Happy Holidays

Blogging will be slim to none until the new year, and maybe then there will be some review of the big history reads of  the past year. Enjoy the holidays!

History of Middlemarch

Early in 2025 I reported here that I was reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, and suggested i might report in on progress from time to time.

Well, there's more than a week left in the year, and I can report I did indeed finish the book. I must say I was pretty bored and may have skimmed a bit while going through those long twisting perfect sentences, but I can say this: Middlemarch is a rom-com.

Not a million laughs, but it's about young Dorothea who marries the wrong man (a historian, for God's sake, old and pedantic and controlling) and then promptly meets her true love while on her honeymoon in Rome  -- easy to do since the old bore is off doing research all the time.  Then we leave that whole plot for about 500 pages about various other well-to-do people from the Middlemarch neighbourhood. Then in the last few chapters girl meets boy again, and (husband having conveniently died offstage) happiness ensures, even though the dead bore has provided in his will that when Dorothea marries her true love, she forfeits the comfortable fortune she inherited at his death. 

People are always making modern updates of the Pride and Prejudice story. (It was Jane Austen's 250th birthday the other day.) Has anyone ever thought of Middlemarch as inspiration for a Hallmark movie?   

History of (gimme a break) "regicide"

In an opinion piece about political leadership in the Toronto Star, columnist Martin Regg Cohn twice refers to the Ontario Liberal Party's recent review of the leadership of its provincial leader as a "regicide."  

You know, the leader of a provincial party is not an absolute monarch. And this leader is even dead. Actually she remains the leader.  The same constituency that chose Bonnie Crombie leader a few years ago recently gave weak support to her continued leadership, and she declared she would resign at a date to be chosen later. That's the extent of it.

Where does this insanely violent language about political party leadership in Canada come from? Every time a political leader faces some challenge to their authority, our pundits and political scientists pull words like "regicide," "coup," and "overthrow" from their bag of tired cliches. What so terrifies them about the concept of accountability?

What they should be calling for is real accountability. There's another story  today about how Quebec's Liberal party leadership may have been won by the handing out of hundred dollar bills to anyone who would put their name to a party "membership" application.  The article points out that such behaviour by political parties is not illegal, just sort of frowned upon. Why don't columnists inquire when will we ever have legitimate leadership selection processes?

It's not a matter of legislation to end the legal corruption in the political parties. We just need to understand that discipline has to be a power of the party caucus, not the leader, with the leader being subject to discipline like any other member of caucus. 

You cannot have a functioning parliament without parliamentarians. And they are not really parliamentarians unless they have authority, including the authority to remove and replace their leaders if necessary.  

And it still would not be regicide, no matter what they would tell you.

Update, 22 December.  The scandal in Quebec forced the leader of the Quebec Liberal party to resign -- i guess it's okay when the agent of regicide in the media-- but all that will happen is that the party will have a new leadership race run by the same corrupt orgy of vote-buying, perhaps with the hundred dollar bills more effectively concealed this time

History of the world crisis

I'm not a reader of the National Post, but one of its frequent contributors, the British Columbia writer Terry Glavin, recently had some blunt and uncomplimentary things to say about the United States and its place in the world and on this continent. It came via his Substack, which was linked to by an American commentator I follow -- such are the ways of information flow these days. -- no, in fact it was Paul Wells's Substack. 

The Trump regime is not on Europe's side, or Ukraine's, or Canada's. You don't have to guess whose side the White House is on anymore.

Book Notes: Dutil and Stewart talk prime ministers.

Dropped by the U of T Bookstore in Toronto last night to hear Patrice Dutil and J.D.M. Stewart talk about their recent books, Dutil's on John A. Macdonald, Stewart's on the prime ministers of Canada.

I was happy to be there with a small but interested audience simply because book launches on Canadian historical topics seem to have become scarce and precious lately.  The discussion was lively, engaging, and often enlightening.

I think both authors would acknowledge being defenders and admirers of John A. Macdonald, but I was sorry to hear them suggest last night, as they also do in their books, that those who criticise Macdonald and even support the removal of many of his statues around Canada are simply misinformed and are a symptom of how badly history is taught in Canada.  

I believe in their sincerity, but they do contribute to that attitude that stifles the discussions we need by presuming that indigenous scholars, and minority historians, and historians less celebratory of our first prime minister, are simply wrong and therefore do not need places on platforms like this one. 

And though I don't teach and they do or did, I think by and large our history teachers do a much better job than they acknowledge.  And that young people's views on history are hardly so dismissible.

A previous post on related thoughts

 

  

Donald Graves 1949-2025 RIP military historian

Military historian and prolific author Donald E Graves died on November 11.  His major works cover the War of 1812, which probably no one else has covered so completely, but he also produced regimental histories, biographies, and studies of the Second World War.  Wikipedia has a good accounting of his work.  The obituary is here.

