Historians in the news:

Coverboy historian

Since we did recently note Adam Tooze here as a historian worth noting, it's pleasing to be able to refer you to this long profile (to which I was pointed by History News Network) of Tooze as historian-celebrity-pundit-cover model.

One takeaway: is there, has there ever been, a Canadian university history department that could provoke this kind of salute:

Arriving in New Haven in 2009, he found himself part of a new academic economy. Within the artisanal guild system of Cambridge, “if you’re the salami-maker, that’s what you do.” At Yale, by contrast, “you’re being hired as a senior partner to a small academic consultancy and teaching business with a very large capital base. And so what they’re interested in doing is maximizing your human resource.” Tooze spoke fluent German, so he could teach alongside the Germanists; he knew his military history, so he could join John Lewis Gaddis’s Grand Strategy program and “do the whole Kissinger thing.” He’d found a polymath’s paradise and, in his view, the style that would make his career. The interdisciplinary approach Yale encouraged is “why I’ve ended up with you interviewing me,” he said.

History!

 

No historians of Quebec in Quebec?

Mario Dumont, who used to be a populist force in Quebec politics and actually named a political party -- the Equipe Mario Dumont -- for himself, now writes for the nationalist tabloid Le Journal de Québec. He has a scandal to trumpet. If you believe him, there is no longer anyone teaching Quebec history at the Université de Montréal.

Depuis quelques années, des gens du monde des sciences sociales se questionnent sur le fait que l’Université de Montréal n’ait plus de professeur spécialiste de l’histoire du Québec. Rien sur le parcours d’un peuple parlant français contre vents et marées, des plaines d’Abraham jusqu’au rapport Durham, de la Confédération jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

La plus grande université francophone en Amérique embauche des experts de l’histoire qui étudient tous les thèmes populaires dans le mouvement woke, des spécialistes de l’histoire de tous les coins de la planète, mais aucun historien nationaliste passionné de l’histoire du Québec.

I'm pretty sure there are quite a few historians of Quebec there -- I can think of a few offhand. Even if we follow Mario Dumont's terms, by which "historian of Quebec" seems to equal "nationalist-crusader," there's probably more than one. 

Dumont is probably misled by, or misinterpreting, a cross-cultural trend among academic historians (noted in two long-ago posts of mine, here and here) to drop national labels  (e.g., "Canadianist,") in favour of "social historian," "historian of women," "labour historian," and so on.  The Quebec historians presumably prefer one of those labels.  And if that's what they believe, Dumont is happy to pretend they don't exist.    

How many leadership "races," dear God?

Kenney: why is this man laughing?

I do try to keep this a blog about historical matters, and most readers are probably long since attuned to my view on party leadership selection. But allow me another kick at the can. It's such a big juicy can at the moment.

Heard the joke about the Liberal-NDP confidence-and-supply agreement that should keep the Liberal government in power until 2025? "Gee, the Conservatives will have time for two or three more leadership races before then."  

It's plausible there could be that many, as long as the federal Tories are agreed that the caucus of MPs can fire their leader but that only an orgy of vote-buying among the mass-membership can give them a new one. It's already reported that in the federal party "race" Pierre Poilievre leads among the mass membership but Jean Charest is preferred by most of the MPs. So that's gonna work out well.

Then there is Alberta. Brian Jean recently won a by-election that returned him to the provincial legislature, with his exclusive platform being a promise to destroy the leader of his own party, Premier Jason Kenney. This seems like a rare outbreak of basic parliamentary democracy in a Canadian political party. In Alberta Kenney apparently lacks the Putinesque power, held by most Canadian party leaders, federal and provincial, simply to disallow the candidacy of or dismiss from caucus any backbencher who might look sideways at him.  

Jean's action would seem to suggest the Alberta Tory caucus believes it sorta-kinda has the same powers the Reform Act revived in the federal Tory caucus. But at the same time Kenney is "fighting for his political life" in a mass party review of his leadership -- aka, the aformentioned vote-buying orgy. So: maybe not?

Then there are the scandals over the corrupt practices that dominated the last Alberta selection, the one that made Kenney leader over Jean. The Calgary Herald speaks discreetly of "concerns about possible rule changes and ballot box shenanigans." Shenanigans sounds like hi-jinks at a St. Patrick's Day booze-up.  But shouldn't observers of Canadian politics agree that vote-buying and vote-selling are always corrupt acts, and that the political parties should not be given a free pass? Bribery and fraud are not removed from the Criminal Code when it is party leadership candidates that indulge in them? 

