Truth and Beyak

I'm a free speech guy and tend to believe that the response to bad speech should be better speech, rather than silencing. And I'm not keen on throwing people out of the Senate for saying hurtful and unpopular things. But Senator Beyak has been testing my commitment to both those propositions.

For the next while, we are going to run here a series of short excerpts from the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.  I'm using Volume One: Summary, the edition published by James Lorimer Publishing, available in a solid paperback for under $30,. As the copyright page notes, the report is in the public domain. Anyone may reproduce all or part of it, and the full text is freely available online as well. (pdf format, Adobe Acrobat required)

Canada's residential school system for Aboriginal children was an education system in name only for much of its existence. These residential schools were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture -- the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society, led by Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.  (first sentences of the preface)

Histories of the history of Vimy Ridge

"No matter what the constitutional historians may say, it was on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, and not on any other date, that Canada became a nation"
         ---  D.J. Goodspeed, military historian, 1969

"Victory at Vimy only happened because, in 1917, Canada was already a nation  -- one that could raise, equip, and send overseas a fighting force with the leadership and esprit de corps of a national army capable of fighting the Vimy battle."
          --- Christopher Moore, occasional constitutional historian, 2017

"The year 2017 is the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation. It is also the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during the First World War.  ... The two events are in curious competition as founding myths."

         ---  Amy Shaw, reviewer and historian, 2017

The centenary of the Vimy battle is just over a week away, and for once it seems there actually is one of those edifying historical discussions the country is so thinly provided with most of the time.

In the Literary Review of Canada, just out, Amy Shaw reviews Tim Cook's Vimy: The Battle and the Legend which covers both the events of the battle and the "legend" that grew up around it. Shaw is troubled by the claims made for Vimy, but finds that Cook "plays down the role of officialdom in shaping the collective memory. His argument hinges on the grassroots nature of myth making" and indeed on the role of art, from Walter Allward's monument to recent novels like Jane Urquhart's Stone Carvers.

It's too bad Shaw and the LRC did not also include in the review essay The Vimy Myth by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift, which I have been reading recently. It's an exhaustive accounting of ideas about war-making and nation-making in Canada, and a sustained frontal assault on "Vimyism."

By Vimyism we mean a network of ideas and symbols that centre on how Canada's Great War experience somehow represents the country's supreme triumph ... and affirm that the war itself and anyone who fought and died in it should be unconditionally revered and commemorated -- and not least because it marked the country's birth.

Friday night in Toronto, historian Eric McGeer speaks at Yorkminster Park Church on the topic “On Vimy’s Storied Hill” and the theme “Vimy Ridge made Canada – but what have Canadians made of Vimy Ridge?” (Facebook details here.) Referring to McKay and Swift, the friend of this blog who is one of the organizers of the talk suspects "Eric will want to challenge some of their positions in his talk."
  

Breakfast for ConstitutioNerds

We are amused.

Wednesday morning I'm honoured to be joining a group of constitutional history geeks for a breakfast at the University of Toronto. This is about as nerdy-historyist as I can imagine: the event.celebrates the 150th anniversary of royal assent to the British North America Act, 1867. (March 29 was a Friday that year.)  Should be fun.

The rest of you, celebrate in your own fashion.

Update, same day.  I learned over brecky about theconfederationdebates.ca  -- crowd sourced constitutional publishing.  A consortium of scholars has undertaken to scan and place online all the texts of all the "confederation debates"  -- every official discussion not just of confederation 1867 but also of every province later joining or not joining confederation, and of each treaty negotiated with and by First Nations. The crowd sourcing part is that volunteers are invited to transcribe the texts that are now available online into searchable digital text, which will then become a permanent searchable database.

Now, of course, another way to mark Canada150 would be to have your university or institution invite me to give my "Living Tree" lecture, as McMaster is doing next week.  Slots for the fall still available.

Quality of the bacon-and-eggs conversation:  I was recommended two must read recent books over breakfast, neither of them specifically about Canada or confederation. I found when I returned home that the Toronto Public Library (a more reliable source than University of Toronto Libraries, I have learned in recent years) has both books available only as non-circulating reference titles. And Chapters/Indigo only lists one of them available for order in hardcopy form.  That's sophisticated.

