History of the zipper

Today, it says here at CBC News, is the hundredth anniversary of the patenting of the zipper.

The thing was invented several times back to 1851, but never caught on. And even the 1913 version was only slowly accepted into use. It was thought a bit, ah, sexy, for popular use. The zipper's early uses were in boots and military fatigues. Levis did not have zippered jeans until 1954.

Canadian connection:  Lightning Fastener of St. Catharines, Ont, held the North American patent rights to the zipper for a long time -- thanks in part to tireless litigation by Toronto lawyer Harold Fox. It says here, on the website of the Fox Scholarships he later endowed, that the company was so strapped that it mostly paid Fox in shares, and he ended up running the company and making gazillions, while also having a stellar career as what would now be called a intellectual-property lawyer and scholar.

Toronto loses... (not the Maple Leafs)

Today is the 200th anniversary of the successful American attack upon and occupation of Toronto.  So if those commemorations of the War of 1812 aren't all way too 2012 for you, the campaigning season is on us again.  Copious details here at the City of Toronto's 1812 site.

Image: Wikipedia

Notman's Victoria Skating Carnival April 25, 1870

William Notman's first composite photograph was of the Skating Carnival at Victoria Rink held on March 1, 1870, in honour of Prince Arthur, the youngest son of Queen Victoria. It received it's first public viewing today, April 25, in 1870.

 

"Photograph | Skating Carnival, Victoria Rink, Montreal, QC, painted composite, 1870 | N-0000.116.21.1"

More information about this image 

This Victoria Rink Skating Festival was the first of Notman’s famous composite scenes. He’d take individual photos of a hundred or more people (for this skating party he took 150 individual photos) and then he’d put them into a painted composite scene – sort of a multi-media combination of photography and painting. For this scene he put an invitation notice in the newspaper for people to come in their masquerade dress and with their skates.

     Everything always looks so formal, so polite to me when I look at pictures from the past, and it gives one a skewed picture of how things really were. The skating party can’t have been so perfect – the McCord Museum cites the Montreal Gazette on April 26, 1876 [seems likely that date is supposed to be 1870] congratulating Notman for leaving out "the monstrosities and idiocies of bad taste, which never should have disfigured the Fancy Dress Assembly."

    Parties will always be parties.

 

Prince Arthur (Thunder Bay was originally called Port Arthur after Prince Arthur) later became the HRH Duke of Connaught - and the Governor General of Canada from 1911 to 1916. He was the first member of the Royal family to be a G. G. Prince Arthur is on the bottom left, towards the centre of the photo.

     Prince Arthur was only 20 at the time and was stationed in Montreal with the Rifle Brigade.

Maybe the big skating party held in his honour was the inspiration for his daughter Princess Patricia’s own elaborate skating parties in Ottawa when they lived in Rideau Hall 41 years later. She also had people dress up in the dress of different nations – a sort of fancy dress ball.  

     The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry was named after his daughter Patricia.

You can find more on the Governors Generals here

William Notman learned all he knew about photography after he’d moved from Scotland to Montreal in 1856. He became one of the most famous photographers in the world – and he was certainly an audacious businessman. He’s the one who ended up taking all the photographs of the Fathers of Confederation (and their unmarried daughters and wives who they’d brought along) at the Confederation talks in Quebec in October, 1864. He managed to get the commission for photographing the making of the Victoria Bridge in 1859, and he became Queen Victoria’s official photographer. There’s lots more on Elaine Kalman Nave’s CBC Idea’s Podcast  here.

The McCord Museum in Montreal also has an immense collection of his work and everything else Notman. I'll get to see it all for myself this May - searching for his photographs of my lost 'daughters of Confederation. See more on the daughters of Confederation

Book Notes: Dodek on the Canadian constitution, no longer out of print

Adam Dodek, Ottawa constitutional law scholar, offers the Canadian constitution to readers. He explains:

In the U.S., you can walk into any bookstore and buy a copy of the American Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, etc.  I can tell you that there are lots of them.  I collect them and I own at least 20 different versions.
The Canadian Constitution will be the first of its kind: the only book that contains the whole text of our Constitution and introduces and explains it to Canadians.
Before I wrote this book, the only version of the Constitution was published by the Government of Canada.  As a good Canadian and a law professor, I encourage my students to buy it every year.  A few years ago, something happened that really pissed me off.  I was informed  that the Constitution was out of print.  It was not available in print form.  Worse yet, it appeared that no one but me noticed.  I knew right then and there that I would have to write this book and the sooner the better.

