History of Corn

Okay, the cobs we ate yesterday with the backyard burgers came from Florida, but it's coming, August in southern Ontario, local corn picked from roadside stalls -- and maybe some you-pick strawberries to follow. Meanwhile the New York Times reviews the origins of corn agriculture in Mexico 9000 years ago.

Corn agriculture only reached southern Ontario about a thousand years ago, and profound adaptation to a shorter growing season were required.  But once the adaptation was made, corn-growing was fundamental to Ontario history 1000 CE to c1820 CE when wheat temporarily took over. Then wheat began to move west c1880. Drive southern Ontario backroads today, and you see that corn is back -- though most of it is silage, "cow-corn," not the sweet stuff.

Coolest "historic" site ever?

It's 1229 in the woods south of Paris. They are building the castle of Guédelon. I want to go.

History of the BNA Act: is a national securities regulator constitutional?

Today "Is X constitutional?" usually means someone will attempt to predict "Will a Supreme Court majority allow it?" But I'm trying to think more of constitutional principles here.

I've seen a lot of coverage as to who might win in the federal government's campaign to create a national regulator of securities trading, but not much discussion of where, given that "regulation of securities trading" is not explicitly enumerated in the BNA Act itself, this power ought in principle to be allocated. Policy Options, the public-policy mag of the Institute for Research on Public Policy, has just published a special issue on current federal-provincial issues, and they don't seem to touch this matter at all. [Not that I actually follow the latest research on the constitutional implications of securities trading -- suggestions welcome.]

I must say the actual text of the BNA Act looks good for the federal side. The feds got, not only "regulation of trade and commerce," but also "banking, incorporation of banks, and the issue of paper money," "bills of exchange and promissory notes," "interest," "the public debt and property," and pretty much everything related to finance, banking, and exchange. The provinces' most relevant powers, "the incorporation of companies with provincial objects" and "property and civil rights in the province," don't sound much like what securities regulation is. Even the provinces' residual power -- "generally all matters of a merely local or private nature" -- doesn't sound very close to the securities business.

Add to that the line of interpretation that has it that the bright line in the division of powers was an agreement that things that touch on local cultural/emotional/communal sensibilities should be on the provincial side, while things related to creating a larger economic unit should be Ottawa's.

Sounds like a good textual basis for securities regulation being more like the things given to the national government than the things given to the provinces.

T'other hand, the constitution is a living tree. It evolves. We have had roughly 150 years of constitutional evolution, and today both Ottawa and the provinces do lots of things they might not have been expected to do (Ottawa does culture, does health funding, funds education? Yes, bigtime. The provinces have quasi-diplomatic agencies overseas, collect their own income taxes, regulate securities? Yup.) National questions, emotional as they may be have clearly become a federal priority. And the provinces have long been much more sovereign within their own fields than the black letter of disallowance would seem to suggest. Still, it's difficult to see a constitutional principle upon which the provinces found their control of securities trading, except they have been doing it quite a while.

Ottawa's new legislative proposal, meanwhile, seem mostly to fudge the issue. They propose a national securities regulator -- unless any province wants to have a provincial one. Is there a principled view there of how powers should be divided? Andrew Smith, for one, is disgusted.

On the Internet everyone needs to know who you are, dog

The UK's The Independent does away with anonymous commenting.

The New Yorker's famous cartoon "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog" is now challenged by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who defends Facebook's dismissal of privacy concerns by declaring that it is now impossible for anyone to maintain several separate identities. You are who you are, and everyone's going to know it, is his implicit declaration. In otherwords, on the internet everyone knows you're a dog.

Zuckerberg has a point. Anyway, I'm with the Independent. I don't comment anonymously, and I'm not keen on anonymous comments.

Histories for Canadian politicians?

Andrew Smith is pondering what history books a Canadian politician might benefit from reading, and he solicits readers' suggestions. He also asks that you take the idea seriously. Good project.

Plus ca change

In Opposition, Mr Cameron often spoke of the need to win back power for Parliament against the ever-growing power of the executive. In Government, however, one of his first moves has been to beef up still further the power of the executive by neutering the one parliamentary body where it had been weekly called to account by backbenchers: the 1922 Committee.

-- Historian John Adamson in the (London) Mail on Sunday. Wikipedia on the 1922 Committee. (hat tip: Paul Lay.)

