Season's break

Due to computer issues -- word of advice: installing Windows 10 on an older computer may have unexpected downstream consequences -- I didn't get to post the promised review of 2015 history books before Christmas came down upon us.

So best for the season, and posting will resume post-holiday.

New York Times follows our lead

The New York Times Book Review picks historian Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton as one of 2015's ten best books. We had it here as one of the best... at the end of 2014, just sayin'.

(Okay, in fairness, I think it was a NYT review that brought it to my attention.)

Upcoming: A look at history books of 2015 should be up here just before the blog goes dark for the holidays.

History of Kelly and Berton

The guy

From a piece in the Globe and Mail on Toronto's tweeting septuagenarian former acting mayor Norm Kelly

Mr. Kelly’s Twitter stream is made up of jokes, pictures of Toronto and, as befits a Governor-General’s award-winning historian, random tidbits about days gone by. Oh, and lots and lots of hip hop.

On behalf of the small circle of Governor-General’s award-winning historians, let me declare that Norm Kelly is not a Governor-General’s award-winning historian. Pierre Berton is a Governor-General’s award-winning historian. Norm Kelly did some valuable legwork for him. 'Taint the same thing.

History of Ottawa

Commoners' Publishing announced planner and historian David Gordon's Town and Crown, An Illustrated History of Canada's Capital:

It is the story of the transformation of the region from a sub-arctic wilderness portage to an attractive modern metropolis with a high quality of life. The book examines the period from 1800-2011, and is the first major study that covers both sides of the Ottawa River, addressing the settlement history of aboriginal, French and English peoples.

Its transformation from sub-arctic is still a work in progress, but Gordon has been working on the city's evolution for years.

I wasn't previously aware of Commoners Publishing of Ottawa, but it seems to facilitating a kind of academic self-publishing system, and it has an intriguing line of professorial authors,particularly in its Invenire line

History of the symbols of state, and of referendums on them

In about fifty years, New Zealand may have exhibitions of all the funny flag designs they were debating in 2015.

Meanwhile this is the candidate to replace the Blue Ensign variant of Britain's Union Jack that New Zealand currently uses.  I'm not sure the black, blue and silver fern will challenge the Maple Leaf for best flag design, but it's distinctively New Zealand.  A binding referendum will be held in March 2016,

Speaking of symbols of state, Barbados has plans to abolish the monarchy, Jamaica is considering, and the newish Prime Minister of Australia, though a conservative, is a former head of the Australian Republican movement.

Speaking of referendums, it is notable that Canadian advocates of proportional representation insisted for a couple of decades that the question must be settled by referendum, at least partly because 1) they expected to win, and 2) they feared no incumbent government would support PR.  Now the referendum record has disillusioned them on #1 and there is a government that might support PR. Suddenly PR advocates insist that no referendum is necessary.

Meanwhile, many opponents of PR opposed putting the question to referendum, at least partly because (1) they feared losing, and (2) they trusted that incumbent governments would resist the change.

Now it's the PR sceptics who are insisting on the referendum that the advocates have abandoned. On both sides, principles seem to shift according to the odds.

I can see how changing the nature of the voting system is one of the limited number of topics that may have a special claim to be put directly to the voters.  But I've never been keen on putting big questions to referendum. I'm a parliamentary government guy, I don't like the divisive Yes/No situations a referendum sets up, or how the answers are often skewed by who gets to phrase the question.

It's increasingly clear that there are many strong arguments against electoral reform, and quite a few in favour. It should be an interesting discussion. It might even strengthen our parliamentary institutions if parliament were left to decide. Needing a referendum would be a symptom of parliamentary failure.

Referendum if necessary, but not necessarily a referendum?

Star follows our example

No more Comments button. But if you want to comment, you can send them an email anytime. Because it's (about to be) 2016.