The government does still make the constitution texts available online. But Dodek also offers an index, a glossary, a timeline, and a short history.

Prorogation: digging deeper into the leadmine

Professor Radha Persaud, who teaches public law and public policy, examines a bill in the Ontario legislature that would restrain first ministers' use of prorogation.  He is not keen on it, or on any new process for prorogation.

In place of legislative change, he offers what seems to be doctrine among our constitutional scholars. What we need, he argues, is for premiers and prime ministers to play nice. Leaders should practise "restraint" and then all will be well.

Parliamentary tradition suggests that responsibility for the legitimate use of prorogation lies with the premier who is responsible and accountable to the people. ...In my opinion, it was incumbent on the premier to be more responsible and accountable to the people of Ontario for his decision — not the lieutenant-governor. Meaningful civic engagement by our elected leaders is imperative for good government under the rule of law.

Shouldn't some responsible scholar point out that this is, well, INSANE?

A system of government that depends on the self-restraint of the executive is, not to put too fine a point on it, no system of government at all.  Surely it is not hard to see that the rule of law ceases to exist if the only law that constrains the executive is its own sense of "meaningful civic engagement."

This idea that parliamentary democracy is based on the sweet, self-effacing, reasonableness of the boss seems to be assuming the status of a convention among our scholars. Two Three years ago this was the argument of 200 political scientists faced with Mr Harper's early 2010 prorogation. And today the often wise Parliamentum blog endorses Professor Persaud's vision of parliamentary leaders having no accountability beyond self-restraint.

Professor Persaud repeatedly declares that the premier is accountable to "the people."  But before that he is accountable to the legislature. What restrains an executive is what the legislature will tolerate. In functioning parliamentary systems, backbenchers on both sides of the aisle have an interest in having the legislature in session, because only when it is sitting do the leaders have much need of them. So in parliaments where the tradition of the accountability of leaders to caucuses survives, a leader who does away with the legislature knows he will face the displeasure of both his own backbenchers and the united opposition -- and is restrained. In Canada, where we have de facto abolished the accountability to leaders to caucuses, that restraint is no longer available.

But the political scientists who seem eager to make it a rule that there is no accountability to parliament at all, only the sense of self-restraint a leader may possess,...  well, they are not making things better.

Cultural history: Fetherling on CanLit

George Fetherling's Travels by Night (1994) is the best account of the cultural ferment of late '60s and early '70s Toronto, when so much of CanLit was being assembled.

His new book promises to be equally valuable testimony to a much longer period of Canadian literary history through the eyes of a vital participant.  The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 launches tonight at Ben McNally's in Toronto.  Many Canadian writers will be wondering if they are discussed in it or, indeed, not discussed in it.

Histoire de la Corriveau

Brian Busby remembers la Corriveau, who was executed at Quebec City exactly 250 years ago today, and explores her posthumous literary career, and even the beer named after her.

Widowed at twenty-seven, in 1761 she married Louis Étienne Dodier who, like Charles,was a farmer from St.Vallier on the St. Lawrence, just south of Ile d'Orléans. A little over eighteen months later, poor Louis was found dead in the barn, his head nearly caved in. The horse was to blame... or so it was thought at first. Then the rumours began to circulate.

History of parliamentarianism

The New Zealand legislature passed a gay marriage bill the other day( and since they get along fine without an upper house, it becomes law directly). Nice that Canada can claim to have led the way on this issue, but seeing this, one cannot help wishing we too had done it in parliamentary fashion (a big bipartisan consensus in NZ, actually).