Update, May 26: Stephen Maclean writes:

I initially shared your concerns over the 'take-over' of the 1922 Committee, but John Redwood--whose 'right-wing' colleagues would suffer most from it--adds some reassuring context

... or some PR bromides, maybe, but the comments are interesting.

Surveying Historical Knowledge... no, this one is British

Ninety-five % of respondents will say anything to get rid of people taking surveys on historical knowledge.

History of Bronze

First you start a blog. Then people start reading it. Then you are expected to have views on things. Merna Forster writes:

Christopher, just wondered what you thought of the recent controversy re the proposed Nellie McClung statue?

I had barely registered the controversy. But I think I am okay with the statue.

As this column argues, if we toppled all the statues of people who have held objectionable and even hateful opinions, we would not have many statues at all. Emily Murphy, prime mover of the Persons Case, had some horrific views about "Orientals" and others, but is part of the Famous Five statue on Parliament Hill -- and rightfully so, I think. A statue ought to be read as an argument for someone's significance, not the proof of it; we should not have to "agree" with every statue we see any more than with every newspaper we read.

I'm reminded of the controversy in the early 1990s over Clara Brett Martin. Martin fought a skillful and successful campaign to become (in 1897) the first woman admitted to the practice of law in Ontario, indeed, anywhere in the British Empire (as we used to say). Martin was more or less rediscovered in the 1980s by Constance Backhouse and other legal historians and became suddenly fashionable. There was an academic lectureship in her honour, and other tributes, and the Ontario government was about to name the new offices of the Attorney General's Department in Toronto after her.

Then the historian Peter Sibenik came across the records of Martin's dealing in nasty stereotypes about Jewish lawyers... and she became more or less an unperson. For years you could see the shadow of her name where the actual letters had been removed from the entrance to the AG's office on Bay Street. (Now the building is named McMurtry-Scott, in honour of two male attorneys-general.) The Martin issue was aired in several articles in The Canadian Journal of Women and the Law (Vol. 5, #2, 1992). The controversy pretty much killed the tributes to her, but one should not have to airbrush Martin's flaws in order to note her achievements (or vice versa). I think it's the same for McClung.

PS. What do you think about this yourself, Merna?  This.

Photo of McClung as wise mother from BC Archives via Google Images.

Blogging the Redshirts' war

My evil triplet Christopher [G.] Moore, Canadian-born writer known as the leading English-language novelist in Thailand, has been blogging the Redshirt/government conflict in the Bangkok streets for days now. Lots of photos too.

(In case you are keeping tabs, my evil twin Christopher Moore, the alarmingly successful California pop-cult novelist, continues to thrive. Though his blog is a little slow right now, he is becoming inescapable on the paperback racks.)

History of Referenda... it was thirty years ago today

Does this feel like yesterday, or a million years ago? To follow up, Daniel Poliquin's biography Réné Levesque in the Penguin Extraordinary Canadians series is the go-to.

[Actually the photo, from Wikipedia, is from 1973}

History of Susan B. Anthony

Pioneer American feminist and suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony has recently become the namesake of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion lobby that declares a pro-life stance was a fundamental tenet of the early feminist movement. Two historians of Anthony and her milieu take note that Anthony was not a pro-life campaigner, that she supported a large role for the American federal government, and that she supported a strict separation of church and state, all positions that are anathema to the SBA List:

Naming this lobby for Susan B. Anthony doesn't change her views any more than clicking your heels three times gets you back to Kansas.

Update, May 20:  Thanks, Jameson Cunningham, who points out the 18-year history of the SBA List.

Museum of Natural History in Ottawa

The Globe and Mail print edition salutes the elaborate renovation of the Victoria Building, now home to the new and refurbished Canadian Museum of Nature, in Ottawa's Centretown.  Online, the Globe offers this video instead. Museum's homepage here.

Before the majestic Museum of Civilization opened in Hull, the Victoria was home to what used to be the Museum of Man as well as what used to be the Museum of Natural History. But the building needed extensive restoration before it could go on being used for anything. That is what has now been completed, and both building and museum in their new guises sound pretty impressive.

The building has no lack of history itself. It housed the Canadian parliament for several years after the great fire of 1916.  And some personal history too; it used to be almost in our backyard during one of our sojourns in Ottawa.

Update, May 20:History Today covers the opening of new galleries at the Museum of London.  When can Toronto have one of these, please?

