Active History goes all YouTube

Is there anything more fun/dangerous/time consuming than unintentionally falling into a YouTube rabbit hole? You start out looking for Stephen Colbert’s Daft Punk video and two hours later have somehow landed on bloopers from Seinfeld. 

So those media crazy kids at Active History thought... "What our kind of websurfers really want is an ActiveHistory Youtube channel!"  And here it is.

The one on "Bovine Tuberculosis in Canada 1895-1960" ain't exactly the Dead Parrot sketch, but it confirms they have an impressive range of items up.

History of Ukraine, history of democracy

Does everyone in Canada know someone Ukrainian? Maybe not, but it is not just a prairies thing.  My own neighbourhood is Toronto's Ukrainian district. (Lots of Baltic-states people too; the Poles centre over Roncesvalles way.)

So you cannot help but care about what's going on in Kyiv. But not so easy to know exactly how.  Any government that wants closer ties with Vladimir Putin must have a deathwish, one would think, but it was legitimately elected not long ago.  Does that mean it reflects the views of a lot of people in the eastern Ukraine far from the mob in big-city Kyiv who can fill the square in front of Parliament and demand their own way. (Recall the Cairo crowds who wanted the duly elected Morsi removed. Well, they got that ... and a new Pharoah.)

Events in Ukraine need a historian, I think. And here is one. Timothy Snyder, the American author of Bloodlands and wise thinker on things eastern-European has a long essay in the New York Review of Books

What does it mean to come to the Maidan? The square is located close to some of the major buildings of government, and is now a traditional site of protest. Interestingly, the word maidan exists in Ukrainian but not in Russian, but even people speaking Russian use it because of its special implications. In origin it is just the Arabic word for “square,” a public place. But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agora means in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet, but a place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society. During the protests the word maidan has come to mean the act of public politics itself, so that for example people who use their cars to organize public actions and protect other protestors are called the automaidan.

Hat tip to History News Network for noting this one.

History of Voting

The Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, recently proposed that almost 6 million Americans who have served out their sentences for a criminal conviction but remain stripped of their right to vote should be re-enfranchised. The United States is in a small minority of democratic countries in which ex-convicts can remain permanently stripped of their right to vote.

It is striking how hesitant support for this measure is, even among progressive commentators. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones declares that the right to vote is as important as free speech and the rule of law -- but he'd negotiate a cautious, maybe after five years, restoration of the vote to ex-cons. He's aware that disenfranchising ex-cons is most an anti-black, anti-poor, anti-Democrat voter suppression tactic, but he also senses behind the rules a deep visceral tough-on-crime sentiment that is politically popular, so he temporizes.

In Canada, voting is a right of citizenship. It is not just ex-cons who vote, incarcerated prisoners vote while they are in prison. They have a sentence and they have to serve it, but that doesn't make them non-citizens.

Why should you read this book?

Because Penguin India just agreed to pulp all the copies of it available in India

Story about India's retreat from intellectual freedom here.  And about resistance here.

Update, March 1:  Happened to see something heartening: Toronto Public Library system lists eleven copies of this book and, right now, 88 requests for it.

History of Shilling and Finance Ministers

Amid all the wheel spinning -- and spin-spinning -- in yesterday's federal budget, Finance Minister Flaherty quoted a few bromides about fiscal rectitude from John Rose, "Canada's first minister of finance."

Confederation nerds all over the country said, huh?  Wasn't Alexander Galt....?

Actually they are both sort of right. Galt joined the Canadian cabinet as finance minister in July 1867, but resigned in November, just days after the first meeting of the commons. DCB has the nasty details:

In the autumn of 1867 the Commercial Bank of Canada, struggling with financial difficulties, sought the government’s help to avert bankruptcy. Galt first used his connections with the Bank of Montreal to seek a solution, but when banking circles refused to intervene, he decided to advise the cabinet to provide $500,000 in assistance to the Commercial Bank, in the interest of preventing the widespread panic that would ensue upon its closure. A second refusal resulted in the bank’s ceasing operations, and Galt, who felt that he had been “betrayed” by Macdonald in this matter, chose to resign, a step he took officially on 7 Nov. 1867.

Rose replaced him and introduced the first budget, etc. So Galt had the title first, but Rose did the job mostly. He got to be the first to say things like "I say that we ought to be most careful in our outlay, and consider well every shilling we expend.” -- now repeated by Flaherty, who knows about shilling.

Aaron Wherry of Maclean's has a nice backgrounder on this.

Another February blizzard in Ottawa “... And my blood runs cold ...”

Not this one from Feb 29, 1012

The tailor Patrick Whelan was hanged today, February 11, 1869 for the assassination of D’Arcy McGee on Sparks Street in Ottawa (it's pretty questionable whether he was truly the guilty party).

Everything about “the tailor with the red whiskers” was noted by the newspapers. He first appeared in court wearing a small green rosette, a white vest, and garnet cuff links. On the final day, however, he came dressed in black, and upon hearing the dreaded verdict of guilty said from the dock:

 “Now I am held to be a black assassin. And my blood runs cold. But I am innocent. I never took that man’s blood.”

From the Dictionary of Canadian History online

Here is a link to the Trial of Patrick James Whelan, from 1868 online here

Apparently 1869 was the snowiest winter on record in Ottawa and on this date a blizzard began that lasted 2 weeks - or a fortnight in more poetic terms.  The year before, the winter of 1867 - 1868 – Canada’s Confederation year, was the coldest on record.

Wasn't expecting that: Belgium adopts a Canadian-style Senate

Belgium, having moved from a unitary state to a federation in recent decades, has now reformed its upper house. Who says no one loves the Canadian Senate? Belgium has moved from a directly-elected to a mostly appointed upper house and transformed its role from actually powerful to mostly symbolic, all the while claiming that the new powerless version will be a forum for the regions.

