Ged Martin explains the American pardoning power

Ged Martin, the British scholar of (mostly) Commonwealth histories, diverges a moment from his usual range of topics to provide a very detailed history of the emergence of the pardon power, now being used for malign purposes by Orange Hitler. 

It's far more detailed than any such explanation I have seen in American media.  It may also be more than you actually want to read on the subject.  But it will reinforce in you the assumption that Ged Martin seems to know a great deal about practically everything. 

Finding digitized Toronto newspapers

The downside of using digital collections of historical newspapers -- and being able to use them is mostly all upside, I hasten to add -- is figuring out where the hell they are, what they cover, and how to work 'em.  My own use of Toronto newspapers collections is very intermittent, and every time I want to do some, I have to learn the system all over again.  

Hence I was delighted to discover on the website of Jamie Bradburn, ace researcher/chronicler of Toronto history, a clear and detailed listing of historical Toronto newspapers that are or are not available online. 

Thanks, Jamie.  BTW, his blog on things Toronto is pretty good too.  

Science proves history FALSE!

The Memorious blog has recently run Ted McCormick's analysis of "Why Most Narrative History is Wrong" by Alex Rosenberg, published in the online magazine Salon.  McCormick ain't convinced, shall we say:

[According to Rosenberg,] Science doesn’t just cast doubt on the explanations of “even the best histories”. Cognitive science, evolutionary anthropology, and neuroscience are now showing that all the explanations history has ever offered are wrong. Get ready, historians, your minds are about to be blown!

Spoiler alert: I’m still here, mind unblown.  The article, excerpted from Rosenberg’s new book, is so horrendous a muddle that I had to start tackling it paragraph by paragraph — at times sentence by sentence  ... just to keep Rosenberg’s shifting claims and multiplying promissory notes straight.

McCormick is persuasive .I haven't gone back to the Rosenberg post or the book it draws on. 

Summer Blogging: Borealia on Acadia

Even amid the longterm decline or relative decline of blogging as a cultural and intellectual force, summer has tended to be the doldrums for history blogging in general.

A lively exception is currently being created by Borealia's series on Acadian history, where a whole lot of  research is being reported, mostly in advance of formal scholarly publications that may eventually appear.  Kudos to Anne Marie Lane Jonah, Elizabeth Mancke, Stephanie Pettigrew and the others engaged in these original and interdisciplinary collaborations.  I'm still reading them, and there may be more to come.

Update, August 7:  Should note that Acadiensis and Unwritten Histories are also participating in this project

Image:  by Parks Canada/Dusan Kadlic, reproduced from AML Jonah's essay.

CHA Reads at Unwritten Histories

Gotta say I'm just knocked out with admiration of Andrea Eidinger's Unwritten Histories blog for creating this week's package "CHA Reads." In "CHA Reads," each book nominated this year for the Canadian Historical Association prize for the best book in Canadian history gets a long, thoughtful advocacy from a fellow scholar. (That is, it's nothing like Canada Reads!) The last one in the series -- all posted over two days! -- is here and all the others follow immediately below on the blog.

Is this not the kind of thing for which blogging was invented? Most of these books will not be reviewed in scholarly journals for another year or so (Because why?), and most of them will get no non-academic attention at all, even here.  (Okay, I did read and note Give and Take a while back.)

Surely Canadian historical scholarship needs this kind of lively, up-to-the-moment, not-so-formal discussion and debate on an ongoing basis. And where else but in the blogosphere?  Another CHA seminar where the audience is about ten people and each speaker gets five minutes ain't going to do the job.

Yet Eidinger seems to be almost alone in trying to make this kind of scholarly blogging happen.  Okay, blogging has been eclipsed by podcasting and all the trendy social media, for sure.  But the internet was made for micro-targeting, intense detail for a motivated dispersed audience.

Sometimes I do wonder what all you profs do that is more important.

Just by comparison, I've seen a flood of online American commentary (example here) provoked by the sudden and early death of the American writer Tony Horwitz, whose book Confederates in the Attic gets praise from scholars and non-scholars alike for its deep dive into the meaning of the American past based on, of all things, an exploration of the world of Confederate military re-enactors..  Not gonna get that kind of thing from the CBC.

Update, June 3:  Andrea responds:

Thank you for your kind words about Unwritten Histories in your latest blog post! Seriously, they absolutely made my day.

