s ideas perhaps have a clearer idea of his extraordinary contribution than do biologists, many of whom assume Darwin’s theory has always been seen to offer, as now, a grand explanatory framework for all biology. Dr. Richards, the University of Chicago historian, recalls that a biologist colleague “had occasion to read the ‘Origin’ for the first time — most biologists have never read the ‘Origin’ — because of a class he was teaching. We met on the street and he remarked, ‘You know, Bob, Darwin really knew a lot of biology.’ ”

From a thoughtful history of Darwin's influence in the New York Times.

How curious that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln would share their birthdate, and how apt that Adam Gopnik both noticed and produced a book putting them together.

History Today recently had a Darwin piece, with the interesting European perspective on the reception of Darwinian ideas: Darwin is not controversial. There is no pro/con Darwin debate. Throughout the educated world, they say, Darwinian evolutionary principles are simply fundamental. It's only in the United States there is controversy, and it's really socio-political rather than scientific.

Bravo Tim Cook

Occurs to me my note on the Taylor Prize yesterday may have seemed grudging towards the winner Tim Cook. I should say I'm terrifically impressed with Cook's achievement in those two books about the First World War: excellent history, excellent narrative, deeply felt -- and clearly reaching an audience too. And I say that having only (mea culpa) browsed in them.

I see in the press that Cook is just 37. The books are the fruit of ten years concentrated effort. Bravo! (as I should have said more loudly yesterday) The other nominees are no slouches either.

The Death of Stefan Swyryda

One of the consequences of responsible government in the Canadas, 1848, was a legitimized and expanded system of revenue collection (basically, representation = taxation). And once of the consequences of that was a blossoming of public spending, notably on all the mid-Victorian courthouses, jails, city halls, concert halls, and other civic architecture that arose across what is now Ontario in the next couple of decades. In many Ontario towns and cities, the old jail or the old city hall has become a museum and heritage centre, still doing valuable work as public space in the heart of transformed cities.

One such place is Brampton, where the former Peel County Jail (built 1867) is now the Peel Heritage Centre. And today Peel Heritage salutes a macabre anniversary. One hundred years ago today, they had the first hanging on the grounds of what's now the heritage centre.

The centre is making more than a day of it. There is some suggestion that Stefan Swyryda, who was executed for murder on February 11, 1909, could have used some ancestral version of Aid-Wyk, AIDWC, the Association in Defence of the Wrongfully Convicted. Anyway, Kristine Marchese has written a play about the trial, . A Complex Verdict will be presented later this spring in the very room where the trial took place. Participatory possibilities: if your ancestor was on the jury, they'd like to hear from you.

Doing Black History Month

The Root, the African-American online magazine, has been hosting a debate about whether Black History Month is still useful and needed... now that Obama is president and all.

I'm rarely sure how best to respond to Black History Month on this blog, other than keeping an eye out for engaging history coming out of it. And here's one -- Miss Pollock's online Black History Month assignment for her Grade 7-8 history class in Ottawa.

Strikes me her list and links make a pretty terrific basepoint anyone interested in the African-Canadian experience could start working from, and good historical work ought to come out of it. If it takes a designated month to spark things like this, that's a pretty good case for it. Go, class! (Thanks for the messages, too.)

Imagine Sean Connery pronouncing "prorogue"

Only in Canada, you say? The minority government in the Scottish Parliament was defeated in a budget vote recently, but apparently will not resign and will re-introduce the budget in a month or so.

What Archaeology Knows

Barry Cunliffe is a knight, a professor emeritus at Oxford, and a leader in the archaeology of Europe. Ever heard of him? Me neither. But this reflection on his recent book Europe Between the Oceans suggests the power and ambition archaeology sometimes reaches for.

Prize Watch

Late update: Tim Cook's Shock Troops the winnah!

Been meaning to note Russell Wangersky, winner last week of the British Columbia Prize in non-fiction for his fire-fighting memoir Bringing Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself.

The other big Canadian non-fiction prize, the Charles Taylor, goes later today. Shock Troops, the second book of Tim Cook's big World War One history, Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar, and Angel of Vengeance by Ana Siljak. An all-history list.

There's been some press coverage lately of how the Taylor seems to have swooped from very lit'ry memoirs to hard-edge history. I'm not sure the Taylor has really found its form yet. In the early years fiction writers dominated the jurors, and the winners were all novelists. Now there seems to be a shift to the "information book." Not to let the prize-givers off the hook entirely, but partly it's the incoherence of the genre. The juries don't know what the gold standard is, and they make it up as they go along.

There was no overlap at all between the BC list and the Taylor list. Still, good luck to the nominees and their worthy books.

