Today's Reading: Tom Peace explains that Canadian history is still not dead yet all over again once more

Good to start the new year with  Huron College/Western University historian Tom Peace and his thoughtful, sensible essay, "No One Killed Canadian History" at the Active History website

The fact of the matter is this: No one killed Canadian history. The crime never happened.

There were hundreds of excellent Canadian historians in the late-1990s, as there continues to be today. The field is broad, rich, and diverse.

At The National Post and the website The Hub, some other historians and commentators have recently been noting the twenty-fifth anniversary of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? and mourning how somehow the poor thing has been killed over again recently. 

No, it has not. 

Actually, if there's a quarter-century old CanHist classic that really deserves fresh attention, I'd like to think it's my own 1867: How the Fathers Made A Deal." Political history -- and proof that there is still room for political history  But that's just me, I guess.  (The link from the title is to one of my favourite review of it -- the Canadian Historical Review never got around to it.)

 

Life in History: Shirley Tillotson

One of the things that helps convince me a Canadian Historical Review subscription is worth the expense is its ongoing series "A Life in History" in which historians are invited to reflect on the history of their own careers. The latest, currently available as a pre-publication advance view online (paywalled, bien sûr), is by Shirley Tillotson the Dalhousie University historian, now emeritus, author of among much else Give and Take, her prize-winning book of tax history as political history. 

The essay covers a lot of ground, including a lot of reflections on historical practice, but two things particularly resonated for me. One is the way she opens the essay: "I have always wanted my work to be useful. I’m an earnest sort."

The other is a perhaps minor theme, but one that recurs throughout: her mixed feelings about pursuing an academic career at all. (We learn here she did have a career in typesetting and graphic design production for a decade or so.)

Although I have chosen not to catalogue here the frustrations of my working life, I will just say that systemic factors in the institution have often meant, in my view, that I could not give students the education that I would have liked, at a price that would have felt fair. The remedies I could see to the negative sides of life in the university were mainly individual ones.... My early retirement reflected my never-entirely-absent ambivalence about universities.

History with dazzle

Who sez history gets no respect?  University of Toronto historians may be moving out of grim old Syd Smith and getting the quarters they probably feel they deserve

The University of Toronto is planning to build a dazzling new Centre for Civilizations and Cultures ....

The new centre will house U of T’s department of history, its department of near and middle eastern civilizations, the institute of Islamic studies and the research arm for the Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies.

A New York starchitect firm will design the new building on the site of the former McLaughlin Planitarium.

Wilson on D'Arcy McGee

Great to see an announcement that David Wilson's big biography of D'Arcy McGee is about to appear, with a launch for the first volume on April 21 at Ben McNally Books in Toronto.

Okay, David's an old friend of mine, and I'm looking forward to his getting the attention he deserves. And I've had my appetite whetted by hearing him talk of this book; there will be new things.

But I'm just as chuffed to see proof that a serious nineteenth-century Canadian political biography is possible, both in the academy and in Canadian publishing. When I wrote a book about Confederation ten years ago, I was very much aware of writing about a field no one wrote about. Richard Gwyn's John A. helped show those days are passing. I hope David's McGee book definitively re-establishes that such subjects can be done and are distinctly worth doing.