Book (well, Poster) Notes: Useful Charts' Timeline of Canadian History

We have been in touch before with Matt Baker -- Ph.D, expat Brit, former school teacher in Sri Lanka, designer, and entrepreneur of the Vancouver-based chart and poster business Useful Charts.

I have found that in early grades, visual materials tend to be incorporated often. However, once a person reaches the higher grades, learning becomes almost exclusively based on reading texts and listening to lectures. There is often very little visually-based material available on more advanced subjects, particularly in the humanities.

Happily, Useful Charts now has its Timeline of Canadian History published and on sale. And he's sent along a review copy:

Too often, the story of Canada is told in a strictly linear fashion: First Nations, followed by New France, then British control, and finally confederation. But for a country as large as Canada, this presents a skewed version of reality. What I aimed to do in creating this timeline was to show what was happening in various regions separately but simultaneously.

Having seen the real thing, I'd say a smallish reproduction, as above, doesn't do justice. The real thing, 24x36 with bright eco-friendly colours on card stock, is appealingly browseable and gets a lot of info down  -- from "The Iroquois Confederacy can likely be dated to...."  to "2014: Parliament Hill shooting" --  without seeming cluttered. $19.95 (cheaper when bundled.) .

L'affaire Potter and the new Potter book

Thoughtful words on Andrew Potter's resignation from McGill Institute for the Study of Canada from Joseph Heath at In Due Course.

We've disagreed on this blog in the past, but that wasn't a firing offence, for sure. Good luck to Andrew Potter whatever he chooses to do next.

And this looks more interesting that the controversial column:  the new book he has co-authored with a crew of scholars, and very sceptical about "electoral reform" it would seem.

History of "But it's so important for the kids!"

 Canada: Story of Us:  "Here's a shocker: Loyalist Laura Secord was born in the US."

John Doyle of the Globe and Mail looks at the CBC's Canada150 project "Canada: the Story of Us," and sighs:

An opportunity has been missed with this glossy, featherweight, politically correct concoction.

...What we create in art, popular or lowbrow, is actually the real “story” of us. But for grown-ups, which Canada: The Story of Us clearly is not.

The best the CBC can do for history during Canada150 is the local franchise of an international project that has previously done American and Australian version.  I had some glancing contacts with some of the local staff in 2015, and, though they were well-intentioned (and constrained), I was not left eager for more involvement. ('Course I was pretty sceptical of "Canada: A People's History" too, and was rather pleasantly surprised.)

"Canada: The Story of Us" premieres Sunday night on the CBC Newwork. Doyle does notice that there are a lot of actors and not many historians of Canada in the program, but if critical reaction follows his, it will be "historians" who take the rap, most likely.

Blair Stonechild, Histories of reconciliation

Last night in Toronto, Blair Stonechild, historian at the Indigenous University of Canada in Regina, was in Toronto talking at St. Joseph's Chapel on the University of Toronto campus about "Reconciling with Indigenous Spirituality," and referencing his recent book The Knowledge Seeker: Embracing Indigenous Spirituality.

I've been reading more about the treaty relationship and control of resources and sovereignty than about spirituality as elements in the reconciliation that is needed. Stonechild didn't directly address the connections between the two. It's complicated.  But he impressed a large audience last night.

Prize Watch: The Cohen

The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing has announced a shortlist.  It's a prize for political writing, named for a popular MP, but the juries like to take a broad view of what constitutes politics.  Of their five books this year, one looks like racial issues, one legal journalism, and one history, and only two are politics narrowly defined. But hey, category creep happens with many prizes, and juries do as they will. Everything is political, I guess. And nice to see Ian McKay and Jamie Swift in there for their reconsideration of Vimy -- a book I was expecting but had not realized was even published.
Here is the Cohen's own shortlist presentation.
  

Kamal Al-Solaylee for Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (To Everyone)
HarperCollins Canada
"Thoughtful and refreshing, Brown has a chance to become a made-in-Canada intellectual landmark."


Christie Blatchford for Life Sentence: Stories from Four Decades of Court Reporting – Or, How I Fell Out of Love with the Canadian Justice System (Especially Judges)
Doubleday Canada
"An unrelenting critique of a cloistered branch of government."


Ian McKay and Jamie Swift for The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War
Between the Lines
"An authoritative, sometimes indignant debunking of ‘Vimyism.'"

 

James McLeod for Turmoil, as Usual: Politics in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Road to the 2015 Election
Creative Publishers
"McLeod’s quirky, intricate account has much to teach about Newfoundland."