Making History From Inside Hyenas

The often cool science website Afarensis links to a study of what African hyenas were eating 195,000 years ago.

Hominids. Us.

Happy Waitangi Day, Kiwis

The Treaty of Waitangi is the document by which in 1840, the British Crown and the leaders of the Maori reached agreement on establishing British sovereignty over New Zealand and guaranteeing Maori rights. Or not, depending on how you interpret the whole thing.

Anyway, it's a public holiday in New Zealand, and the Wikipedia entry on the treaty gives what seems a pretty decent summary of the thing and its complications.

You start out wondering, gee, how would things be different if Canada and the First Nations had one big treaty like this? Then you realize: not much, not much.

Forsey on Forsey on Parliament

It's been up a few days, but Helen Forsey's explication via HistoryWire of ten "fairy tales" about parliamentary democracy that her father Eugene Forsey laboured to expose is a gem, both for the good strong views it presents and for the elegance of its tribute to a great thinker.

History of Free Trade

I've been writing columns for The Beaver a long time now, which means that for a couple of decades I've been blessed with an excuse for routinely calling up historians out of the blue and asking if I could interview them at some length about their works and their interests.

One of the very first of those conversations came back as I was following recent press coverage of the "Buy American" clauses of the American stimulus package and the glum realization among Canadians that Free Trade or no, the Americans were going to close their borders to Canadian competition whenever it suited their purposes. We can send people to Washington to beg for favours, but that is hardly "free" "trade."

That early conversation -- November 1990, I see -- was with Jack Granatstein. Free Trade was still quite new in 1990, and we discussed his quite prominent role as a sceptic and critic. His words come back in the new context:

Mulroney set out three conditions sine qua non -- a binding disputes settlement mechanism, a definition of what constituted a subsidy, and absolute protection for social programs. They're all essential, and he got none of them.

Seems to me Jack had his finger on it, though it's the first two that are pertinent right now.

We do have a free trade agreement, but given the nature of the agreement, it is one the Americans have been able to ignore with near-impunity. Under the settlement process, Canada can win every tribunal, but we still don't get access.

And well informed observers (and participants) knew that going in.

The Power of Archives

We're an immigrant family. I do Canadian history, but I don't trace my own roots here at all. My children's family, that's another story, thanks to their mother's vast Canadian ancestry, but the Moore history here is no longer than my own.

The other day the 1911 census of Britain was made available and searchable online at 1911census.co.uk.

On a whim I enter my father's name. Click: there he is, born 1910, four months old when the census was taken. Dead now these twenty-five years, and he lives forever from the tally made during a brief interaction between my grandparents and some census-taker in County Cheshire. The power of archives....

Another day at the office for Samuel Pepys

What Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary for February 3, 1665:

Up, and to the office very busy till 3 o’clock, and then home, all of us, for half an hour to dinner, and to it again till eight at night, stating our wants of money for the Duke, but could not finish it. So broke up, and I to my office, then about letters and other businesses very late, and so home to supper, weary with business, and to bed.

Sounds rather like the day I had yesterday. I never got around to stating my want of money to the duke either.

Pepys's diary is available daily here. For someone who tries to post daily, it's reassuring to see how dull the master diarist often is.

But the whole sequence has been interesting enough to send me to The Plot against Pepys, a recent British bestseller by the father-son writing team of James and Ben Long (review in The Independent here). In 1679 Pepys, no longer keeping a diary but still Charles II's Secretary of the Admiralty, was charged with treason. It was a political trial; Pepys, a beneficiary of the Restoration, was a strong supporter of Charles and his brother-heir the Duke of York, at a time when the leaders of Parliament were resisting Charles's autocratic ways, not least by whipping up popular hysteria over the Duke of York's Catholicism. The trumped-up charges against Pepys (he was accused of selling naval secrets to the French, with hints he was himself a secret Catholic) were merely a skirmish in the contest, though it did not seem like that to Pepys, who might well have been executied.

The Longs make a rather breathless and excitable tale out of the episode, as Pepys gradually discredits his accusers and the fury of the "Popish Plot" begins to abate. They are pro-Pepys and hence pro-Charles and monarchist without much grasp of the political and constitutional issues at stake. But even obliviously, they provide a vivid account of what a third-world polity Britain was just before its "Glorious" Revolution: venal political judges, arbitrary trials and execution, crude prejudices running free, corruption on all sides.

In 1679 the philosopher of government and founder of liberalism John Locke was serving the Whig leader the Earl of Shaftesbury -- one of Pepys's persecutors and a key villain for the Longs. Apparently Locke was drafting the Two Treatises on Government at the time. One can see why he thought they were needed.