Two proposed rules:  

a properly functioning parliamentary system requires that party leaders be constantly accountable to the elected representatives of the voters who send them to the legislature;

it is not ethical to either buy or sell a party membership while the leadership of a party is being contested, so long as membership and the opportunity to vote in leadership selections are the same thing.

These complaints apply equally to all Canadian political parties. Somehow the Tories just seem better at making the contradictions glaringly apparent.

Update, same day.  The sleazepipe pours out more than I can keep up with.  Don Braid reports that, sensing he may lose the in-person review in Red Deer on April 9, Premier Kenney has had it re-organized as a mail-in ballot, which is apparently easier to rig. ("This is about political survival. In its interests, Kenney's will was imposed on the party's provincial board.") Paid a big fee and booked a hotel to vote out Jason Kenney? Too bad, suckers. This is how we do things here.

We Canadians look disdainfully at the gerrymandering and vote-rigging that are standard in American elections. Indeed most of that was eliminated from Canadian elections by the Elections Act, 1920.  But why do remain so tolerant of similarly corrupt practices when practised by the political party.  It's serious  -- premiers and prime ministers are formed from these sleazy doings. 

This month at the Literary Review of Canada

Having just posted about the dearth of CanHist book coverage these days, I have to note the current (April 2022) Literary Review of Canada, which does pretty well on that measure.

A featured article is Charlotte Gray's review of Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of A Mining Superpower by savant and MP Charlie Angus. There's a timely republication of Jeffrey Collins 2019 essay on Timothy Sayles' history of NATO, as well as Tim Cook's review of Michael Nieberg's After the Fall, a study of the Vichy crisis of 1940 and how it impacted the Anglo-American alliance.

Beth Haddon reviews Flora!, the memoirs of politician Flora Macdonald (with Geoffrey Stevens), and Michael Taube reviews Barry K. Wilson's life of Mackenzie Bowell -- noted here first, may I say. And Sandra Martin explores the oddities of cultural critic and assisted-suicide advocate John Hofsess. 

J.D.M. Stewart reviews Robert Wardhaugh's and Barry Ferguson's new history of the Rowell-Sirois Commission, the 1930s investigation of the trials and tribulations of confederation. Dan Dunsky considers the state of Canadian relations with China through three recent books, and Yuen Pao Woo considers Hollowed Halls, a new book that argues both Canadian foreign policy and the study of it are in the doldrums.

Speaking of doldrums, Jack Granatstein starts his review of two new books in Canadian military history by declaring, "As I have observed in these pages before, military history in our universities is in terminal decline."  I found this hard to accept the other time he said that -- of all the understudied fields in Canadian history, I doubt military history would make the top ten -- but at least a couple of of our impressive corps of academic military historians do get their books reviewed in his vigorous take-no-prisoners style.

So, reviewing of Canadian history may be struggling, but not so much at the LRC.

Update, March 24:  Helen Webberley responds from Australia:

I would really like to read Robert Wardhaugh's and Barry Ferguson's history of the Rowell-Sirois Commission, the 1930s investigation of the trials and tribulations of Confederation. Firstly I know the beginning of the Confederation process was uncertain, but by the 1930s, most of the issues should have been long sorted out.

Secondly the Australian states and territories Federated, after a long period of debate, all on the one day:1st January 1901. Were the issues in the two British countries similar?

The Wardlaugh-Ferguson book The Rowell-Sirois Commission and the Remaking of Canadian Federalism is available for order from here -- and/or some large Australian libraries should eventually have copies.  

Australia must be a more peaceable kingdom than Canada, constitutionally speaking! Far from being "sorted out," contestation over the issues has never stopped here. In the 1930s, the Rowell-Sirois problem was that the federal government held most of the taxation power and hence the revenues needed to address the depression, but the provinces had constitutional authority over most of the fields where spending was needed.  

Shared-cost programs do now exist, but this is very much still a live Canadian issue:  today the federal government has a plan to subsidize daycare nationally, but it can only do so by striking deals province by province. Medicare has long worked the same way, and no doubt the newly-announced commitment to adding dental care to medicare will require new federal-provincial negotiations. And wait until we are ready to abolish the monarchy -- what would be the price of provincial consent for that?