Watch this speech by a NZ MP and you can't help but wish Canadians had real legislatures where parliamentarians' talk can actually mean something sometime.

HIstorians in the news 2: Frederic Bastien

[This post is updated/corrected below]

Not bad – a new history book out, and Fréderic Bastien has a unanimous resolution of the Assemblée Nationale and a Supreme Court of Canada investigation to show for it.

As you may have seen, Bastien’s La Bataille de Londres presents evidence, mostly from British sources, that in 1981 judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, particularly Chief Justice Bora Laskin, gossiped with politicians and public servants about the Patriation Reference while it was still sub judice. Professor Bastien, who teaches at Dawson College in Montreal, argues that this breach of the separation of executive and judiciary invalidates the whole process by which the constitution was amended and patriated.

From the first, I wondered what Philip Girard’s take on this might be.  Professor Girard, lawyer and historian at Dalhousie and former Supreme Court clerk, is the author of an excellent 2005 biography Bora Laskin: Bringing Law To Life. Well, now we know what he thinks, because Le Devoir had the good sense to ask him.

Girard’s take is that, well, it was “extremely imprudent” but not that serious and not that surprising. Laskin and Justice Estey, he proposes, breached no vital barriers in their chats with diplomats and politicians. He questions Bastien’s conclusions but not his evidence that it happened, and indeed his biography gives some supporting evidence. In the biography, Girard describes Laskin at a legal conference where senior lawyers and politicians were to discuss the patriation reference, still undecided by the court – and Laskin had to be convinced his presence at the session would be inappropriate.

Our national newspapers do not seem much interested in this story, (But Everyday History has been on the story.) It’s otherwise in le journal national. Le Devoir has printed both Girard’s opinion and a response by Bastien, and much commentary besides.  

Girard argues effectively that Bastien’s evidence hardly sustains his charge that this constituted a “coup d’etat” at the Supreme Court, one that invalidates the constitution itself. But it strikes me as serious, and the Supreme Court should be investigating. The reputation of the Supreme Court and of Bora Laskin are tainted by this kind of imprudent chat between judges and the politicians who were strategizing about the consequences of a case actually before the court. We are entitled to know: could similar things happen in the McLachlin Court if a case of equivalent political heft were suddenly put before it? 

In 1981 Chief Justice Bora Laskin was head, by virtue of his office, of the Canadian Judicial Council, the only agency with the authority to discipline judges for unprofessional conduct. Discussion of possible improprieties by a former chief justice might oblige the Supreme Court to return to the question: quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

The Bataille de Londres is history. The Battle of Laskin may still to be written.

Update/Correction, May 2:  Philip Girard has let me know that Le Devoir did not approach him regarding his commentary. He approached them -- after The Globe and Mail showed no interest when he offered it to them.

He also reports U of T Press will soon issue a paperback of his Bora Laskin: Bringing Law to Life with a new preface addressing this topic.

          

Historians in the News 1: David Wilson

... gets a whole lotta love from Jeffrey Simpson's Globe and Mail column on D'Arcy McGee on the anniversary of his funeral:

McGee died, as University of Toronto history professor David A. Wilson argues in his brilliant two-volume biography of this fascinating figure, an “extreme moderate,” slain as an enemy of Fenian extremism. For that rejection of extremism, he paid dearly politically among Irish Canadians and, ultimately, with his life; although much controversy attended the trial and conviction of his murderer, Patrick Whelan, no one doubted his Fenian fanaticism.

Book notes

A few recent history titles that have come to our attention:

• The Osgoode Society presents Ian Kyer's Lawyers, Families, and Business: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863-1963.  Kyer started in computer science studies, then completed a Ph.D in medieval history, then went to law school, and then had a career as a tech lawyer with the Toronto firm Faskens. In as much spare time as a leading downtown lawyer has, he kept his historical interests alive over thirty years or so working on the 19th century origins of his firm -- then totally unknown to everyone else in the firm.  He's now retired, and here's the book -- as much about the Toronto families involved as about the law practice,  and all the stronger for it.

