Where to find books of Canadian history reviewed?

A note from the Readers' Den at www.canadashistory.ca reminds me:

Now that general book reviewing beyond the bestseller lists has largely vanished from newspapers, magazines and other usual outlets, where is there an opportunity to find books on Canadian history reviewed and discussed?

Well, the online books section of the Canada's History website.

A number of reviewers have developed online projects (like this one) to survey new Canadian fiction, but I don't know of anyone beyond Canada's History attempting that for history or even for nonfiction.

Giller-winner's historical roots

Will Ferguson, who won the Giller Prize last night for his novel 419, is also the author of Canadian History for Dummies.

Which is not bad, by the way.  Anyone ever try to teach and undergraduate survey from it?

History of the arts cuts: the death of the CCA

The Canadian Conference of the Arts, the bi-lingual, multi-cultural, non-partisan, national lobby and research institute on the arts, shuts its doors,  It was sixty-seven years old.

The CCA helped launch the Massey Commission on the Arts, the Canada Council, the National Library, and other cultural institutions.  Its leaders over the years included such luminaries as Alan Jarvis, Jean Bruchési, John Parkin, Pauline McGibbon, Lister Sinclair, and Jean-Louis Roux.

Another victim of the Government of Canada's cuts to arts and cultural institutions (except a few favorites).

History at Douglas & MacIntyre

Douglas & MacIntyre, the Vancouver publisher and one of the few substantial Canadian-owned trade-book publishers still standing, put itself into bankruptcy protection last week.

This all may simply be prelude to the takeover of another Canadian publisher by one of the multi-nationals. What have we got to lose?  Just note a few historical titles D&M has put out in the last few years.

• Four Wars of 1812 by D. Peter MacLeod (companion to the War Museum exhibit); and also MacLeod's 1759 book Northern Armageddon
• British Columbia, a history in maps by Derek Hayes, and also Hayes' Historical Atlas of Toronto
• The Last Viking, Stephen Bown's biography of Roald Amundsen
• King, the biography by Allan Levine
• Breakout from Juno, by Mark Zuehlke and all Zuehlke's other military histories
• Defiant Spirits, GG winner (and nominee again) Ross King's study of the Group of Seven and his earlier art histories.
• Polar Imperative by Shelagh Grant, the authoritative history of northern sovereignty
• Whoever Gives us Bread by Lynn Bowen, British Columbia's leading trade historian
• The Horse that Leaps the Clouds, a remarkable history of the Great Game in early 20th century central Asia by Eric Enno Tamm
• Cold War by Roy MacSkimming -- actually about the 1972 hockey series, not that other cold war

And just recently Candace Savage's meditation on Prairie history, Geography of Blood, currently shortlisted for the $60,000 Weston Nonfiction Prize.  

Not an exhaustive list by any means.  More details here. (Disclosure: they publish one of mine too.  And one by my father, as it happens.)

Addenda:  And today Bertlesmann (i.e., Random House, Knopf, Doubleday, etc.) and Pearson (Penguin,etc.) announced they are merging their interests, just in case we didn't have enough oligopoly in the trade.  Random Penguin correction, October 31: The parent companies are only merging the trade divisions, that is, Random House and Penguin Books, into a jointly-owned unit. Their many other operations remain separate.

"History, only more badass"

According to Slate, the wargaming videogame Assassin's Creed III may also be the best historical simulation of the American Revolution ever made.

What they’ll find is the most accessible reconstruction of the Revolutionary War era that’s ever been made. That’s because of the painstaking research and astonishing sense of historical responsibility that AC3’s makers poured into the project. But the game also stands out because it’s the first of its kind: Nobody in mainstream entertainment has ever tried to capture 18th-century American at this level of detail.

