New Canadians and non-Canadians in history

History Notes from the Media

1. I nearly posted last week about historians Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore and philosopher Jason Stanley, all Yale University professors and students of fascism and authoritarianism, who had announced they had moved permanently to Canada and to positions at the University of Toronto -- out of concern for events in the United States, doubtless also over fears for their own safety. 

But I held off, because I had only seen the news on BlueSky. And all social media are prone to frauds and false trails. So I waited a while, and then when it was confirmed, I was on to other things.

Goes to show that little in the United States is too crazy to be true, I guess. On the other hand, the Canadian Conservative Party platform today promises to end "woke ideology" in our universities if elected. And even trailing, those guys are still on track to win 120 or more parliamentary seats.  

Not.

2.  When I saw that today's Toronto Star editorial about the collapse of the Hudson Bay Company starts out with many paragraphs about Prince Rupert, its founding governor back in 1670, I was prepared to despair about how the dumbest parts of history live forever in the media. I still cringe over the cover story Canada's History once ran featuring Rupert as "Canada's Warrior Prince." (That one was NOT by me.)

In fact, the Star editorial people have Rupert dead to rights. 

The op-ed brings up Rupert and his horrors only to make clear he was named governor by his brother the king only so he could skim off large fees from the enterprise, in which he was otherwise largely uninterested. He never came anywhere near Canada. The essay uses him to make a nice segue into an analogy with Richard Brooks. The last governor of the HBC resembles the first one: a foreigner interested in the Bay only for what he could plunder from it. Poor Canada.