Were the issues similar in Canada and Australia?  It strikes me not very much, but I wish I knew a good book on Australian federation that would help with that. And, of course, as the author of the authoritative current account of Canadian confederation, I'd be glad to come and help Australia with that question for a modest retainer and some plane tickets.

 

Who's gonna review Canadian history now that the media doesn't?

The last fulltime book critic in the Canadian media retired recently, and has not been replaced. The general collapse of newspapers and magazines, and the return to foreign control of most Canadian trade publishing, has meant the end of serious book reviewing in Canada outside the narrow and exceedingly slow world of the academic journals.  Toronto book publicist Sarah Miniaci sets it out bluntly in a recent SHuSH SubStack:

One outcome of this change has been the destruction of the critical environment for books. “There just aren’t as many reviews, and the reviews are generally not as thoughtful or comprehensive as they used to be, because everyone is rushed,” says Sarah. “Criticism as a force is diminished and that has changed the nature of editorial decisions about books."

I used to do a lot of "reactive" book noting at this blog -- the book promotion industry brought enough material to my attention that I always had some new book to mention. These days, it's hard work trying to find what gets published about Canadian history.  There is a lot; it's just become invisible. 

Canada's History remains a notable holdout. Reading the substantial review section in this month's issue, I find fourteen reviews and notes on recent Canadian history titles, filling eight pages and ranging from the life of Wa'xaid (Cecil Paul) to Montreal's role in building the atomic bomb to Nova Scotian crime stories to the rise and fall of a Vancouver butcher shop to a Prince Albert memoir to the streetcars of St John's to The Toronto Book of Love. It is simultaneously a lot and not hardly enough.

What's needed is an online CanHist book review site.  Call it a blog, a website, a magazine, I don't care, but someone needs to create and curate a site for briefly noting, reviewing and promoting what's being published into silence from Canadian historians.

There are models. The British Columbia Review (devoted to anything published in or about that province) is one. Active History (daily commentary by historians on whatever moves them) is another, slightly more distant, model.  Like them, a Canadian history-reviewing web platform would need a university home, I think, since universities are awash in money (relative to everyone else) and have the infrastructure readily at hand. But academic reviewing in academic journals is not in trouble and not the problem. The kind of site that Canadian history urgently needs would need to follow (and take advice from, probably) the BCR in aiming entirely at a general rather than academic readership.

Update, same day: Patrick Lacroix responds

I'm reaching out to share a few thoughts regarding book reviews. To preface this, I agree entirely with the need for a widely accessible platform offering reviews that are timely but not rushed.

Part of the issue, as I see it, is that social media has provided readers' unprecedented access to authors and vice versa. Personal followings have formed online and readers have trucked thoughtful analysis by a third party for this type of access and immediacy. Authors (and their networks and rivalries) are themselves molding the public conversation. In my experience, publishers have turned away from the prospect of glowing reviews in the national media and relied more and more on authors themselves to drive book sales.

That being said, reviews have not disappeared entirely but, as you're hinting at, the market is fragmented. I've reviewed books on my blog - but it's a fairly narrow audience that, for the most part, has a built-in interest in the topic. I'd say that's true of many blogs, podcasts, etc. We've settled into little niches and we're missing a common ground of discussion appealing to a wider public.

I hasten to add that these blogs are usually oriented towards academic publishing - and fair enough. As you've pointed out before, the landscape of general-readership history publishing is not what it used to be. Maybe (even setting aside the role of social media) it's a natural corollary that book reviews would go the same way.

In any event, I hope some enterprising organization or individuals will help set in motion precisely what you describe.

Update, March 22.  And just to prove historical book notices are not entirely dead, Active History publishes a review by Robin Benger of James Cullingham, Two Dead White Men, a intriguing-sounding comparative study of Duncan Campbell Scott and Jacques Soustelle, respectively a Canadian and a French agent of assimilation. It's published by Seneca (College) Press, with an introduction by Drew Hayden Taylor and an afterword by John Milloy.