And the gamemakers are willing to put in more than "shoot up the Redcoats."  They include, for instance, big chunks of the eighteenth-century "Beggar's Opera":

Hutchinson admits to a perverse glee, too, at jamming opera—what he calls the most maligned art form—into one of gaming's most mainstream franchises. "I love the idea of making 10 million kids listen to an opera for half an hour. This is stealth history, the songs people are singing, the jobs they're doing around you, it's all just happening. You’re not singing in that opera, you're not part of the line infantry, but you see it, it surrounds you,” he says. 

Apparently the game's hero is a Mohawk, and the game apparently includes substantial chunks of Mohawk dialogue, recorded with help from the Mohawk communities south of Montreal  -- the game's creators are Montrealers, working for the gamer giant Ubisoft.  Slate thinks this is the best presentation of the First Nations experience of the Revolutionary War period we've ever seen.

Mind you, they are not exactly trapped in historical accuracy. There are aliens. It's enough you to think of becoming a gamer.

Book notes: Banff and John Porter

Banff has been a national park forever. So how come there are hydro dams in it?  There's a story in that, and constant scholars Armstrong and Nelles are on the case.

Other new stuff from the University of Calgary Press catalogue here.

And an H-Canada review by David Tough makes Measuring the Mosaic: An Intellectual Biography of John Porter by Rick Helmes-Hayes (from UTPress) sound pretty terrific, on the pioneering sociologist and self-educated academic. It was published in 2010, but if it takes H-Canada two years to get around to a review, we think we have an excuse for not noticing it earlier.

Case of the dithering detective?

Fireside Publishing continues its quirky series of YA novels about crimes and mysteries solved by Canadian prime ministers in their youth. This time, following John A. and John George (Diefenbaker),  it's young Paul Martin, intrepid crime-fighter.

Fireside's youth movement isn't just the subjects. The author here is seventeen.

Refighting 1812 on Wikipedia

Richard Jensen has made available his article from The Journal of Military History, "Military History on the Electronic Frontier: Wikipedia Fights the War of 1812." It is a study of how the online encyclopedia and its contributors deal with a large historical topic of current public interest. 

Jensen is a history professor who has also been an active Wikipedia editor, and a founder of H-Net. He  tells H-Canada:  

It seems that everyone knows about Wikipedia but its working are something of a mystery. Its article on the War of 1812 runs 14,000 words and over 2400 different people helped edit it:  "crowd sourcing" you might say.  The results were reasonably good, in my opinion.

Though, as he points out,

They rely on free online sources and popular books, and generally ignore historiography and scholarly monographs and articles. The military articles are old-fashioned, with an emphasis on tactics, battles, and technology, and are weak on social and cultural dimensions.

The Jensen article's version of that standard opening footnote thanks all the usual academic colleagues, plus "Dank, Dwalrus, Narson, Shakescene, TFD, and Tito Durra." The historical universe evolves.

(H/T to H-Canada)

 

Second World War comes to a stop

It has been a month since one of my go-tos, World War II Day by Day, stopped its daily posting.

I sympathize. The task of live-blogging the whole damn second world war on a daily basis must be enormous, and this one is a solo effort without ad revenue or other support.  It has gone on hiatus at least once before, and come storming back, and I hope it does again.  There are other WWII blogging sites, but I've grown accustomed to this one.

And, I never thought I would say this, I miss the war.

Make big cheques doing history

Genealogy ain't just your aunt's retirement project anymore.  Or if it is, your aunt may have some loose change.  Ancestry.com has been sold to a European private equity firm for $1.6 billion.

Still going to be headquartered in Mormon central, Provo, Utah, where genealogy has always been big.

Queenston Heights, cont'd

Peter Mykusz of Tribute Video offers HD video of last week's Queenston Heights+200 reenactment commemorations.

Sainte-Kateri

I was inclined to be more creeped out than moved by this weekend's lavish canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, the young Mohawk woman who died in a Jesuit-led mission community outside Montreal in 1680. Alienated from much of her nation and much given to corporal mortification, she has always seemed a tragic figure rather than a role model, and copping a sainthood from Pope Benedict  seems like, I dunno, accepting an honorary degree from a shady online college.