The newest reform will change the composition of the Senate to 50 elected indirectly by the Community/Regional parliaments and 10 co-opted, removing all directly-elected members. Its powers and functions will also be hugely curtailed: it will no longer take part in regular legislation, will no longer have the power of inquiry or to ask ministers questions. The only legislative power it retains regards to the constitution and the monarchy. Instead of being a true legislative chamber, the Senate is supposed to become a forum for the Regions and Communities. The reform was a compromise between those wishing to abolish and those wanting to retain the chamber (the latter being mainly French-speaking parties, if I’m not mistaken).

Fruits and Votes has more.

History of The Names of Things in Nova Scotia and Toronto

Nova Scotia is thinking about adopting that mid-February holiday that some other provinces.  Just to prove they can be as bland as Upper Canada, they are considering the name Family Day. But other contenders include Joseph Howe Day, and some people are advocating for Viola Desmond Day. (More Viola Desmond from this blog here and here.

In Toronto, meanwhile, a proposal to rename Union Station for John A. Macdonald seems to have been rejected by public opinion. The idea of renaming Avenue Road (speaking of bland!) Macdonald Boulevard seems to be spinning its wheels. But there is always next year.

H/t Ron Caplan.

History Matters to Toronto ... and Quebec City

The History Matters talk series, organized by people associated with ActiveHistory.ca, returns to Toronto public libraries this month, with some lively topics.  Details here.

And Charlevoix draws our attention to some remarkable 3-D reconstructions of Quebec City's lower town at various moments in its history.  (Compréhension française valable).

History of blogging and borders (Updated)

Andrew Sullivan's remarkable and ceaselessly original American blog The Dish, funded entirely by about a million dollars a year in subscriptions volunteered by its readers, is deep into its renewal drive.  As part of that, it takes note of "Dishheads Around the Globe" and gets a slew of enthusiastic shoutouts from various countries, plus this contrarian viewpoint from Canada:

Noting that pageviews from Canada are not even a twentieth of your domestic following, I find my own choice not to subscribe is sustained. It’s a very Yank phenomenon, your blog.

In the 1930s, a Canadian public-policy guru, Graham Spry, said of broadcasting (he meant radio, but it applied to television, and more widely too): “It’s the state – or the United States.” Either Canada built up public broadcasting or there would be nothing but American broadcasters sending us American news, culture, personalities. So Canada built a public broadcasting network – and regulated private broadcasters as well.

There’s no sign of publicly funded blogging on our horizon. But no Canadian blog with ambitions anything like yours could survive on subscriptions. And if we subscribe to The Dish, we reinforce the American blogging hegemony. You run a great blog, but despite the Kiwi dreamer who sent you his money and hoped for more rugby posts, it’s gotta be pretty much all America all the time.

Now if your 170,000 Canadian pageviews could translated into $20 apiece for a Canadian blogging consortium…? Hmmm. (But since 170 of them are probably me alone, there’s only a thousand or so of us looking in, anyway!)

Is this right? Are there solutions? (The author of the comment is also the blogger of this blog.)

Update:  Russ Chamberlayne suggests:

Can we in Canada (and other places with smaller readerships) foresee a day when our blogs become less dependent on the bloggers' resources and more institutionalized? Graham Spry would have suggested state-supported public blogcasting, but I wonder about the possibilities that will arise when the on-line newspapers of today evolve into something financially viable. Could those neo-newspapers -- less like conventional papers and perhaps more news-and-views journals -- be a remunerative home for bloggers? The blogosphere would undoubtedly continue, with interesting writers volunteering time and effort to mount the sort of stand-alone column we see today. But a band of Canadian bloggers providing material to a history or humanities or Canada journal might help attract enough eyeballs to yield subscribers and patrons.

Mark R. Harris, who teaches at Technologico de Monterrey in Sinaloa, Mexico, writes:

An interesting question that relates to your post "History of blogging and borders" is what kind of non-Canadian readership there is for Canada-oriented blogs (and other materials). It is probably not huge; but for my part, I am an American who reads and subscribes to quite a number of blogs related to Canadian history and literature. Canada is far from the only country that I have that kind of interest in, but like Mexico it does have a special status in my eyes because of its neighbor status with the U.S. (I have lived and worked in Mexico for the past three years as a teacher at a university-based high school or "prepa.")
 I'm ashamed of the fact that with the exception of some residents of Canada-contiguous states such as Maine and Minnesota, my countrymen generally take all things Canadian for granted. I try to add my small amount of weight to the other side of the scale.
 I hope your fine blog has many American readers, perhaps more than I might expect. Do you hear from them much?

Um, no.  American readers, is you there?

Black History month: William Peyton Hubbard

At the John A. Macdonald 199th birthday dinner in Toronto last month, among the many costumed participants was a handsome black man who told me he was portraying William Peyton Hubbard, a protege of George Brown. There were some George Browns at the dinner too, 2014 being kinda bipartisan about all this.  Hubbard, a longtime Toronto city councillor, was the city's prominent black politician.

The Hubbard story was new to me, and the DCB has not got to him yet either -- he died in 1935. But he may be emerging as one of the stars of this year's Black History Month events in T.O.

Historicist was on this story years ago and has most of the details. There seems to be a bit of a legend of how Hubbard pulled George Brown from drowning in the Don River and Brown got him into politics. It seems a little implausible, as the story never made The Globe, and Hubbard first ran years after Brown died. Historicist treats it carefully, and there does seem to be basis for the Brown-Hubbard connection, even if the publisher-politician never quite went into the river.

There is a biography of Hubbard, Against All Odds, by his descendant Stephen L Hubbard. You could pick up a used copy online for about $8.