History of Protest... Ontario and British Columbia

The KnowBC blog reports on the efforts to overturn British Columbia's decision to implement the Harmonized Sales Tax. A province-wide petition drive to have the law reviewed has been in progress for weeks, and there are threats/promises to launch recall initiatives against recalcitrant politicians.

Indeed, it looks like the high threshold required to have the law reviewed is going to be met, according to this.  As they have found in California, you can always get people to say no to a tax. No to spending the money, not so much.

It's striking how placidly Ontario is going forward with the HST, while BC seems convulsed by the prospect. The BC campaign has even brought Bill Vander Zalm, the unindicted former premier, back from the dead. This just confirms each province's stereotypes of the other, for sure. But the notable difference is that British Columbia's Liberal government campaigned against the HST just a year ago and won a very hard-fought election.

In Ontario, the Liberal government made no such promises, and much of the province remains aware that after the fiscal devastation wreaked by the Harris/Eves governments, there was going to have to be, ah, adjustments to our taxation regime, no matter how gingerly the premier has treated the whole subject.

History of Bookselling 2010

Bookninja, the terrific book blog, has a revealing piece on the nasty way bookselling works in the twenty-first century.

Publishers frequently set firm sell-dates to ensure all booksellers get an equal shot at launching a hot title. Booksellers that jump the gun are likely to be penalized by being denied prompt supply of future hot titles.

The suggestion is that with the new Stieg Larsson book, Chapters/Indigo has jumped the gun by ten days or so, when most small booksellers have not ever received their stock yet.  But since Chindigo controls the market so well, the publisher is unlikely to dare to punish it.

Today's quick ethics quiz: do you -- that's assuming you are already hot for Lisbeth Salander -- rush down to the big box right now, or do you wait for your long-suffering indy store to get its copies?

Bookninja claims to have broken this story, now being followed up by the press. Don't miss the comments on Bookninja's post.

(I know, your new history book is just out, and you just wish someone would stock it at all....)

Cliopatria...

... to my mind the best history blog in the world, got its millionth visitor yesterday. Not that they care about mere numerical standings, I'm sure, but that is a great number to not care about. Congratulations.

History of the unemployed

The always interesting Economic Principals reflects on a recent historical transformation: the great wave of involuntarily retired workers dropped from the workforce in the economic crisis. It goes on to reflect on Studs Terkel's oral history Working, other works of journalism that pay homage to working life and its difficulties, and various groups of workers who have refused to let their experience go undocumented.

Canadian working class history, I think, has done well in this regard. I'm thinking of books like Sobel and Meurer's Working at Inglis (pictured), about the Toronto appliance (and sometimes armaments) factory now replaced by condos. And all the work of the Hamilton labour historians, some of it noted here. And the remarkable Workers' Arts and Culture Centre in that city. And probably a hundred other local working-class history projects that I've never heard of.

But much of the history of labour in Canada has been sustained directly or indirectly by organized labour. Who will remember the clerical and administrative workers that EP identifies as the principal victims of this wave of cutbacks?

Quotable

This tries not to be one of those history blogs that is an endless screed about contemporary politics. But the historical scene seems a little flat these days, and Taylor Owen's closing comment in his 5 Reasons why the British coalition experience is not likely to be repeated here, seemed worth saluting:

Possibly the main lesson of the British coalition is procedural. Brits have once again shown Canadians that they take parliamentary democracy seriously. There was no talk of coalitions with socialists and separatists, Gordon Brown stepped aside with dignity, Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg authored an incredibly thorough agreement that has a legitimate chance of lasting, and the media overall treated the historic events with substance rather than gamesmanship. In short, they were adults.

History of Prime Ministerial Autocracy

Lawrence Martin in the Globe looks into John Boyko's new biography of R. B. Bennett, noted here some weeks ago. Bennett, he notes, served as his own foreign minister and finance minister:

He wasn’t long in office before a cartoonist at the Winnipeg Free Press depicted a cabinet room in which every man at the table was Bennett.

The showpiece of Bennett’s stewardship was his dramatic shift to the left with a Canadian version of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. He introduced it without telling anyone in his cabinet. The only exceptions were his foreign minister and minister of finance. They were well briefed....

While our conventional wisdom suggests that the office of the prime minister has slowly evolved over time into something resembling an elected dictatorship, a look at Bennett’s inglorious days at the helm tells a different story. Our power mongers have been around for a while.

Ask a lot of our political commentators about the rise of prime ministerial autocracy, and they will say, "oh, since the Trudeau era..." which is roughly equivalent to saying, "in the mists of antiquity."