But one could not help but be impressed by the substantial number of Mohawk and other First Nations people for whom this was important and affirming, who said, "This shows we can be respected too."

A reminder: for historians, the story on this is Allan Greer's Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits.  As one reviewer said, "In rescuing the "lily of the Mohawks" from her hagiographers, Allan Greer has produced an utterly fascinating volume."  Greer mentions that the Jesuit-driven cult of Kateri was such that one could argue she was the most famous Canadian who ever lived.  I saw no mention of Allan's work in the media coverage of the canonization events.

Update:  Brian Busby reminds me that Leonard Cohen introduced a lot of people to Kateri Tekakwitha too!

Downton Abbey Economics .. with a little contemporary lesson

Why Britain needed a Robespierre?

Via The Browser, a blog called Somewhat Logically considers the political and economic structures that underlay the world of Downton Abbey ... and suggests the perils of propping up a rentier class whose prosperity is based on financial manipulation.

The Minutes are Back, cont'd

Just below, I was musing about a Heritage Minute Heritage Minute.

Mark Reynolds reveals: it's been done.  And it's perfect, except that it's three minutes long. (It's tough getting one done in a minute.)  Thanks, Mark!

Hilary Mantel's second historical novel Booker

Thomas Cromwell can now tuck a second Booker Prize under his arm. (With his severed head under the other, I guess.)  Bring Up the Bodies, the second part in Hilary Mantel's vast novel about the 16th century English courtier and politician, just earned her a Booker Prize to match the one she received two years ago for the first part, Wolf Hall.  First sequel to win ever.

The British novelists must be approaching where the Canadian novelists hit about ten years ago: now all their big novels seem to be historically based.  I admired and enjoyed Wolf Hall enormously  Those who dislike it, dislike it a lot, I find, but I was greatly taken both with its strikingly original voice (it's a novel, after all, and that's what matters in fiction) and also with its "theory" of Cromwell, whom it evokes as a "modern" type set against Thomas More as a Medieval fanatic and Henry as the embodiment of everything one fears about autocratic rulers.

Bring up the Bodies struck me as more of the same, and hence a lot less fresh.  And I can't help thinking no matter what Mantel does, the end of the last volume is gonna be a big downer.

The Minutes are back

Robert Harris's "School Trustees" -- memorably riffed on in a Heritage Minute

Pity!  I couldn't make it to the launch of the new Heritage Minutes at the Royal in Toronto the other night -- hey, that historybloggers' social circuit gets busy! But the minutes are up on the Historica-Dominion website. (The Minutes were originally an initiative of Charles Bronfman's CRB Foundation, which morphed in Historica, which merged with the Dominion Institute, so it all fits.)

Maybe there'll be a Minute about inventing the Minutes one day.It would feature an actor playing the broadcaster Patrick Watson, who transforms a dull meeting by saying "mini-movies!" -- and then gets his way, damn the expense. I profiled Watson and the Minutes in the mid-1990s

The secret was finding how to leave things out. Or, as Watson puts it, "finding the dramatic nucleus." Where an historical documentary like the beautiful, much-admired American film "The Civil War" explains everything it knows, a Heritage Minute leaves a thousand things unexplained, undiscussed, barely evoked.  Its allusions just flicker by, and may not even make sense on a first viewing.  But like commercials or music videos, the Minutes appear over and over. The Foundation offers them free to TV stations, and since they confer valuable Canadian-content points, their total exposure nationwide now runs at more than thirteen hours of airtime every month. To your pleasure or fury, you may already know some of them by heart.

I wasn't in school, either as student or teacher, during the Minutes' heyday, and I probably wasn't a big watcher of the TV channels that needed to run them endlessly to score enough CanCon credits for their automatic licence renewals. I liked and admired the minutes, still do, but I actually did not see them that often. It was only in retrospect that I learned how many people had really been bathed in them during their youth.