Graves began his historical career in the public service, working for Parks Canada's Historic Sites Service, Library and Archives Canada, and the Department of National Defence before launching a lengthy career as a consultant on military history and a freelance writer on historical topics. 

I did not know him but I once fulfilled my title as contributing editor to Canada's History by recommending him to the magazine during the planning of its War of 1812 bicentennial coverage, which may have led to his article there on the Battle of Lundy's Lane. Recently he was doing a series of military history talks for the History Symposium, some of which are yet to be podcasted. 

Image: History Symposium

History of fighter jet purchases

Wesley Wark, historian and national security/ intelligence consultant has thoughts on the F-35 and Saab Gripen fighter jets choice. TLDR: buy a few F-35s and base them in Norway as our contribution to European security. Defend Canada with the Saab Gripens.

Make it a Red Friday

 

Crossing Borders

 

On the United States' Thanksgiving Day, I fee grateful that I have no need or reason to visit the United States right now. This story presents one reason why. 

I hope my American friends stay safe and stay resolute.

Book Notes: Legal History again. And Buffs

Legal historians in the news. Historian Carolyn Strange's book, Fatal Confession, which we noted here in a recent post on the Osgoode Society publications, got a substantial excerpt in the Toronto Star on the weekend, highlighting the issues of extorted confessions and prosecutorial tunnel-vision in the 1950s and later too!), which led to the speedy trial and eventual execution of Robert Fitton.  Strange is a Canadian historian now teaching in Australia.

Following on the Globe's enthusiastic coverage of Eric Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross on Japanese Canadians repatriated to Japan after World War II, it's not a bad showing for the historian/lawyer partnership that is the Osgoode Society.

Speaking of the Adams/Stanger-Ross review, I jibbed a bit about journalists calling (dismissing?) people who read and take history seriously "buffs."  Russel Chamberlayne writes:

My late 1990s Gage Canadian Dictionary calls a buff a "fan; enthusiast: a hockey buff; a theatre buff."
My Oxford Dictionary of the same vintage has a somewhat more acceptable definition (at least to me) "a person who is enthusiastically interested in and very knowledgeable about a particular subject: a computer buff." It gives as the derivation: "early 20th century; originally applied to enthusiastic firewatchers, because of the buff uniforms formerly worn by New York volunteer firemen."
My Fitzhenry & Whiteside Canadian Thesaurus (2001) lists "aficionado, collector, devotee, enthusiast, expert, zealot" Pick any two of the above.

Enthusiastic firewatchers! 

Does Victoria Goldiee have some history for you? The spread of AI journalism

The Local, a Toronto-area version of those online newspapers offering coverage that rivals or extends what the more established media have, ran an story recently about the articles now being offered to it -- many of which turn out to be AI creations using fake or borrowed interviews, invented material, and authors who may or may not be real people and may be submitting "Toronto" stories from a base that could be anywhere in the world. Suddenly an editor has to spend a lot more time deciding not just if the story is of interest but if the author and his/her material really exist. As The Local's editor writes:

I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.

In the health/money story he got back, most of the quotations, even from real experts, had been faked, even in stories the "author" had successfully placed in some major international publications.

My own pre-ChatGPT mind screams out, why would anyone bother? Do they know what Canadian magazines pay? 

But if people are making up news and current affairs stories, the potential for AI-created historical writing, both in trade and academic publications, must be immense.  What a world!

Wright on Miller at Active History

Donald Wright drew my attention to his recent appreciation of J.R. Miller in Active History.  Here's the link (also added to my obituary notice of September 25 below).

Book Notes: Globe on Challenging Exile... and about those "Buffs"

Saturday's Globe and Mail included a substantial review of Eric Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross's book Challenging Exile, the account of Japanese Canadian citizens facing the Canadian government's determination to exile them by the thousands to Japan after the end of the Second World War.  (We noted the book here last week in an Osgoode Society roundup.) 

John Ibbitson calls it  "a superb chronicle."

You might read the review for the big picture summary Ibbitson provides about what was attempted in 1945-46. But right off he says the book is:

essential reading for anyone who cares about our country’s past.

Then there is the headline the Globe gives the review. It takes Ibbitson's phrase and turns it into 

essential reading for history buffs

What is a history buff? Are there sports "buffs"?  Economics buffs? Differential calculus buffs? "History buff" always seems essentially condescending and demeaning, a way for the headline writer to tell us he (gotta be he) would not be caught dead reading this stuff, no matter what this guy Ibbitson thinks. Sure, headline writers need to save space, but wouldn't "essential reading for anyone" have done as well?