Toward Truth and Reconciliation

The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released yesterday, is accessible from here. That's not say I've read it, but now I know where to find it. And if you do the history of Canada, this probably isn't one you can leave to the specialists.

Like the COP21 final signings in Paris the other day, the TRC presentation seems to have been moving, heartwarming, and encouraging.  Previously disputatious parties seemed to agree that something really significant had been achieved.  There was a lot of media coverage. The prime minister was there to dispense a sunny-ways "we must and will respond fully" message.  I hope so.

But it will be all in the results, not the press conferences.

I can't shake the feeling that the healing needed over the residential schools horrors -- and indeed the way to address the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women (and men!) -- won't come solely from addressing educational issues, or policing and security issues. I don't mean to minimize the importance of those, or the value of dealing with them. But the longer project has to be in enabling the emergence of strong and self-reliant indigenous nations and communities with a sound economic foundation. Surely the underlying cause is there.

That kind of progress, I think, has to come from fresh approaches to the treaty relationship. If the First Nations can shift from being one of the poorest demographics in Canada to one of the prosperous ones, it is going to come via implementation of treaties.  With that shift, I think our other problems -- and I certainly mean to include Euro-Canadian racism, paternalism, and colonialism among the problems -- could begin to be addressed.  But not otherwise.

Gotta say:  Murray Sinclair was impressive yesterday.

Benedict Anderson (1936-2015 RIP) and the Imagined Nation

Triumph of imagination?

I came late to the work and ideas of Benedict Anderson, who died recently. I became aware of him about the same time as I noticed the vanishing Canadianist.  It seemed that a lot of history professors in Canadian universities who once would have been labelled as Canadianists had become political historians or labour historians or historians of women or whatever. Someone explained to me that after Anderson published Imagined Communities in 1983, scholars and their departments went looking for other labels. They had became less keen on linking their professional identities to something imaginary.

But it seemed to me plausible enough to accept Canada as an imagined community, "a political nation, politically created," as I recall Jack Granatstein saying somewhere. The fact that its coming into existence with its present boundaries and structures was not inevitable or entirely "organic" did not need to mean it was less a nation. Indeed, the question of how it was imagined into being and into continuing existence suddenly seemed more, not less, worthy of study.

So I was happy to see, in this obituary appreciation of Benedict Anderson in the American New Republic, the argument that Anderson admired nationalism's potential to be "an integrative imaginative process that allows us to feel solidarity for strangers."

In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals (particularly in Europe?) to insist on the near-pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love,” Anderson wrote in Imagined Communities. “The cultural products of nationalism—poetry, prose fiction, music, plastic arts—show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles.”

Exactly.

Human Rights Museum gets some love

Martin Knelman in the Toronto Star notices that, after a year in operation, the Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg is a hit.

The museum is exceeding attendance targets, drawing tourists and boosting the prairie city’s economy. Its target for annual attendance was 250,000, but in its first year it drew 400,000.

Meanwhile, it has won 24 international, national and regional awards.

It's been called one of Canada's best looking buildings, made Travel and Leisure magazine's "top five coolest buildings in the world" list, and helped put Winnipeg on the must-see destinations list of National Geographic Traveller.

As Knelman says, this all follows teething pains that involved a "brutal set of obstacles, most conspicuously a vitriolic and long-running chorus of hostility." 

Image: Toronto Star.

Yirush on Wright on Creighton. UPDATE: a note from Ramsay Cook

(Some months ago Craig Yirush, a friend of this blog who teaches history at University of California Los Angeles, offered a review of a book he had been reading, Donald Wright's new biography of Donald Creighton.  There has not had much take-up on my offer to open blog space to readers' reviews of recent and relevant history books, but the offer remains open, and here at least is this one. Thanks, Craig!)