From Civilization to Canada

The National Museum of Man became the Canadian Museum of Civilization when it got its new quarters in Douglas Cardinal's new building across the Ottawa from Parliament Hill.  Now the Civ is about to become the Museum of Canadian History or the Canadian Museum of History.  So reports the Globe and Mail, but I found the news on the rapidly-becoming-indispensable blog called Charlevoix.

Charlevoix suspects this is another of the Harper government's efforts to brand Canadian history as dead white guys, war stories, and Queen Elizabeth II.  Well, maybe, but the museum, whatever its name, has always been largely a museum of Canadian history.  If it continues to be a place where museum professionals can do cutting-edge museological work about Canada for a large public -- something Charlevoix very much doubts -- I'll be okay with the name change.

War of 1812+200: Queenston Heights

The observances this weekend of the Queenston Heights battle, October 13, 1812, may be the high point of the bicentennial events.  Spectacular setting, spectacular monument, we beat the Americans again, Isaac Brock becomes a dead hero, proximity to major population centres... Queenston Heights has it all.

The bicentennial has been so successful this summer, I would say, that it is hard to see it continuing at such a pitch for two more summers. No doubt Toronto will make the most of the battle of Toronto next spring, and Chateauguay will get attention next fall as the Quebec event.  But I'm not sure all the other Niagara peninsula battles will stand out as this one does. Nor will Crysler's Farm, or the naval battle off Pelee Island, or the torching of Washington, or the other big moments, will be quite so marketable.

Thomas Jefferson said the war would be a matter of marching.  The British, having gone undefeated three-for-three in 1812, had nicely set the pattern for the war.  After Queenston Heights ends the first campaigning season, there is a lot of marching back and forth.  But at the end of the war things will look a lot like the day after Queenston Heights.

William Notman 'Canada's most successful photographer'

On CBC Radio this eve Part One on William Notman - famous photographer of, among other things - the eighth wonder of the world, or the Victoria Bridge in Montreal (for example), and the Fathers, and daughters, of Confederation.

 From CBC Idea's website:
"He [Notman] arrived in Montreal in 1856 as a fugitive from the law. He became Canada's most successful photographer. A rare combination of canny businessman and master craftsman, William Notman embraced the wondrous new medium of photography and left us a unique record of Canada's social history. A portrait by Montreal writer Elaine Kalman Naves.  ...

On the lam from the law, William Notman remade himself in Montreal.  He saw his chance and quickly mastered the brand new art of photography. His timing couldn't have been better.  Fascination with the astonishing new medium was sweeping Europe and North America - never before had it been possible to create a permanent image without an artist's pencil or paintbrush or engraver's tools.  Eventually, William Notman would own the largest photography business in North America ... "
 
      And to the 'Daughters' of Confederation:

Mercy Coles, who I wrote about last fall at this time (here and about weekly through November 2011)  and used in my novel To the Edge of the Sea, was the charming, beautiful and unmarried 26 year old daughter of Prince Edward Island delegate and Father of Confederation George Coles. She kept a diary of her trip to Quebec for the Confederation conference of 1864 and subsequent tour of the Canadas. Their first stop after the conference was Montreal. There she writes of her visit to William Notman's studio to have her photograph taken.

Saturday October 29, 1864 continued:

“ ... Ma and I have just been to the Convent Congregation Notre Dame. Mr. McDonald (stutterer) came and took Mamma and I. I have just come from Notman’s. My photograph was not good I don’t think, so I would not take it however the man said he would send me two dozen to the Island. ...”

        The CBC link has good pictures and a link to the McCord Museum in Montreal which has a phenomenal collection of pictures, videos and information on Notman and his work, (regardless of what Mercy Coles thought of her photo).

Historians of the big issues

Medicare and gun-control are always hot button current-affairs issues.

