This month at Canada's History

Handsome new issue of Canada's History in my mailbox yesterday. Editor Mark Reid leads with a photo essay on the treasures of Canada's museums: from a bison amulet of unknown age to Dilly Moffatt's hockey stick from the 1830s, from the assassin Patrick Whelan's revolver to Louis Riel's ceinture fleché.

Plus an essay on the 1930s dust bowl from Bill Waiser (something of a national treasure himself). And a powerful piece on Canadians' historic ambivalence about immigrants by George Melnyk, himself a child of refugees  (Yeah, him too.).

My own column this month is a reflection on R. v Comeau, the "free" beer case in which the role of history and historians in making law (including an affidavit of mine) came to the fore at the Supreme Court of Canada.

If you subscribed like you oughta, you'd have it already. Meanwhile, find a newsstand if you can.

Update, August 1:  Re George Melnyk's article, Helen Webberley responds from Australia:

It is fascinating to me that a powerful piece on Canadians' historic ambivalence about immigrants emerged in your post at  EXACTLY the same time as I am thinking about the subject in Australia. When half of my family moved to Australia as migrants (to Melbourne), the other half moved to Canada as migrants (to Winnipeg), I would like to think that Canada handled the immigration issues with more grace. Thanks for the link

History: journalism about dead people?

Thoughts on history from super-editor Tina Brown, in The Vanity Fair Diaries 1983-1992, a very entertaining gossipy summer read, though it did make me wish we had a magazine culture in Canada  even slightly like the London/New York one she describes:

... talking to the historian Asa Briggs about Richard Nixon. "I think he will be like Richard III," said Briggs.  Nixon will have his demonology. But also his admirers in every century." [,,,,] I have come to realize that history is only point-of-view journalism about dead people. There is no objective truth about anything. This is what Nixon meant when Henry Kissinger in White House Years says, "History will treat you differently, Mr. President." And Nixon replies, "It depends who writes it." 

History of public memory fights: remembering Ginger Goodwin or not

Who'd a thunk it?  The Vancouver Sun notes the centenary of the shooting of union leader and conscription resister Ginger Goodwin -- and ends with an glimpse of how nasty and petty provincial politics can be in this country

On July 27, B.C.’s NDP government proclaimed Ginger Goodwin Day to mark the 100th anniversary of his “untimely death.”

The NDP has also renamed Hwy. 19 near Cumberland Ginger Goodwin Way. A previous NDP government had done so in the 1990s, but the provincial Liberals changed it when they got into power in 2001.

Photo: From Vancouver Sun/Paul Rudan

Update, August 20:  I now see that Daniel Francis was way ahead of me on this story.

On holiday hiatus

Going on the road, and blogging is likely to be slim to none into early August.

Nibali out:  too much of this stuff!

The Tour will have to fend for itself. With Sky asserting its dominance, most of the contending teams decimated by illnesses and accidents to their leading riders, and almost all the sprinters disqualified by their inability to meet rigorous time requirements in the mountain stages, it looks like they will just have to grind on to an inevitable coronation in Paris.

I'd still watch as they are hitting the Pyrenees, and in the Tour things do surprise.  But you will have to follow for yourselves this year.

History of dinner, TV dinner

I've caught several episodes of CBC-TV's brief summer series Back in Time for Dinner. There is food history on TV.

Okay, it's food history with a fair amount of cheese. This is a pretty soft presentation, very much for entertainment. The series immerses a Canadian family of five in the decor, clothing, technology, fads, and above all the food of six decades one after another, 1940s to 1990s, and it has to move fast and funny.

But time and again I was struck by how the program actually did achieve a certain time depth. The horror of the modern family obliged to follow the wartime forties' reliance on organ meats like kidneys ("All I smell is urine!") and other economical (and unprocessed) foods is striking, just as their disgusted amazement at the fifties' enthusiasm for jellied salads is entertaining.

But a sense of foreignness is effectively created. Back in Time for Dinner nicely notes how, when  kids went out for snacks and sociability in the fifties and sixties, they generally went to a mom-and-pop kind of place, not to the corporate-planned Macdonalds, Tims, or Starbucks we take for granted. The modern woman in the series, refusing to surrender her 21st century perspectives, effectively emphasizes the house work expected of women and only women, and the lack of kitchen technology in most of the decades they briefly inhabit.

The family seems very much white and Euro-Canadian -- until the father mentions his indigenous experience on his mother's side. And there were (a few) intriguing nods to diversity, as Canadians took shyly to Chinese food early, later to South Asian food (effectively linked to changes in immigration policy), later to global gourmet trends.   

There are even food historians -- U of T professor Jo Sharma for one -- featured.

Back in Time for Dinner ain't a Ken Burns documentary, for sure. But for a summer entertainment, I was kinda pleased with its sense of history and historical change.  Probably still available on demand on your TV service or online.