Noah Richler for The Candidate: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Doubleday Canada

"With candour, humour, and fascinating detail, Richler lures us into the world of political candidacy."

Blogger Helen Webberley comments from Auz:

I am particularly interested in Noah Richler's book, The Candidate: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

I am assuming the topic is as relevant for Netherlands, France,
Australia, Germany and the USA etc as it is for Canada. I am also
assuming that once the prize is awarded, the books will be distributed to book sellers around the world.

From your mouth to God's ear, Helen!

History of vote buying

These stories about vote-buying in the Conservative Party leadership race -- the O'Leary team that accused the Bernier tearm now being accused itself -- must be the oldest of old news.  It's a vote-buying contest, ain't it?  The candidate whose team buys the most "memberships" (ie, votes) gets to pick the winner.  That's the way all mass-party leadership races work  It's the way they are supposed to work.

Complaints that some team has bought too many votes ...?  Doesn't that just mean they are going to win? And once they have the leadership, who would be able to sanction them for ... winning?

Historical question: given that no leadership race has been free of these allegations, has any leadership race winner ever been sanctioned for committing or condoning irregularities in the accumulation of memberships?

History of Chuck Berry

A minor classic, in which the lyrics are all Cajun, but here somehow the beat starts to go all Mexicali. Chuck is paying the white-boy backup band minimum wage, no doubt.

You might prefer Johnny B. Goode with Bruce and the E-Street Band.  Vas-y, Johnny, vas-y.

An appreciation by Bill Wyman, who turns out NOT to be the Stones' bassist.  It goes to show you never can tell.

History in the market

Yesterday Active History published a Canadian Historical Association document that takes note of the perceived unsuitability of history degrees in the job market and proposes a number of solutions.

As instructors of History who benefit materially and intellectually from the thousands of students who attend and participate in our courses every year, it is incumbent upon us to make the link between a History degree and history-related jobs more obvious for students, employers and the wider community.

It is good to see academic historians responding to the challenges of declining enrolment and declining prestige for History departments. There surely is no quick or simple solution, but  the purposes of historical education need always to be interrogated and justified, and no doubt this new stimulus will encourage that process.

(Good also to see Active History, an initiative launched by a self-starting group of bright young historians, become the default venue for circulating this kind of critical self-examination within the profession.)

But critical self-examination does not go very far in the CHA committee's proposals. Instead of a deep examination of a historical education and its links to the wider culture, they open with proposals for better marketing:

a communications plan or promotional campaign to encourage greater awareness among students, parents, professors, the media and employers about the skills developed through a history degree and how these skills can be applied in the job market.

... plus renaming courses to look more attractive, plus working with career development centres, and so on.

Later sections of the report, on what professors could do, and what students could do, are thin: professors could urge students to get career advice, students could create "media analysis reports" or business case studies.

Well, yes. Marketing has its place. But what's missing here is any call for a serious, critical self-examination by history departments of what they do and how they teach, particularly how they teach undergraduates.  (Surely if they want history students to create media analysis reports, they might have recommended that departments become innovative in the kinds of assignments they provide, not put the expectation on students themselves)

When I visit history departments, I meet lots of smart, dedicated hardworking faculty, and lots of smart motivated students too. But I find that departments are still largely oriented around the doctoral mindset.  For history departments, the real history student is one who is moving toward that kind of long term, intensely specialized primary research project. And the real history professor is one who then gets to research and teach his or her special subject, more or less forever. History departments still look like places mostly oriented around the convenience of individual faculty members, who are enabled to do what interests them.

Doctoral work is important, and justifiable, at least for that small cohort of students who will go on to be the professors for the next generation.  Beyond that, do history departments really have goals and objectives at all? Do they really have identifiable plans for what services they hope to provide to their students and to society? Or serious, measurable programs by which to evaluate how they are delivering on those plans?

Image source

Update: March 20:  An academic friend who wishes not to be identified asks what I mean by "measurable results in terms of history departments’ services to students and society," referring me to projects in other countries that put academic knowledge under political control.

Well, I'm not convinced that public institutions like universities should be immune to political accountability. But in this case I was not advocating for more outside control of how history departments teach history.

Having worked outside large organizations all my life, I'm hardly up on the literature. It's just that writing several substantial institutional histories has gradually persuaded me that managed institutions tend to be more successful than unmanaged or poorly managed institutions.