Donald Wright, Donald Creighton: A Life in History (University of Toronto Press, 2015), reviewed by Craig Yirush  

Donald Wright’s new biography of Donald Creighton is a triumph. Elegantly written, as befits its subject, it does justice to the life of a man, now neglected and even maligned, who was arguably the most significant English Canadian historian of the 20th century. Indeed, it says much about the historical amnesia of the present that Creighton needs to be rehabilitated. But such is the power of Canada’s post-1968 makeover that someone who was a towering figure in mid-20th century Canadian life and letters should seem so alien to us in the 21st century.

In Wright’s compelling biography we learn about Creighton’s Methodist ancestors, his upbringing in a house full of books and imperial patriotism, his literary ambitions as a young man, his iconoclastic embrace of modernism at Victoria College, his historical education at Oxford, and his epiphany about the centrality of the Saint Laurence river in Canadian history, which became the subject of his first book, and which made his reputation as the rising star of the Canadian historical profession in the 1930s. In the 1940s, Creighton wrote a history of Canada (Dominion of the North) shaped by his conviction that Canada’s destiny lay with the east-west pull of the river, an imperative that justified Canada’s independent existence in North America.

Searching for his next big subject, Creighton chose to write a biography of John A. Macdonald. Creighton’s two volumes on Macdonald garnered him accolades at home and abroad. Reviewing the first volume in the English magazine The Spectator, Max Beloff praised Creighton as “one of the half-dozen best historians now writing anywhere in the English-speaking world.” In 1959, Creighton’s reputation was such that he was appointed to a Commonwealth commission on the future of the Rhodesian federation, where he argued for a constitutional right of secession, a surprising position for him to take given his later hostility to Quebec’s sovereignty movement. The 1950s were the highpoint of Creighton’s career. While he continued to produce compelling histories, the Canada which he loved, and which he lad lovingly chronicled, fell apart around him in the 1960s and 1970s. The rise of Quebec separatism, the federal government’s embrace of bilingualism and binationalism, and the growing cultural influence of the U.S., left Creighton, who died in 1979, a bitter man.

Wright narrates Creighton’s rise and fall movingly, though never allowing his admiration for the man to temper his criticisms. And he makes a compelling case that without understanding Creighton we can’t understand the fraught history of 20th century Canada. For this alone, the biography is worth reading. Wright also contends that Creighton was not just a great Canadian, but a great historian. Yet he is severely critical of Creighton’s historical scholarship. It is, Wright tells us, full of stereotypes of French Canadians, Metis, and First Nations; excessively romantic and nationalistic; and virulently anti-American, leaving the reader to wonder whether there is anything of value in Creighton’s oeuvre? The answer, I think, lies in Wright’s deft reconstruction of Creighton’s approach to history. As he puts it, “The desire that drove Creighton to write history was the desire to feel the reality of the past . . .” (129). As the biography shows, Creighton had an essentially aesthetic and emotive relationship to the past. He believed deeply that history was a story, which should be told as elegantly and as vividly as possible. So he wrote narrative histories of big subjects, full of novelistic details that made the past live in the present. Creighton also wrote history for a general audience, but without sacrificing argument or analysis. Canadian historians may no longer accept Creighton’s Laurentian thesis, or his heroic account of Macdonald’s nation-building, but perhaps after they put down Wright’s biography they’ll reflect on Creighton’s artistry, and think about ways to emulate it in their own work.

One small quibble. I ordered the hardcover as I wanted the dust jacket with the wonderful photo of Creighton which features prominently on the UT Press website. Alas, when the book arrived, there was no dust jacket, just a plain black binding. My advice - buy the cheaper paperback instead.

Update (same day): a note from Ramsay Cook:

Craig Yurish’s praise for Donald Wright’s biography of Donald Creighton is well deserved. But his understanding of what he calls the post 1968 “makeover” of Canada is seriously deficient. He claims that “bi-nationalism”(whatever that is) was “embraced.” If he means the claim that Canada is composed of “two nations,” the exact opposite was the case as the 1982 constitution makes evident.  

