The Maritimes -- never had a bad holiday there. One of our projects this time was chasing sites where my wife's Acadian ancestors had lived and died in various obscure corners of New Brunswick and Quebec. Surprising, the fun to be had in arriving in a small town and chasing down its original cemetery, its "old" cemetery, its current cemetery, and its various memorials, and actually finding headstones of great-grandparents, buildings they went to school in, and so on. Much aided digitally, of course, but in the end being there matters, too. And great seafood everywhere.
Also, I could not help reflecting pretty much everywhere on the qualitative improvement in small and local museums. Fifty years ago a lot of these, even the charming ones, were basically lineage shrines, haphazardly filled with stuff out of people's basements explained on cheaply printed labels reflecting, shall we say, an unsophisticated historical consciousness. (Come to think of it, the seafood restaurants were often not so great then either.)
No more. I was impressed in several places: the Institute Lefebvre in Memramcook, the Village Historique Acadien near Caraquet, Parks Canada's Restigouche historic site, and particularly the Museum of Quebec Acadians in Bonaventure, Qc. A lot of people have gone through museology courses and programs in the last fifty years, and it shows. Museum funding may have become more sophisticated too. I was educated and entertained and impressed by the professionalism of each of these in their own way.
The fall book season is upon us. Two books whose imminent arrival caught my eye are Matthew Hayday's biography Joe Clark, Progressive, Conservative, Canadian (McGill-Queens UP), and Truth before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism (Manitoba UP) edited by Sean Carleton and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair. More about them and other books, I hope, before long.
David Eby's election call in British Columbia, two years early and prompted by a crisis in the opposition that is already over, reminds me how badly governed almost all our provinces are at present. It's the kind of decision that is driven by the triumph of the pollster-strategist-political gamester mentality that is so powerful in Canadian politics.
Not that I want Eby's government defeated, given the alternative, but if it is, it will be richly deserved.
Higher education strategy is not one of my preoccupations, but I seem to come back to Alex Usher's Higher Education Strategy blog surprisingly often. Currently he has a lively conversation posted with the historian behind what sounds like a lively book on the history of the university, William Whyte's The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood.
Okay, itch to blog scratched for the moment.