Frankly, I take it for granted that most undergraduate education in the humanities in Canada is terribly inadequate to what students need and deserve. And it strikes me that academic departments lack the management tools to address that problem meaningfully. A departmental campaign to identify and implement ways to better teach undergraduates might well make unwelcome demands on individual faculty members, but that need not imply outside control. If faculty managed academic departments more, they might be less susceptible, not more, to being managed from outside.

This month at Canada's History

The new Canada's History, just reaching subscribers, has a Vimy feature, with a new piece by Tim Cook.  Also Mathieu Drouin and others on Montreal's 375th anniversary, and Mary Carpenter on the dark legacy of residential schools among the Inuit.

For my own column this issue, I talked to Lori Chambers of Lakehead U and Elise Chénier of Simon Fraser about their recent study of the gender of prize-winners at the Canadian Historical Association awards.

The group of women historians attending the 2014 prize-giving of the Canadian Historical Association all noticed the same thing. “We all kind of looked at each other,” recalled Elise Chénier, who teaches oral history, sexuality, and modern Canadian history at Simon Fraser University. “Are we just noticing this – or is this year a fluke?” she said to Lori Chambers of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, who has written substantial histories of adoption law, women’s property law, and other matters.

What had they noticed? That it seemed men were winning all the big prizes.

My brief column draws on the longer analysis, "Still Working in the Shadow of Men?," which they and Anne Toews wrote for the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (Vol. 26 #1 -- as yet only available to subscribers).

History of fiction bigotry

Steven Beattie offers a vivid example in the Globe and Mail recently:

Fiction and history share a symbiotic relationship. Though the latter provides the raw material for the former, it is often fiction that has the stronger claim on truth, if “truth” is to be understood as emotional or affective, as opposed to baldly factual. Fiction, by definition, traffics in “alternative facts,” and is transformative; by approaching history through the prism of story and technique, the fiction writer is paradoxically able to access deeper wells of understanding about our relationships to the world and to each other.

Alternative facts, really?  A lot of fiction writers will know this is nonsense, I think. They share Roger Ebert's dictum about movies: "it's not what the movie is about, it's how it goes about it."  Film-making or story-making, it is about the craft. Well-made stories persuade us, not to believe, but only to suspend disbelief.  A story is supposed to feel true, but that does not make it True, only persuasive.

Beattie, on the other hand, is arguing that if the shells are moved about with enough skill, then the guy who says the pea is under this particular shell must be telling us the truth.

This is a faith, not a critical stance. It's a claim that fiction is the superior form of writing, by definition, and all others are lesser. It is fictionism, not criticism, and it's ultimately a form of bigotry.

Nonfiction, just to be clear, should never expect a reader to suspend disbelief. If it "reads like a novel," you should probably distrust its claims. Nonfiction doesn't achieve truth, but it is the genre where claims to truth can best be compared and evaluated.

I have started collecting examples of this "fiction is true; history/nonfiction is not" ideology.  There must be a million out there, as the fictionist ideology is thriving these days.  Contributions of fresh examples would be welcomed.
 

Concordia's copyright violations.

When students appropriate others' work without payment or permission, the universities call it plagiarism and expel them. When the universities do it themselves, they call it "fair dealing" and they base their courses and budgets on it.

But once in a while, a university does get caught stealing too fast.  Kate Taylor had the deets on Concordia in the Globe and Mail on Saturday.

Barry Lord 1939-2017 RIP, museum curator

Barry Lord, who with his wife and partner Gail Dexter Lord made Lord Cultural Services into "the world's foremost museum planning firm," died the other day, according to this obit.

More on the Lord firm here at its website.

International Women's Day ain't over...

.. until you have taken Merna Forster's new quiz:  What do you know about Canada's Herstory?

Maclean's quiz: is this man the Governor General of Quebec, or is he its lieutenant general?

Maclean's, which used to be quite a substantial magazine of Canadian news along with its provocative cover stories, is now little more than a website like the rest of us. Recently it has a truly sad story about Canadian constitutional history. It's not that they don't know anything; it's that they cannot even be bothered to find out.

The original story had a couple of references to M. Michel Doyon, the person who represents the Crown in Quebec. Both times it referred to him as "the lieutenant general" of the province.