• Baraka Books, the Montreal publisher that is developing a line in translations of Quebec historical works, presents Peter McCambridge's translation of Paul André Linteau's The History of Montreal -- more a readable short account than the definitive word on the subject, but from the historian who knows the subject.

• This one is recent only to me, but after his Creighton Lecture, I started reading David Cannadine's The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (1990), and was surprised to discover that one of the factors that brought 'em down was ... the Canadian prairies. Once efficient and productive agriculture and fast shipping from the US, Argentina, etc., as well as Canada, hit world markets, global prices of foodstuffs plunged. Suddenly the political economy of most of rural Britain -- territories supporting a thousand farm families plus one aristocratic family collecting rents equivalent to what the other thousand families earned -- could not support that luxury superstructure. There's more to it than that (it's a long book), but I must say I'm kinda chuffed to learn that all those hardscrabble Saskatchewan farmers had a key role in throwing the bastards out.

The Economist gets it [updated]

It's still the truth that cannot be spoken in Canadian discourse, but when it comes to our parliamentary dysfunction, The Economist's Canadian correspondent has been listening:

The appearance of a handful of dissident government MPs is much more unusual in Canada than in other countries with the Westminster system of parliament, such as Britain and Australia. Mr Trudeau, the former prime minister, is often accused of hastening the slide of MPs into irrelevance by consolidating control in the prime minister’s office. But the slide really began in 1919 when the governing Liberals decided that instead of allowing their MPs to select a party leader, he (and in Canada the leader nearly always is a he) would be chosen at a convention of party members. MPs eventually lost the ability to turf out an underperforming leader. (emphasis added - CM) While the new system is deemed to be more democratic, it has had the opposite effect because it makes MPs accountable to their leader, rather than the reverse.... This keeps a tight lid on dissent. In Britain and Australia, where MPs can quite easily get rid of the prime minister, leaders have to keep their MPs happy or face sudden demotion, as Margaret Thatcher and Kevin Rudd both discovered.

The Economist's piece on gestures at independent thought among Harperian MPs is called "Revolt of the Bobbleheads." MD can correct me if I'm wrong in seeing a close paraphrase of my 1867 in the part emphasized above.
(h/t to AW)

Update, April 15:  Andrew Stewart writes:

This is a fascinating story – at stake is how democracy is defined in our country. The Liberal leadership vote, and the party’s expansion of eligibility for voters through the creation of the supporter category is, arguably, another sort of subversion of parliamentary democracy. Has there really been a consistent trend in the centralization of power in the PM’s office since 1919 in Canada, as The Economist correspondent writes, or has it more a question of the person and personal style of the prime minister? Is there any way the influence of conventions can be reined in? Are we experiencing an inglorious revolution, reversing the outcomes of 1688 and returning us to a more autocratic time when Stephen Harper is cast as the patriarchal Oliver Cromwell and Justin Trudeau stands in for the more relaxed and sunny Charles II? If so, it will prove fascinating to have the chance to play out the politics of the 17^th and early 18^th century all over again to see what happens the second time around.

Who is pro-First World War?

The Toronto Sun has a headline today: "NDP MP stands firm on anti-First World War blog post".

Is someone out there pro-First World War? "Hey that would be a great idea. Let's have another First World War."

The "anti-WW1" blog post in question regrets "the thousands of poor bastards who got themselves massacred for a hill" (my translation). "Il n’y a que le « sacrifice » et la « bravoure » à célébrer." 

I'm with Prime Minister Borden on this one.He called the First World War "the suicide of civilization."  And that was before it even got started. Pretty amazing there are people who have had 99 years to think about it, and still seem to be chafing for another one.

There's a Treaty of Utrecht Day? And I missed it?

"In 1713, by the Treaty of Utrecht..."

When I was a little baby historian at Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, it seemed every public statement, every research report, every article, every piece of writing of every kind that came out of our shop began that way, leading into a potted explanation of how it was as a consequence of that treaty that the French government founded the fortified city of Louisbourg, and history began, as far as we were professionally concerned.  It gave me a little seminar in narrative openings: search my works, and you will not find that opening in any of them, until today.