Good to see University of Toronto Press has a couple of big histories this fall on the historical roots of these topics.

R. Blake Brown has Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada.  Years ago, I read how, at the time of the Saskatchewan River rising of 1885, the Government of Canada proposed to control guns -- mostly for fear that the First Nations and Metis would get more of them -- and provoked vigorous "right to bear arms" rhetoric in the House of Commons.  David Mills, Ontario Liberal and future Minister of Justice and Supreme Court of Canada justice:  “The constitutional rule is that it is one of the rights of a British subject to have fire arms in his possession; it is in fact one of the provisions of the declaration of rights. We see it in the Constitution of the United States when they were copying the fundamental privileges of British liberty.” The 'it's in the constitution' line struck me at the time, so it's good to see someone taking the question up seriously
 Meanwhile Gregory Marchildon edits a collection called Making Medicare: New Perspectives on the History of Medicare.  It is just fifty years since the Saskatchewan Doctors' Strike.

UTP's fall/winter 2012 catalogue, with other history titles available here.

Update, same day:  The Declaration of Rights, 1689, actually says, "Subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law" which ain't quite the right to bear arms tout court, but is still interesting as an influence of the American second amendment.

Carleton Library Series hits fifty years

Remember the small print on newsprint pages and the always-split-lengthwise glued spines?  Those early Carleton Library paperbacks were cheap and they looked it.

Well, the books have improved since then. But the impact was probably greatest at the beginning, when the Carleton Library editions were about the only ones available.

But the point is, the Carleton Library series of Canadian documentary reprints and original scholarship is hitting its fiftieth year. Details here and here.

Over the years it has moved from McClelland & Stewart to Carleton University Press to McGill-Queen's, which mostly uses it now to reprint backlist titles.Turns out -- I actually didn't know when I began drafting this -- that The Illustrated History of Canada, of which I am a co-author and which is now published by McGill-Queen's, is the 226th CLS title.

But this is crazy: history of the Bieb

A press release raises the possibility that all Canadian celebrities are related.  Course it helps if you can play the game of l'ancetre francophone:

Researchers at Ancestry.ca have discovered that Canadian stars Justin Bieber, Ryan Gosling and Avril Lavigne are cousins. Bieber’s celebrity bloodline doesn’t stop there either as he’s also related to mega-star Celine Dion.
 Family history experts at Ancestry discovered that Bieber, Gosling and Lavigne share a common family connection that goes back 400 years to some of Quebec’s earliest settlers. Bieber and Gosling are 11^th cousins once removed and Bieber and Lavigne are 12^th cousins through common relatives Mathurin Roy and Marguerite Biré. 

Jeffrey Simpson leaks the Cundill nominees

The website for the Cundill Prize in history says the long list of nominees will be announced in Montreal on October 10.  But when you put a journalist on the jury..... Well, Jeffrey Simpson is one of the jury, and his column in the Globe and Mail announced the whole list last Saturday. Winner to be announced at the end of November.

As usual the Cundill list is international in subject matter and uncompromising in matters of form. No pop history here. Five of the six 2012 titles Simpson reveals focus on war; two of the six are by women. But I'm willling to bet there is some pretty substantial history here.

Some previous Cundill coverage here and here (this winner is huge, ambitious, and very readable, I can testify).

You are working on... a book?

William Cronon, president of the American Historical Association, considered the oddity of history, a discipline that still thinks books are important.

History of influence

You get a website.  You start a blog.

Then the media come calling.

This is true.

Women's History month

Merna Forster reminds us it is Women's History month and offers a quiz: Famous Firsts in Canadian History

"If this is too easy," she says, "here's my Canadian Heroines Quiz."  [The blogger's score: 64%, no googling]

And for girls and young women:  Which Canadian heroine are you? The Facebook Quiz  (QuizBank app is required.)

Archivists retiring

Charlevoix has a nice tribute to Patricia Kennedy and Lorraine Gadoury, archivists at Library and Archives Canada, now retiring.