They have made a silent correction. Now it reads "the Governor-General of Quebec." Twice. Let me quote the relevant paragraph, since they will probably make another unacknowledged correction sometime.

After Charlottetown, Quebec was the province to host the follow-up meeting, which Quebecers se souviennent. “When the delegates to the Quebec Conference gathered here,” wrote the Governor General of Quebec in 2014, “they laid the basis for a country…” The City of Quebec has also erected a statue of Etienne-Paschal Tache, the chairman of the conference, whom the Governor General called the “too-often-forgotten Father of Confederation.”

The rest of the piece has about the same level of cultural literacy. There is a historical oddity at least in every paragraph. ("Canada was conceived in Saint John, incubated in Quebec City and born on the Island?" Huh?)

It's another belated riff on the story Jacques Poitras broke around the New Year and I covered here.  But the first story actually wanted to get the story right; you could tell the reporter was genuinely taken with the subject. The succeeding ones seem to take the position that it's about history, so any old crap will do.

Image> La Presse

Prize Watch: the Taylor and the Canadas and the Speaker's

The very prolific Ross King, much honoured for his art history books  (e.g., two Governor General's Awards), won the Charles Taylor Nonfiction prize the other day for Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies.  Historian John English was one of the jurors, but CanHist is pretty scarce on the list. Details and shortlist here

The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences announced nominees for the Canada Prizes for scholarly books in those disciplines. No shortage of historians here.  Quillblog reports them as:

Emilie Cameron, Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic (University of B.C. Press)

Gerhard J. Ens and Joseph Sawchuk, From New Peoples to New Nations: Aspects of Métis History and Identity from the Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries (University of Toronto Press)

Sean Mills, A Place in the Sun: Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Arthur J. Ray, Aboriginal Rights Claims and the Making and Remaking of History (MQUP)

Donald Wright, Donald Creighton: A Life in History (UTP)

And the Ontario Legislative Speaker's Book Award (an award that previously honoured someone close to this blog, so we are well disposed) was presented to Toronto Maple Leaf great Red Kelly and his co-authors for The Red Kelly Story.  Full list of nominees here included works on Ontario premiers Davis and McGuinty and almost-premier Darcy McKeough -- and even Red Kelly had a stint in parliament, no?

'Why weren't we taught this history in school?" is a whiny cliche

Browsing notes (no, really browsing, not reviewing the latest "browser" software):

• I'm browsing through the current Literary Review of Canada, and I find Donna Bailey Nurse's thoughtful review of Steal Away Home, a new book recently noted here. But the reviewer, having picked up on various intriguing small details the author has unearthed about Toronto's 19th century black community, is moved to complain: "'Why hadn't I encountered this history in school?"

• I'm browsing through the local paper, and there's Toronto's lively urbanist Shawn Micallef describing how a detour off the soul-destroying Highway 401 leads him, via a historic plaque, to the remarkable pre-contact Southwold Earthworks near the Lake Erie shore. But he can't simply admire the place, he has to complain that, even though he once went to school, "It's a place and history I wasn't taught."

• I'm browsing through a soon-to-be-published book with a lot to say about dysfunction in parliament. But I'm continually brought up short by the author's explanation that parliament is so dumb because "inadequate education in the primary and secondary levels' has not taught Canadians what they need to know about democracy.

Yeesh. Where does this whiny cliche come from, particularly from otherwise smart people?  It seems to articulate a deep social consensus that if only we hired people to ram enough history down kids' throats in Grade 5, then we could all lead blissful adult lives, never again learning one new historical thing -- indeed,complaining when we actually do.

Nurse mentions her contacts with the Ontario Black History Society. Micallef constantly researches the surprising past of Toronto neighbourhoods.  The parliament book is based on some wide reading. All these writers, in other words, actually do learn new things, new historical things, all the time. 

It's just that they all think they should complain about that, that they have to blame some negligent or possibly malevolent education system for not telling them already (at a time when they probably would not have been interested in the slightest.)

People, your Grade Five history teacher was never going to teach you everything ever to be known about history, any more than your Grade Five science teacher was going to teach you everything about nuclear fission, or your Grade Five math teacher was going to teach you everything about the algorithms behind derivatives trading. With the science and the math, you probably accept that.

But somehow, with history (and the associated civics), there seems to be this deep understanding that it is a subject only to be learned by children and that if there is some historical fact or interpretation we have not yet informed ourselves about as adults, it's the schools' fault.