I'm embarrassed to admit I had not realized this was the third year of CHA Reads at Unwritten Histories.

Chris visits a Canadian grave: Adam Fergusson Blair

At the Lawyers Guns and Money blog, I frequently find myself reading the "Erik Visits an American Grave" feature. Erik Loomis, a prof of American history and pillar of LGM, is relentless in visiting graves of famous and obscure Americans from across the centuries and riffing on the website about their intriguing and often revelatory lives. I'm not nearly so energetic in grave-visiting as Loomis evidently is, but today I'm stealing his gimmick.

Recently in Burlington, Ontario, we happened on the grave of Adam Fergusson Blair beside the 1832 Anglican church of St. Luke's. A plaque salutes him as first President of the Privy Council of the Dominion of Canada.

Blair, a veteran Reform politician, was one of those who refused to leave the confederation coalition in 1867 when George Brown was striving to rebuild the Reform/Tory polarities and John A Macdonald was striving to create the illusion of a big-tent by coopting some Reformers into his election team.

It didn't work out well for Fergusson Blair.  He died in December, six months after Confederation, and John A. offered his seat to Joseph Howe.  The DCB has Fergusson Blair's biography here.

Wisdom from the east (mostly)

Acadiensis (the blog one, I mean) recently offered an essay connecting the Halifax Explosion to climate change. "What, then, does the story of the Halifax Explosion tell us about our contemporary moment of climate disaster?"

Absolutely nothing, one is tempted to respond -- except maybe the author has a project underway on climate history. But in fact, author Jacob Remes, a student of disaster response, has quite a few interesting and ingenious comparisons and analogies to offer.

Meanwhile, at Borealia Jerry Bannister has advice on how to get that bogged down thesis started.  For one thing, he says, you can take Christmas off.

If you’re like 94.7% of the academic world, you will get precious little work done once the holidays are upon us. You can fight it and make yourself unproductive and miserable, or give into seasonal reality and be unproductive yet happy.

Not from the east but:  Active History offers pointed and thoughtful public policy advice from a team of historians who have analysed the perhaps hastily-drafted Bill 66, the bill to provide for expungement of criminal records for victims of LGBTQ+ harassment.

Active History recently got some enthusiastic attention from the academic newsmag University Affairs.  Blogging -- still not dead yet, I guess.

Active History explores the Catalan referendum

The pro-Spain demonstration in Barcelona October 8, 2017

Given that Canadians tend to take a certain special interest in separatist referendums, kudos to Active History for providing better coverage of the Catalan secession crisis that most of our major media, AH has provided two fundamentally opposed interpretations in the last couple of days. 

I'm more of the view of Aitana Giua, who condemns the breakdown of democracy attendant on the Catalan government's referendum strategy while critiquing the malpractice of the Spanish government, than of Ben Bryce, who supports the Catalan independentists pretty much unconditionally, but you can read and learn from both historians.

Image:  The Independent

Just another day in Canadian History

We try to keep this a history blog -- not a historian's blog about politics and current events like some others gradually become -- but the summer's history news doldrums (or just mine?) seem to linger on. The Cundill prize longlist came out, but I'll wait for the shortlist in a week or two

For something to inspire a post, I took a look at "Today in Canadian History."  Turns out nothing very spectacular happened in Canada on September 27.  These are the lead features from the Canada Channel/Northern Blue online publication "Today" listings

1806 - Isaac Brock appointed to command British forces in Upper Canada.
1876 - Sitting Bull leads Sioux people toward Canada after the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
1888 - Vancouver Mayor David Oppenheimer opens Stanley Park, named to honour the Governor General.
2005 - Michaëlle Jean installed as Governor General of Canada, succeeding Adrienne Clarkson

But even if today ain't so spectacular, I have to say how impressive is the research Canada Channel has put into this feature.  Their list goes on and on, for pages -- and it's like that for every day of the year.  Good work, team.

Also today in Canadian history: I'm speaking as part of a Canada150 Law Society of Upper Canada legal history seminar, "Lawyers and Canada at 150."  Throwing us a lunch too -- always a pleasure at Osgoode Hall.

The Great Depression, 144 years ago yesterday

In Canadian history, there's this thing called the crash of 1873 -- an economic depression that started elsewhere but created conditions in which the Canadian economy stagnated for five years, the Pacific railway project languished, and the new Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie was doomed to a single term.