(We can secure review copies for readers ready to review, but Craig Yirush purchased his own copy -- it wasn't us that went off with his dustjacket! Update: Donald Wright confirms UTP has no dustjacket on the hardcover,.)

The Globe at the Museum of History

It's a bit late for an exhibition that opened most of more than a year ago and closes next month, but the other day the Globe and Mail's Robert Everett-Green reviewed the Rebellion and Confederation exhibit at the Museum of History. (Parts of an interview I did with the exhibit's curators appears in the exhibit and on its website.)

Everett-Green starts with the usual sneer at confederation for being a matter of talking (you know, democracy, parliamentarianism, reason, due process, all that) and therefore boring.

Canada was accomplished by talking, which was why I and my classmates found the story so dull. Real history, for us, was the bloodier national narratives of other countries.

He then moves on to dismiss as cynical -- and even as a surrender to Stephen Harper's military vision of history -- the curators' determination to link confederation to events of the previous thirty years  (armed conflict, civil strife, cultural confrontation, political deadlock).

It’s easy to see the former prime minister’s shadow over the current Confederation exhibition at the Canadian Museum of History, the institution he refashioned in 2013

The part of his review that has caught the most attention -- how I learned of it, actually -- is his observation that there is not much in it about indigenous peoples.

Museum of hist's Confed exhibit missing indigenous roots - This is why we need renewed discussion of #cdnhistory 1/2 https://t.co/jQJZrTBDgV

— Thomas Peace (@tpcanoe) December 9, 2015

though Everett-Green also tells us, "What is accurate about the absence of indigenous people from this show is that it perfectly mirrors the imagined reality of those who wrote our first constitution." (Update, December 15:  Everett-Green's piece has been updated online to confirm there is more indigenous material in the exhibition than he had originally suggested.)

Sunny ways down south: would Yank strategists consider doing a Trudeau?

Did you hear about the Republican presidential nomination candidate who was so wrong that the other Republican presidential nomination candidates noticed?

In Canada a few months ago, even observers who detested the Harper government tended to concede its Machiavellian cleverness in the use of money and strategy to micro-target, to concoct wedge-issues, and to rally the base, all in the service of turning 30% core support into another majority. Tax gimmickry, the fomenting of hijab hysteria, ad-buys selling fear and anger -- we may have hated them, but lots of analysts thought they were clever campaign tactics. They might be mean but they are smart, went the refrain.

Funny how campaign strategists are all geniuses until they turn out to be idiots. In the end, the candidate who most effectively rejected anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, rejected divisiveness, and appealed constantly to Canadians' better natures ("Sunny ways") won overwhelmingly. Nasty strategy turned out -- who knew? -- to be stupid strategy. Supporting refugees, instead of vilifying them, turns out to be just what we Canadians do.

I wonder if there is a genius American political strategist who is looking at the tsunami of hatred and division and micro-targeting that most of the American candidates are currently surfing on, and then looking north and saying, "Hmmmm...."?

More history of museum appointments

Updating an item of November 24:

Elizabeth Thompson of iPolitics reports the new government's attempt to get 33 appointees to renounce the reappointments-in-advance the previous government doled out to them before its defeat does include Mark O'Neill, CEO of the Canadian Museum of History. He is among those who have received a official letter making the request.

Thompson also confirms that these re-appointments were planned directly by the Prime Minister's Office, not by the ministries concerned, and that extending Conservative influence for as long as possible was very specifically the aim. Some of the early re-appointments  extend terms into the 2020s. Apparently the Conservative re-appointments covered every single board seat at the National Energy Board through the life of the current parliament.

Thompson reports that the new government assures those who do renounce their early reappointments that they are welcome to seek consideration for re-appointment at the appropriate time. Some hold at-pleasure appointments, in any case, and could be removed even if they decline to abandon Mr. Harper's gift to them.

Should he agree to renounce his reappointment, O'Neill would be in the last six months of his current five year term, so he would be entitled to some prompt confirmation about his future from the new government.