The Tour a week in

No Canadians in the Tour de France this time, instead of the two or three that has become common recently. And Chris Froome's drug-clouded Sky Team favoured to win, and few enough colourful rivals waiting in the wings. All the teams taking on new colours and new names, so it's hard work to figure who is who.  And kind of a dull opening, with many long flat stages that had even the usually discreet commentators talking about "a procession" rather than a race.  I miss Ryder Hesjedal

If only for the reputation of Grand Tour cycling, Chris Froome should never have been allowed to compete in this spring's Giro while under investigation for serious drug allegations. I was heartened by the way the Tour de France was about to keep him out -- when the results of the investigation came in.

And he was cleared. Not by some dodgy cycling panel but by WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, which surely had no reason to go easy or to fudge the results. It looks like Froome, who has lived with asthma all his live, did not exceed the regulated limits for his medication (which has no known stimulative properties anyway) during last year's Vuelta a Espana.  So he is a legitimate contender again.

With all that, a Tour fan simply has to buckle down for the long term.  The terrain for the first week wasn't conducive to exciting racing, but it surely hallmarked the lush, rich beauty of rural France.  You cannot help but notice, watching the Giro and the Vuelta, that Italy and Spain, for all their beauties, are in many parts hot, arid, rugged, and impoverished places. But France: the Tour always makes it look like paradise. Lush fields, flourishing agriculture, beautiful rivers and lakes,  breathtaking chateaux and villages at every turn.  I'd watch for the travelogue alone.

And in a slowish opening week, at least you get to sort out the teams and contenders, to find some promising new faces to watch for, and to figure out where the team strengths and weaknesses.  It's a rest day today,  and Tuesday they are into the mountains.  Sad to see Mark Cavendish, for a few years unbeatable in a sprint finish, slowly losing the twitch muscles that used to give him such acceleration.  Nice to see the numbers of South American riders, all terrific climbers, increase.  Could Awesome Lawson Craddock become the American hero the Tour has needed ever since that guy who cannot be spoken of anymore was exposed and banned?  And did I say I miss Ryder Hesjedal?

TSN, which took over the Tour broadcasting in Canada, has abandoned it again.  (Cycling coverage on television always did better on minor networks like Outdoor Life, which didn't really expect big numbers.) But tech takes away and tech giveth. The Sportsnet network is offering the whole Tour on its digital channel. For a month's subscription we can watch the whole tour whenever we want on the laptop, and to hell with whatever rival sports dominate the box. World Cup?  Wimbledon? Baseball All-Star Game? Ha.)

Historians at the Order of Canada: Robert Bothwell

I've been meaning to note that the late June announcement of appointments to the Order of Canada included Robert Bothwell, the prolific history professor at the University of Toronto -- and my editor in the Canadian history series he edited with Margaret Macmillan that includes my Three Weeks in Quebec City (not that that's the reason for the honour!) 

Here's Bothwell's career from the Canadian Encyclopedia.  Congratulations!

Photo credit:  Monk Centre, U of Toronto.

History of a move, and of business organization

Since about February, blogger and spouse have been in the process of buying a new home, selling the old home, and organizing a downsizing, a staging, a sale, a purchase, a move, and all that goes with those processes. We actually find ourselves owning both the old property and the new property for a couple more weeks, which means -- this all happening in Toronto -- we are temporarily either rich beyond our wildest dreams, or just more in debt than we ever expected to be at this stage of life. (Mostly the latter.)  It is all remarkably complicated, And time-consuming.

Hence the lighter than usual productivity at this blog over the last few months and particularly the last couple of weeks.

I don't think a history of this move will be forthcoming.  But several times I found myself reflecting on the history of business organization.

We used a smallish real estate agency, about ten people altogether.  We used a local moving company, where the leader of the moving crew had his family name as the logo on the truck. We used a two person law office. All of these were superbly organized, courteous, prompt in executing, and always completely in command of what they had to do.

We also used a major bank (let's give it the initials RBC) for the bridge financing we needed, and a telecom giant (initials BELL) to shift our internet/television from old address to new. The property finance kid at the bank was prompt and competent, and the tech who came to do the telecom installation seemed like a master to me.

But getting the bank's remote Closing Centre simply to hit Send on the crucial financing documents very nearly sank the whole transaction, and finally had us more or less occupying the bank manager's office and refusing to move until we got confirmation that our lawyer had received what she needed.  And the effort it took to get the telecom's service centre to actually make the booking for a tech visit and then ensure that the tech department actually knew about the booking, and...  well, I don't even want to go into it.  Blogging might have been more active had we actually had an internet connection for several days there.

In the history of business organization, the large corporation has decisively beaten the small local one in almost every field. But if that is the case, how is it that the small ones still work so well, and the big ones so badly?

There are still a hell of a lot of unopened boxes around here, and still at least one major banking/legal transaction to bring to a close. (The one scheduled to obliterate all that debt!)  So no promises about the pace of blogging in the near future, but I'm becoming hopeful.  Hey, it's July and we haven't even mentioned the Tour yet.  Stick around.

Move, if it's right for you. We're glad we did.  But don't underestimate the complications!

Update, July 12:  Archivist Charles Levi notes that among the fields not yet dominated by large organizations is librarians.  I tried to counter with the size of the Toronto public library system (not that I have ever found it inefficient, quite the contrary) but Charles insists that because of its branch structure.