Anniversaries

Today's the fiftieth anniversary of the Day The Music Died. Not my music, particularly, but I seem to have been missing all the flurry of anniversaries lately, and sometimes a history blogger's gotta take what he can get. One day last week was the 360th anniversary of the execution of the tyrant Charles I of Britain. Best reflection on that: John Cleese's observation that Charles was 5'6" at the start of his reign but only 4'8" at the end of it. If you are more serious about it, I recommend Geoffrey Robertson's passionate The Tyrannicide Brief, a lawyer-historian's paean to the lawyer who led the prosecution -- and was eventually disembowelled for it.

2009 seems to be thick with anniversaries, in fact. Origin of Species 1859. Lincoln's birth 1809, and Darwin's the same year. Plains of Abraham 1759, and also the birth of Admiral Nelson (okay he wasn't an admiral yet).

Wikipedia doesn't know everything?

Doing a little thing on oil and Alberta, I checked Wikipedia for a couple of details about Eric Harvie, founder of the Glenbow Museum and the original Alberta oil zillionaire, who acquired most of the province's subsurface rights during the Depression and cashed in bigtime upon the Leduc strike of 1947. What comes up:

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. Please search for Eric Harvie in Wikipedia to check for alternative titles or spellings.

I had thought Wikipedia had something on everything by now.

That starts me wondering how many other Canadian topics Wikipedia has not yet covered. Anyone? Okay I'm not there either, tho' 13 other Christopher Moores (!)are, but that's a different order of magnitude.

Notes on leadership

A reader commenting on my Danny Williams post from last week raises the question of when Canadian parties began holding leadership conventions.

"1919" is the short answer. When Wilfrid Laurier died in 1919 (still leader of the opposition), the Liberals were in the midst of organizing a policy convention. They turned it into a leadership selection meeting and William Lyon Mackenzie King won. The idea caught on.

But the deeper implications are worth looking at. King, the first beneficiary of mass party leadership selection, was the first to grasp the autocratic power it conferred on the successful leadership candidate. The Liberal convention dissolved the day after selecting him (and the Liberal Party did not hold another until he retired in 1948), so he never had to worry about accountability to the party. When the caucus occasionally grew restive, King replied that he had been picked by the party membership at large. He was not accountable to caucus, so it must be accountable to him. It has been that way for Canadian parties ever since. Power corrupts, and absolute power is even better, as they say.

Britain has recently been drifting in the Canadian direction, but in parliamentary nations (other than Canada) all over the world, the rule has always been clear. The people elect their MPs, the MPs select (and deselect) the leader, and accountability is real, direct, and permanent. Nothing has done more to undermine parliamentary democracy in Canada that the system by which party leadership is the fruit of massive competitive vote-buying by self-selected individuals who are accountable to no one and to whom the new leader will owe no accountability the moment their purchased vote has been cast.

Leadership by party membership voting is not a source of democratic legitimacy, but a travesty of it. Indeed, the recent dismissal of Stéphane Dion and selection of Michael Ignatieff was the most legitimate leadership change Canada has seen in ninety years, though the caucus ought to realize and declare that having hired its new leader, it can also fire him. That the caucus action of last December continues to be sneered at as quasi-legitimate by people who ought to know better (I'm talking to you, Jim Travers) emphasizes how degraded our parliamentary processes have become.

Constitutional Drivel Watch

Tom Flanagan asserts today that now the budget has passed, Stephen Harper has a free pass: the governor general must grant his request for an election whenever he wants one.

The bloc of constitutional scholars who recently offered to lay down constitutional rules for ignorant Canadians said something similar: if a government survives "six to nine months," the prime minister's right to call an election is unfettered.

These are all distinguished scholars. All the more reason to declare they are talking nonsense. Parliamentary practice is not a set of arbitrary rules to be negotiated between politicians and their academic supporters and then announced to the rest of us. There are rules, and the rules derive from principles, not from a time-clock.

The governor general is part of parliament. She serves, not to make arbitrary decisions, but to facilitate the working of parliament. She does this by determining the will of the people's elected representatives. If the House of Commons has lost confidence in her government and its leader and wishes to remove them, they must go. If the Commons has united around an alternate government and leader that can command majority support in the Commons, the governor general's role is to call upon that leader to form the new government. These are parliamentary principles. They are clear and reasonable and, in their way, profound. They do not depend on the age of the session or the number of bills it has previously passed.

There is no six to nine month rule; that is a sheer invention and a dangerous one. The passing of a budget means only that the budget passes; to say otherwise is to deny the authority of parliament.