Historical artist Irma Coucill 1918-2015 RIP

A very brief obit notes the recent death of portrait artist Irma Coucill recently.

Coucill's images of fathers of confederation, governors-general, and prime ministers were once widely printed, particularly around the centennial year almost fifty years ago.

She was also the artist of inductee portraits for the Hockey Hall of Fame, the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, and other institutions.  She died at 97.

Photo: Toronto Star.

Ryan O'Connor's History of Christopher Moore

Podcasting?  Am I supposed to be podcasting history too? There's tweeting, and blogging, and you know, books and magazines and talking to people.  How many media is enough?  Instagram, what the hell?

Happily, historian Ryan O'Connor IS podcasting history, so maybe I don't have to. And after he called me up recently, we recorded a long conversation about, well, me and my historical career.

All the autobiography that never turns up on this blog is now up at Interesting People with Ryan O'Connor.  It goes about a mile a minute for most of an hour, and you can play it from here  

Season of scholarly press book deals

Published a book with a university press? (No small segment of readers here have, I guess.) This is the season when many university presses promote special sales to their authors on all their titles. Here's UBC Press's offer.

We are extending your author/volume editor discount to 50% off all available UBC Press books until December 31, 2015

And here is University of Toronto Press's End-of-Year Sale promising 40 to 70% discounts on over 2000 titles (some by me!), to authors and non-authors alike.

Forty per cent is not as huge as it sounds. That's the normal discount (off list price) that publishers offer bookstores, who cover their overheads from the list price.  Sold to you directly, there is no bookstore cost.

Still a deal's a deal.

Imagine a parliament that debated.

There's a debate today in the British House of Commons on a government resolution to expand the bombing in Syria and Iraq. Significant numbers of Labor MPs on the opposition benches have been declaring they will vote with the government on this question. Meanwhile, a Conservative MP's amendment opposing the government's plan is awaiting a vote.

The dissidents in either party may be unpopular with their leaders for a while, and perhaps with some of their own constituents too, but none will be expelled from caucus or otherwise silenced. In functioning parliamentary democracies, occasional differences of opinion among MPs are understood to be an essential part of the process of representative democracy.

Is there really no Liberal MP in Canada who now supports continued bombing in Syria by Canadian forces, or no one in the opposition who opposes it? We'll never hear from them, that's pretty certain.

Update, December 3: Sixty-six Labor MPs supported the Conservative government's bombing motion. (Labour had made it a free vote for its MPs.)  Seven Conservatives opposed their government's motion. (The Conservatives had made it a party discipline measure, a "whipped" vote.)

Update, December 4:  An indicator how how much parliaments and governments are being jerked on ISIS's chain: Two weeks before the Paris shootings, a British Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee (6 conservatives, 4 Labor, one ScotNat) concluded:

there should be no extension of British military action into Syria unless there is a coherent international strategy that has a realistic chance of defeating ISIL and of ending the civil war in Syria. We consider that the focus on the extension of airstrikes against ISIL in Syria is a distraction.

A handful of gunmen shoot up a Western city, and suddenly the RAF is back to turning over the rubble in Raqqa.

Image: Guardian

The decline in history students

One hears anecdotes about the decline of history enrollments.  But, you know, profs are gloomy whiners... it's probably just anecdote.  But American stats say no:

If the numbers are right and if I’ve run them correctly, history departments graduated roughly 3,400 fewer students in AY 2013-14 than in the previous year. That’s a 9 percent decline, and it’s surprising because no year-over-year change in the last 15 years—up or down—has come close to being this large. And if we look at the number of history undergrad degrees as a percentage of all bachelors degrees, we see a slide that started in 2007 and has continued into 2014–a year in which history majors claimed only 1.73 percent of all bachelor’s degrees.

 Allen Mikaelian, author of this HNN piece, also has a blog full of "data visualizations" on the state of the history trade.