But permit me to note the 300th anniversary of the signing of that treaty of peace between His Most Christian Majesty (France) and His Most Britannic Majesty (Britain), duly signed in the Dutch city of Utrecht, April 11, 1713. Charlevoix has the details. And Active History  Also, Louisbourg will be rocking it this summer. Still, I'm not entirely surprised that today is not a major public holiday,

Utrechtiana: there is a story by Alice Munro, published in her first book of stories Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), called "The Peace of Utrecht."  It is not set in Utrecht; indeed, it is the first of the semi-autobiographical stories rooted in the southwestern Ontario home she called "Jubilee," and henceforth "this was the only kind of story I wrote." So the story is historic in its own right. One of its characters had been studying European alliances at university before returning to Jubilee to negotiate peace with her family and ... well, if you have read a little Munro, you get the picture. Suffice it to say this is not a historical novella about the foundation of Louisbourg.

James Marsh, editor emeritus?

Yes, James Marsh, editor of the Canadian Encyclopedia since forever, recently retired. On the TCE Blog, he offers some reflections:

I see the peculiarities of our country’s bi-national (French and English), multi-ethnic and regional diversities to be both our strength and our challenge. I found the encyclopedia a wonderful means of representing this—much better than narrative histories or theoretical treatises or literary paeans. It was a way also in my mind to avoid the usual simplistic nationalistic clichés with a more nuanced and even paradoxical presentation.

Mapping Toronto online

At Active History, Nathan Ng draws attention to his website of old maps of Toronto, which is indeed pretty wonderful.  Can't help thinking how recently it would have been that an equivalent atlas of historical maps would have required a substantial publishing grant, cost about a hundred bucks a copy, and sat heavy on your bookshelf forever.

That transit plan from 1892 makes one kinda wistful...

Vimy96, Ancestry, and a new HistoryBlog

Canadian artillery at Vimy (Wikipedia: Vimy Ridge)

Tomorrow being the 99th 96th (sorry)anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge, Ancestry.ca is offering free access to its records relevant to the First World War for the next few days.

And here with the details about it is a new to me HistoryBlog: DavidCarrigg.ca  Carrigg is a Vancouver journalist particularly interested in Australian and Canadian experiences of the First World War -- having had ancestors in both armies. He has been blogging steadily for a while on many aspects of WW1 history.

Creighton Lecture at UT: David Cannadine (with update)

The University of Toronto history department has never been very good at publicizing the annual Donald Creighton lecture generously endowed for it long ago; they don't even manage to get one organized every year.

But let's help them out.  The lecture is tomorrow Friday, 4.00 pm at the George Ignatieff Theatre 15 Devonshire Place on the UT Campus.  Free admission.

The speaker tomorrow is David Cannadine, the British historian of practically anything about British history that interests him.  Tomorrow it's Winston Churchill and the Anglo-American Relationship.

I learned about this by attending the rather-thinly attended Margaret MacMillan lecture in International Affairs today, also at the Ignatieff, where the speaker was the other British historian of anything about British history that interest her:  Linda Colley... who is married to Cannadine.  Twofer!

Update, April 7:  Pretty much a full house, actually, not that I'm claiming credit at all.  Best line from the speaker: Apparently Churchill met an American prohibitionist who said he never drank because alcohol combined the kick of an antelope and the venom of a viper. To which Churchill replied: Now that's the drink I've been searching for all my life. (Until then, I had been sure it was impossible to say anything new about Churchill.)

A line you would not hear many other places, from the reception afterwards:  "I was reading The Federalist Papers on my Kobo on the TTC down here, and..."  Ah, historians.

Kickstarting history --- no easy money

The Kickstarter funding project for a book of short biographies that I took note of last month now reports:

Funding UnsuccessfulThis project reached the deadline without achieving its funding goal 3 days ago.

and I know of another book project seeking Indiegogo funding that seems headed for a similar fate.  Crowdsourcing your book project ain't gonna be no day at the beach, it seems.  Would be glad to hear of happier outcomes for historical projects if you know of them.