Update, March 23:  Claire Campbell weighs in:

Admittedly, our focus is environmental history (Canadian, continental, and beyond), but we try to cover at least one corner of the map as NiCHE (the Network in Canadian History & Environment). We publish book reviews online, as well as a monthly column highlighting new work, and posts featuring new work and author interviews. (If you're interested in reviewing for us, do let us know!)

It's worth noting that Andrea Eidinger (who now works for LAC) used to do the kind of survey you would like - but as volunteer labour. It would be lovely to have a whole cohort of historians employed full-time in writing reviews and curating book news ...  

Thanks, Claire Campbell. You are quite right about NiCHE 's coverage of environmental history-- see the link to it at right for evidence. And Andrea Eidinger's blog did do noble work, but a regularly appearing and comprehensive compilation of notices and/or reviews of new work in Canadian history is far beyond ability of any individual volunteer. 

This month at Canada's History

Barry Gough, longtime historian of western and exploration history, has the cover story in the new Canada's History:  "Alexander Mackenzie Follows Indigenous Pathways Across the Great Divide," with lively artwork from Robert Carter.

Also in the issue, Gare Joyce on Buster Keaton's last great film: cross-Canada on a railroad speeder for the National Film Board.

Cheryl Thompson compiles a history of  Afro-Canadian hair styling -- with a sidebar by Jo McCutcheon on the classic 'dos and how the press swooned over them.

Patrick Carroll on salt in the HBC trading empire.

Plus Jack Miner, new dinosaur research, birding in Labrador, Michif language preservation, tolling tokens, and a shelf's worth of book reviews

History of indigenous mapping

 This CBC story seems like good news about good sense.  The Prairie Climate Centre at the University of Winnipeg produces the Climate Atlas of Canada which "combines climate science, mapping and storytelling to bring the global issue of climate change closer to home, and is designed to inspire local, regional, and national action and solutions,... Various aspects of climate change can be explored using maps, graphs and climate data for provinces, local regions and cities across the country. Plain-language description and analysis make climate science understandable and meaningful."

The CBC story notes how deeply indigenous knowledge and indigenous research and documentation are imbedded into the Atlas. It particularly focusses on the work of Hetxw'ms Gyetxw, a Gitxsan working with the University of Winnipeg, though Silla Watt-Cloutier who is Inuk, and others are also involved. 

This seems like it ought to be absolutely normal.  Not yet.  

Pandemic memories

Two years ago today, the World Health Organization declared the existence of a global pandemic, and the world began to shut down. I went into surgery that morning, and proceeded to sleep through much of the early weeks of lockdown.  Two years in, my recovery is long past. The world? Not quite there yet. Today it's only my car going in for some fixing. I'm still wearing a mask in the dealership waiting room. 

Update:  Counting my own anniversaries, I forget all about John Ralston Saul's annual proposal that we observe the anniversary of the achievement of Canadian democracy.

'Today is the 174th anniversary of Canadian democracy. You can read my statement below:  

— John Ralston Saul (@JohnRalstonSaul)  

But shouldn't we also note when this achievement was reversed, and the House majority became de facto accountable to the executive, rather than vice versa?

History of organized artists

Jacobin magazine has a remarkable article on the history of musicians' unions in North America, their remarkable successes, and their recent inability to maintain musicians' incomes in the most recent wave of technological change and legislative attack.

Now if we could draw similar attention to how universities and schools work to undermine writers' incomes from the use of their work in teaching environments....   

If history has answers, who's delivering them?

Who is the historian to explain what's going on in Eastern Europe and global geopolitics right now? It's a hot market.

Maybe Anne Applebaum, who works as a journalist but has serious credentials and a substantial bibliography on eastern Europe and Russia.  She writes mostly for The Atlantic (which is a pretty cheap online subscription, though I recently abandoned mine, getting tired of too much insular Americanism.)

Maybe Adam Tooze. Tooze is a British economic historian now teaching in the United States. He came to prominence with a big book called Crashed, which smart reviewers seemed to think was the best book on the 2008 global economic crash. These days his substack "Chartbook"  (adamtooze.substack.com) is absolutely relentless in pouring out deeply researched opinions on just about everything going on. Free, mostly. (The image above is from his Chartbook #96, that takes the Ukraine crisis back to 1918.)