No, it ain't. It's your own damn responsibility to keep educating yourself. There are new books, there are magazines, there are historical societies and historical plaques and sites and filmed docs, and.... Jeez, there are actually websites with all this stuff. You could keep kids in Grade 5 history class for twenty years, and they still wouldn't learn a tenth of what people seem to expect them to absorb, and most of it would go over their sweet childish heads anyway.  

But if adults accepted that learning new history (civics too) is an ongoing adult responsibility (and a cultural enrichment, and a pleasure), then young people would pick up that model, and not disdain their history classes because they see their elders disdaining historical knowledge too.

We have had subways in Toronto for some sixty years. Every time I notice how many people have not yet learned it is sensible to let the people on board get off through the doors before they try to get on through the doors, I reflect on the limits of what public education can achieve. The idea that a couple of lines in a classroom textbook somewhere will save democracy... I can't even.

Update, same day:  Jerry Bannister likes (and defines) it:

Great rant on the whole why-weren't-we-taught-this thing.

Mark Reynolds also likes it, but has a point to raise:

I think Micallef has a point about Southwold: it's possible the education system's improved since I was subject to it, but First Nations / Mi'qmaq history was almost entirely absent from my curriculum. If we could make it out to the Halifax Citadel, the Neptune Theatre, and the Fisherman's Museum in Lunenburg, I'm pretty certain we could have managed a field trip to the Glooscap Cultural Center in Truro or the Powwow in Millbrook.

Thanks, Mark. I'm going to take the opportunity to acknowledge that two of my examples do indeed relate to topics that surely have been minimized in schools and popular historical culture alike:  Black Canadians and First Nations.

But I doubt that even the most enlightened curriculum would give very much time to Southwold or to abolitionism in 1860s Toronto newspapers  (the examples given) -- or that kids would remember the details years later!  And the third example I mentioned is evidence, I hope, that exactly the same "Why don't the schools...? cry is heard about the most traditional subjects: Vimy Ridge, John A., Loyalists, parliament, whatever.

And from Chris Raible:

Over the years I have spoken to many historical societies - usually about some aspect of the life and times of William Lyon Mackenzie.

I think I never did so without some attendee commenting, "why were we not taught this in school?" (or words to that effect).

As an immigrant (now citizen) whose public education was in another country (the US) I could never do much more than shake my head in sympathy, and add that when I was in school my own mind was on much more urgent matters than history - so much I was probably taught I didn't really learn.

March 20:  From Donna Bailey Nurse:

Ah. I see you are using the word whiny to describe my concerns about dishonest history - perhaps to get back at me for using the word whiny to describe white racists in The Star a whole ten years ago. Way to hold a grudge! I am sorry if my criticizing white racism has hurt your feelings. At the same, your comments regarding my essay are mendacious and it is just this sort of dishonesty that causes more and more people -of every race- to distrust white historians. All I am asking is that you do your job with integrity. In other words, if you are going to write about slavery, do it honestly. And if you are going to teach slavery, do that honestly as well. Not everybody should be writing about racism. I know that many white people have a difficult time with that subject; You all have too much invested in keeping things the way they are.. But you've got to start taking responsibility for the enormous damage you have done in the world. You really must try harder to do the right thing.

Let me just say I rarely even read The Star ten years ago , let alone retaining a word-perfect memory of it. Beyond that, must say I agree with all that follows "All I am asking...."

:

History of Toronto, and mining, and power

The Guardian's "Cities" series runs a thoughtful, historically informed essay on the role of the mining industry in underpinning Toronto and its financial sector -- and vice versa.

Unbeknown to most of its residents, Toronto is a city built on mining. Nearly 75% of mining companies globally are headquartered in Canada and almost 60% are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). In 2015, more than half of all capital investment in the mining business travelled through the exchange.

In fact, few – if any – other capital markets around the world are as specialised in a single industry as Toronto is in mining. 

Written by my former researcher Niko Block, too.

A little pushback on Canada150

Who?  These guys?

They can't bring themselves to mention the country's founders in its 150th anniversary year, but they fund this. https://t.co/DZU3ZurPOl

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) March 3, 2017

What "this" is, is federal funding for Espace Réné Lévesque, a tribute to the late separatist in his home town of Nouveau- New Carlisle, Quebec.