History of Campaigning: Canada got there first?

FDR campaigning in Kansas, 1932

Slate, the American online magazine, has a "slideshow" on American presidential campaigning. How recent it is! If Slate is right, the first American presidential candidate to campaign openly was ... Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

The notion lingered long in American politics, t'seems, that it was undignified for gentlemen like Washington and Jefferson actually to seek office, rather than have it thrust upon them.  More important, perhaps, was the ideology that that a president, as a kind of elective king, should aspire to be above factional division. So Abraham Lincoln derided an opponent who travelled out of state on the pretense of visiting his mother when he was actually, gasp, seeking votes. Well into the twentieth century, even as party lines hardened and campaign managers professionalized, would-be presidents remained on the front porch and let surrogates do their campaigning for them.

Was there ever such a phase in Canadian politics? John A. Macdonald gets a lot of credit for developing a  coherent, centrally-controlled party "platform" and selling it -- and himself -- at campaign picnics and electoral tours, particularly after his return to power in 1878.  But well before confederation, party leaders toured relentlessly during elections, debated each other frequently, and pressed the flesh across the towns and crossroads of British North America.  Even patricians like the Blakes and Baldwins campaigned ferociously, often attended by the gangs of streetfighters who might be needed to get them and their voters safely to the polling station. 

King on the trail, 1926

Presumably all that was more acceptable in a parliamentary context, where no one aspired to be the president-above-politics.  It was always accepted in Canadian politics, at least from the dawn of responsible-government thinking, that the public interest was served by the clash of partisan differences in an elective and representative assembly. 

Well, the Yanks started slower, but they caught up, they caught up. Best thing about Canadian election campaigns is how brief they are -- though the trendy fixed election date craze is inexorably screwing that up.

Photos:  Washington Independent and Canadian Encyclopedia, via Google Images/

    

Prize Watch: the non-fiction GGs

Not a big year for historians in the Governor-General's Awards for non-fiction, but some historically oriented books here.  The nominees announced this morning are

• CBC journalist Nahlah Ayed for her memoir "A Thousand Farewells: A Reporter’s Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring,"
• Carol Bishop-Gwyn for The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca.  (Actually CBG is a historian -- teaches history of dance at Ryerson. The Gwyn in her name is from her husband, the writer and John A. biographer Richard Gwyn
• much-admired explorer, anthropologist ans writer Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
• Ross King, a GG winner for a previous study of impressionists and classicists in belle-epoch Paris, Leonardo and the Last Supper
• author and broadcaster Noah Richler, What We Talk About When We Talk About War

And, if I can have some special pleading, I note that the shortlist for the Children's Literature award has reverted to the all-fiction norm.  Last year, ahem, a nonfiction book actually won.

Use and abuse of history

Last week in the Toronto Star Rick Salutin, who is white and interested in Canada's past, pondered the anglophilic gestures the Canadian government has been making lately.  "There are few votes in anglophilia," he guesses, and he ventures a possible explanation:

There may be actual nostalgia too, but less for Britannia than for an earlier Canada that seemed to belong to white guys (leaving aside those folks in Quebec and the native ones) in those days. The more irretrievably the former Canada appears to be slipping away, the keener is that nostalgic yearning. Ian McKay and Jamie Swift write, “The application of ‘royal’ to institutions left and right may seem comical, but one would be ill-advised to minimize the extent to which the British sovereign is a deeply meaningful symbol of whiteness, hierarchy and authoritarian rule. 

Kelly McParland, who contributes to the National Post, thereupon reframes this as:

If I’m white, and I’m interested in Canada’s past, I must be a racist who hankers after the good old days when I could abuse natives, discriminate against gays and treat women like dirt.

Huh?

 

Eric Hobsbawm 1917-2012 RIP

The Guardian has an obituary for the British historian, scholar, and public intellectual.