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| You know nothing, John Historian |
A quick look at the "new books in Canadian history" page at the University of Toronto Press website suggests a lot of pretty specialized works, and a few of wider interest. A trio caught my interest (but see here for the full list: much on women, multiculturalism, military history, other topics)
Margaret Conrad tackles just the pre-confederation history of Nova Scotia in a 400 page book, At the Ocean's Edge, promised for October -- though the webpage doesn't have cover art yet, so maybe last-minute work continues there.
In Questions of Order: Confederation and the Making of Modern Canada, Peter Price (or his publicists) declare
Confederation was not just a political deal struck by politicians in 1867, but was a process of reconfiguring political concepts and the basis of political association. Breaking new ground, Questions of Order argues that Confederation was an imperial event that generated new questions, concerns, and ideas about the future of political order in the British Empire and the world.Then, and this might be interesting, there is Sharing the Past: The Reinvention of History in Canadian Poetry since 1860 by J.A. Weingarten. The poets, it seems to argue, have been better social historians than the social historians, because
the academy’s continued emphasis on professional distance and objectivity made it difficult for historians to connect with the experiences of those about whom they wrote, and those same emphases made it all but impossible for non-academic experts to be institutionally recognized as historians....
Sharing the Past argues that the project of social history has achieved its fullest expression in lyric poetry, a genre in which personal experiences anchor history. Developing this genre since 1960, Canadian poets have provided an inclusive model for a truly social history that indiscriminately shares the right to speak authoritatively of the past.