Martin's right to point to an earlier origin. Laurier and Borden frequently faced effective cabinet and caucus resistance. King and Bennett, the first prime ministers not chosen by or accountable to the party caucuses, did not tolerate caucus dissent. They grasped their new status immediately. Our political science community has never quite caught up.

[R.B. Bennett cartoon by Arch Dale.]

Signs of Spring

Historically, spring initiates the military campaigning season.  Even in Canada, things had sometimes thawed enough by early May for a little aggro.  On May 11, 1885 the siege, such as it was, of Batoche was in full swing.

On May 11, 1745 the New England attackers got ashore near Louisbourg to begin their siege of that town.  No, I'm not about to liveblog it. Someone could, though.

Wikipedia will tell you the siege began on April 30 -- because its entry is built on ancient New England hagiographies that follow the ancient Julien calendar. New England (and Britain) did not convert to the modern Gregorian calendar until 1752, so all its dates were about eleven days out of whack.  (Funny how one often finds Wikipedia convenient and adequate enough, until it comes to something you actually know about.)

May 13: Stephen Bown comments:

Regarding Wikipedia, your comment about Wikipedia being "convenient and adequate enough, until it comes to something you actually know about" applies to most newspaper reporting too, I've noticed.

I think you should enter the date change on the Wikipedia site yourself, including the rationale/explanation. Wikipedia is supposed to be constantly evolving by seeking the input of specialists and other knowledgeable people and I think that clarification would be a valuable contribution.

If the UK retained the parliamentary system...

... surely the Labour Party caucus would have removed Gordon Brown from the leadership before the election. Now, days after he goes to the electorate as party leader, he decides he will step down. The party will not have a leader until next September, and that leader will not be accountable to the Labour MPs just selected by the voters.

Poor Britain. What's happening there is not the Americanization of the political process but its Canadianization. It used to be that Canada was the only parliamentary democracy dominated by autocratic leaders chosen by self-selected mobs in arenas, accountable to no one, and always staying on far beyond their time. Now we see the same situation in Britain.

British Labour, it's true, has long been somewhat Canadianized in this regard. Extra-parliamentary factors have long had some influence on leadership selection... resulting in a long run of unelectable leaders (Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown) and the occasional charismatic tyrant (Tony Blair). But now it's taken over the whole system.

Carrying an Ivory Tower in one's one forehead

The democratisation of the past is not, of course, an entirely negative process.

Richard Overy is one history professor who does not want to be loved.

Public confusion over what history is as an academic subject derives from the misperception that popular history and popular history writers are doing in some sense real history

Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, in her 2008 book, The Uses And Abuses Of History, called on her peers to reduce their commitment to theory and to write shorter sentences. To do so would be to dumb down what history as a human science is doing.

The writing of history is intentionally complex and linguistically sophisticated. At the cutting edge of modern research, it has no less reason to be inaccessible than physics or biochemistry.

But he still wants the attention:

By making the work of academic historians more visible in a wider cultural and intellectual milieu, some of the alleged dichotomy between the ivory tower and the marketplace may be overcome.

What history students learn.

Sometimes I just stop to admire the serious, thoughtful, original stuff history bloggers put up there, unasked, unrewarded, possibly even unread. I wish there were more of them. In that vein, this is Historiann reflecting on an end-of-session review with some of her history students.

I left the academic world decades ago and don't have a dog in this fight. I'm just impressed.

New Yorker features leading Canadian scholar

Donald J. Savoie, the prolific political scientist and expert on the Ottawa civil service, has drawn the attention of the New Yorker. But it's in their recurring marginalia feature "Block that Metaphor" (May 10, 2010, p. 78):

"It's not just public servants paying the price," said Savoie. "Ministers don't know what foot to dance on. They don't know when the bazooka will hit or when a public servant at a committee or an access to information request will blow the lid off an issue.  They are also hitched to a bargain that no longer exists." (Ottawa Citizen)

If you think that's complicated, try reading his Court Government and the Collapse of Accountability.

Evaluating Sources

At History News Network, the Americanist Daniel Crofts writes a fascinating piece about one of the methodological challenges of the trade: how to assess the authenticity of an anonymous and quite possibly fraudulent diary full of potentially valuable insights into an important historical moment. It was indeed composed after the fact, he concludes, and many of its conversations are more-or-less invented, but it's a useful source nonetheless.