Maybe John Mearsheimer, if you lean to the idea that NATO forced Putin to invade Ukraine, because it's a law of politics that Great Powers must dominate smaller nations around them, and to hell with all that sovereignty and self-determination twaddle. In right-wing American publications, though he has an odd left-wing following too, for those who blame the American empire for everything. Did himself no favours in a New Yorker interview published March 1, which looked like Putin apologetics to a lot of readers.

Maybe Fiona Hill, British expat, biographer of Vladimir Putin, and eastern European policy expert at American universities, think tanks, and sometimes the White House. (She worked in the Trump White House, but Trump thought she was a secretary or the coffee girl, and she testified for his impeachment). Actually, if you want a break from Ukraine horrors, her book There is Nothing For You Here, particularly the memoir in its first half, is a terrific account, from her own lived experience in northern England, Moscow, and the United States, of how all three countries, from the 1980s to today, have created their own massive rustbelts, economic devastation of the working class, and much of the subsequent socio-political upheaval we live with today. Doing a lot of media, so she's all over YouTube right now (here on Colbert)

 Who else? And whose twitter feeds to follow? Suggestions welcome.

Break the Bias

"Break the Bias": Theme for IWD 2022

 Jamie Bradburn offers a historical quiz for International Women's Day

And Heroines.ca, the web resource for all things Canada/Women/Herstory, has an IWD feature for March 2022

Image: International Women's Day 2022

John Duffy 1963-2022 RIP

I did not really know John Duffy, the political strategist and author of a history of Canadian elections called Fights of Our Lives. But I interviewed him about twenty years ago about that book and I remember him well.

Duffy worked as a political communications strategist, consultant to politicians at many levels, confidant to Paul Martin and other leaders, local, federal and provincial, and principal of a strategy consultancy called StrategyCorp. Mostly I think the horde of political strategy consultants constitute just about the worst thing existing in the Canadian political world, and the source of most of its corruption and stupidity. But I thought Fights of Our Lives was clever, smart, lively and perceptive to a degree not often matched in Canadian political writing, and John Duffy's knowledge of and enthusiasm for Canadian political history was impressive -- and infectious.

He thought the historical sense mattered in politics, too. In my notes from twenty years ago, he says:

That old saying “history is past politics” has been a straw man for historians to knock down for a long time. But there is a sort of underground political-history subculture in the political world. Historians like Bliss and Granatstein and Morton may think of themselves as isolated and without influence but they are not. History buffs may be a minority, but they are a significant one, an elite among the political community.... There is a sort of underground political-history subculture in the political world. The top guys have always had a sophisticated knowledge of the past.

 And: 

I really believe Chrétien learned his way of dealing with the Meech Lake Accord from thinking about Laurier. It was not until this book, when I really looked into Laurier’s “Sunny Ways” image and how he used it, that I understood how Chrétien used a folksy image to deal with Meech. Laurier’s was from Aesop’s fables, and Chrétien’s, when asked how he would deal with Meech, was, “Well, negotiating is like when a car gets into a snowbank. It takes a lot of rocking back and forth.” Meech was threatening both parties, and he wanted it to break the Tories before it broke his party, which is what Laurier wanted from the Manitoba Schools Question.

Fights of Our Lives' categorizations of such time-honoured electoral strategies as the Quebec Bridge and the Double Tribal Whipsaw still impress and entertain.

John Duffy was the son of the equally-engaging English professor Dennis Duffy, author of many studies of historical Canadian culture and literature, who survives him. Toronto Star on John Duffy

1914 in 2022

In 2015, when the centenary of the First World War was still in the news, I blogged about a book that argued Britain had prepared an elaborate non-military strategy by which to kneecap Germany if a European war started. In Planning Armageddon, historian Nicholas Lambert set out a British plan to use Britain's immense influence over what then existed of a global financial network.  Germany would be frozen out of all financial transactions, and its ability to wage war would quickly be stifled without Britain having to engage either its navy or army.

But when war actually started, the barons of the London financial world blanched at the prospect of having to close down most of the system that they lived on.  They convinced the government the financial system was too important to be risked in war. So Britain sent an expeditionary force to be annihilated in Flanders instead.

Is it knowledge of the slaughter of the trenches, or awareness of the nuclear threat, that permitted the Euro-American financial system  to be marshalled against Russia in 2022, instead of NATO's air forces and armoured divisions?  

Here's the original post from 2015. I never read much of Lambert's book, but it comes back to me now.