I have not been too concerned about the thinness of the historical content in Canada150. It's a birthday party: you have balloons and fireworks and you give out gifts; you don't devote the whole party to earnest lectures about the day the guest of honour was born.  So a sesquicentennial whose themes are diversity and youth and whatever the third one was hasn't provoked me to Coyne-esque furies.

But if you do think in 2017 that a little reflection on the events of 1867 is worth supporting, lemme just say:  My lecture, "A Living Tree? Canada's Constitution 150 Years Ago and Today," already a hit at universities across the country, is now accepting booking for the fall tour. No federal funding sought.

(Earnestness factor?  Well, some. hey, it's important to be earnest.)

Unwritten Histories could use your help

In a post that is equally about the burdens of blogging and the toxic state of the academic job market, Unwritten Histories -- a very lively and informative blog for the last year or so -- puts out a call for support.

Histories of slavery and murder in 19th century Ontario

Karolyn Smardz Frost, archaeologist, writer, scholar, GG nonfiction winner a few years ago for I've Got a Home in Glory Land, her study of escaped slaves coming to Canada West,  has a new book on a similar theme: Steal Away Home, about Cecelia Reynolds, a youthful enslaved woman who escaped successfully to the African-Canadian community of Toronto and then spent years in correspondence with her former owner, Fanny Ballard of Kentucky, seeking to purchase the freedom of her family members.

She had the benefit of expert advice, probably from Washington Spradling, a free African-American in Louisville. Her escape plan suggests there was a communications network stretching across the Ohio River and all the way to the borders of Canada, a "grapevine telegraph" operated by African-American men and women who worked on the rivers, lakes, and canals that made up the continent's inland waterways, and as railroads progressively made their way across the continent, by those who stoked the engines and served the passengers on the trains as well.

Also on the subject of race issues, Ray Argyle's An Act of Injustice, forthcoming from Mosaic Press, is centered on the trial and execution of Cook Teets in Owen Sound, Ontario in 1884, protesting his innocence all the way.

Argyle's subject is principally the wrongful conviction issue, but the murder and its surroundings involved the African-Canadian and mixed race community of the "Queen's Bush" country south of Owen Sound.

I became aware of the tragic fates of Rosanah and Cook while researching wrongful convictions in Canada.  An astonishing story turned up in the October 12, 1908, issue of the Toronto Evening Telegraph. A single paragraph below th fold of an inside page, it bore the headline, "Hanged an Innocent Man." The story carried neither attribution nor byline, but suggested a plot far deeper than the modest space it occupied might indicate.  The actual murderer had confessed, leaving no doubt that Cook Teets was innocent of the crime for which he had been hanged

Argyle has written a novel. not a history, but he's a friend of mine and the story sounds interesting, so I'll bend the no fiction rule we mostly have here.

  

From Louisiana to Rupert's Land

Slate, the American online... What? "Magazine," "newsfeed," whatever -- today has, amid its endless Trump scrutiny, a detailed analysis of, of all things, the Louisiana Purchase: "The True Cost of the Louisiana Purchase" by Robert Lee.

Lee starts with the common-sensical but not so common observation that the United States did not buy the Louisiana Territory from France in 1804

What Thomas Jefferson purchased wasn’t actually a tract of land. It was the imperial rights to that land, almost all of which was still owned, occupied, and ruled by Native Americans. The U.S. paid France $15 million for those rights. It would take more than 150 years and hundreds of lopsided treaties to extinguish Indian title to the same land.

And that's if you can call it extinguished.

The author, a California PhD candidate in history, explores in a lot of detail (for a Slate piece) the number and price of all the acquisitions of title that the United States has made in the Louisiana Purchase territory since 1804.  It's nothing like a fair price, but it's a hell a lot more than the $15 million paid to France.

Consider Canada's acquisition of Rupertsland from the Hudson's Bay Company

Three years after Confederation the government of Canada acquired Rupert's Land from the Company for $1.5-million: the largest real estate transaction (by land area) in the country's history.

says the Canadian Encyclopedia's Ruperts Land article  But Canada only acquired pretty much what the US got from France: "imperial rights" to what was still the territory of the First Nations.  Hence all those numbered treaties that followed.

I wonder if anyone has tried for Rupert's Land what Lee attempts for the Louisiana Purchase: a tally of all the money spent trying to acquire Crown title after the initial purchase?