Never really had to do this myself, but I've had my spidey-sense tingling once in a while -- could this be a fake? Never yielded to the temptation to create a fake either... but I can see the attraction.

John Ralston Saul digs parliament

John Ralston Saul, one of the few people in Canada to take 1848 and the achievement of responsible government as a vital moment in Canadian history, scores another coup. The Montreal parliament building in which several of the vital decisions leading into and out of that event were made is going to be excavated and commemorated.

“I think it’s about time,” he said in an interview yesterday. “All the best things about Canada were formalized first in that Parliament building. This is where Canada became a democracy.”

In a sidebar in the print edition story, Desmond Morton seems caught off guard by the press's interest. "They practised early versions of responsible government," he ventures.  How many versions were there?

Image: "The Burning of the Parliament Building, 1849" is attributed to Joseph Legaré.

Drivel Watch: Kinsella on senators and prime ministers

Warren Kinsella disapproves of Senator Nancy Ruth's outburst on the maternal health/abortion controversy. But his remedy is worse than anything she did:

Her leader, the Conservative Prime Minister, must kick her out of caucus.

Where does this crazy notion come from, that leaders kicking people out of caucus is a good idea? In functioning parliamentary systems, party leaders are part of caucus and subject to its discipline just as other caucus members. The idea of party leaders as unaccountable dictators free to end the career of parliamentarians not slavishly loyal to them personally is anti-parliament, anti-democratic, and deeply dangerous. Nothing is more worth encouraging than the freedom of parliamentarians to say unpopular, inconvenient, even foolish things, free of censorship by the party Central Committee and its spin doctors

Kinsella is a Liberal partisan, probably mostly concerned here to put the Conservative leader on the spot. But nothing damages Canadian political life more than the rarely challenged assumption of Canadian party apparatchiks that the absolute power of unaccountable leaders is not merely a good thing but a thing beyond discussion or reconsideration.

If the Senate Conservative caucus collectively though it necessary to censure Senator Ruth, that's one thing. But if the Conservative leader attempts to send Senator Ruth to Siberia, the Senate caucus should tell him to shove it.

To commemorate the centenary of the Canadian navy, Canada Post has issued a couple of handsome postage stamps. They seem to be discouraging copying, though you can see them here, so I've put up the coin on the same subject instead.

Historian Michael Hatley, responding to a suggestion that the navy become once again "RCN, the Royal Canadian Navy," has a thoughtful, historical letter (scroll down to "At Sea on Naval History" -- tho' Camille Paglia's letter is a hoot, too) in today's Globe and Mail. Hatley cites the historical work that emphasizing the Canadian navy's decades of struggle to emancipate itself from British tutelage and be a truly Canadian navy. He's not much for the "Royal," let us say.  Naval centennial site here.

Speaking of stamps, I once had a gig writing brief essays about new Canadian stamps on historical themes. Once in a while, spotting intriguing new issues at the postal kiosk at the back of the card shop (ok, I still buy a stamp from time to time), I wish I still had it. Case in point: the recent "Indian Kings" issue, commemorating the 300th anniversary of the portraits done of four Mohawk emissaries visiting London in 1710.

LRB on Canada on Britain

Kenneth Sheppard emails:

In case you don't read the LRB blog, you might find the following interesting, which has a comment on Canada.

Whew, someone notices; that's a relief. The Globe & Mail observes today that while Canadians have been hailing the significance Speaker Milliken's recent ruling will have for parliamentary regimes all over the world, their reporters could barely find anyone outside Canada who had heard of it.

From Canada, frankly, the British panic over the possibility of a minority government seems a bit silly. Striking, how people seem able to find a constitutional crisis in any parliamentary event. On Friday morning, who in London will be able to say, "The world is unfolding as it should...."?

The end of senate reform?

William Thorsell's piece on the Senate in the Globe and Mail today should mark the collapse of senate reform as an idea anyone takes seriously anymore. [Link now fixed -- thank you, Mark.] That is, senate reform remains alive as a political objective, by a kind of inertial drive accumulated over all the years of Triple-E agitation. But surely no thoughtful Canadian should still take senate "reform" -- an elected, powerful upper house -- seriously as an idea about making Canadian government better.

Update, May 3: Janet Ajzenstat has a very different point of view.

One bad day for beavers

The Hudson Bay Company was founded 340 years ago tomorrow, May 2, 1670.

Here's the HBC's history page.

And here is Stuff White People Do's take on the whole thing.