In a lot of Canadian history, it's a kind of random intervention, like a hurricane or a drought, mentioned for its local impact but rarely explained or analyzed. So the summary explanation of its causes and consequences at Lawyers, Guns, and Money is a worth-reading.

Summertime blogs

Blog readership and production around the blogosphere slow down during the summer.  A tribute to the season, or more proof of the malevolent influence of the academic calendar, I don't know.

My blog list to the right of this page has been a bit uninspiring lately, I fear, So I'm glad to add a blog that has just come to my attention, though it has been around a while: Memorious, a pretty active and pretty serious blog about things historical by Ted McCormick, who teaches European history at Concordia in Montreal. Elegantly laid out, too.  Recent sampling:

What motivated me to look at the makeup of full-time, permanent history faculty in 25 departments was curiosity about their temporal focus. To be blunt: how many of us work on the last one or two hundred years, as opposed to the thousands of years before 1800?

Allan Greer at Five Books

Russ Chamberlayne recently drew my attention to Five Books, an ambitiously curated site where experts are invited to choose, ah, five books (duh) in their field and to discuss them in an interview. They have a substantial collection in their History category

Their range is global, from a (not exclusively) British perspective. In a recent Five Books on "Saints," I noted one of those chosen by Simon Yarrow was Allan Greer's Mohawk Saint, his study of the life and afterlife of Kateri Tekakwitha (d. 1680).

Other than that, however, Five Books seems unaware of Canadian history as a concept or indeed of Canadians as contributors to knowledge. No Canada, no Quebec, no fur trade or Inuit, etc, among their categories. There is, however, "Ice Hockey"  (well chosen by sports journalist Bruce Dowbiggen) and there is "Arctic" (with zero CanCon).

This week at Borealia

If you are not following Borealia, you ought to be.  It's a blog on early Canada, but it's frequently ambitious in the range of subjects it covers, and its contributors can go deep as well as various. As lately:

• Jerry Bannister gets into Adam Gopnik's New Yorker article that compared the political evolution of the United States to Canada's, and dissects "the American gaze" behind it.

• Elsbeth Heaman offers a tribute and reminiscence about Michael Bliss that brought tears to my eyes. It also brought back my old fury at how the U of T History Department seems to conspire every year to prevent anyone outside the department from hearing about the Creighton Lecture  (which Heaman delivered last month, I now see.).  Elsbeth, I'm sorry I missed it.  

• And more: CHA notes, blog seminars on teaching, much Anishnaabe material....

Update, June 4.  Allan Williams:

Your comments about the Creighton lecture certainly resonated with me! I managed to get to the one by David Cannadine a few years ago, which was excellent. Since then, despite two requests to be added to a distribution list to be notified and even occasional visits to the history department website specifically looking for it, including this past spring, I have been stymied.

History of women instructors at Active History

"She's hot," Andrea Eidinger's post on female instructors' experience with student evaluations has received more hits than any other post in the history of Active History

Over the course of the past year or so, there have been a number of studies that have emerged detailing the gender bias against female instructors in student evaluations. According to one study, male professors routinely ranked higher than female professors in many areas. For instance, male professors received scores in the area of promptness (how quickly an assignment was returned) that were 16% higher than those of female instructors, even though the assignments were returned at the exact same time. Another research project, which examined word usage in reviews of male and female professors on “Rate My Professor” found that male faculty members are more likely to be described as “funny,” “brilliant,” “genius,” and “arrogant,” while female faculty members are more likely to be described as “approachable,” “helpful,” “nice,” and “bossy.”

History Carnival deadline looms

Tomorrow I will be putting together December 1's History Carnival, a selection of the best history blog posts from all over the world during November 2016.

Nominations are open until I post, pretty much -- just email a link to the post to me, address at right.. But if you want your favorite blog post considered among noms from around the history blogging world, time grows short.

Reminder to history bloggers

In ten days, on 1 December 2016, I'll be hosting History Carnival, the monthly roundup of notable history-related blog posts from around the world. Nominations for your favourite Hist-Blog posts of November -- from your own blog or anywhere else -- will be gratefully received here (email at right) or via History Carnival's nomination form right up until I post.

Rise of the podcast. Twilight of the blog?

Liz Covart, historian

History News Network links to an American Historical Association item on the notable success of Liz Covart's interview-based history podcast Ben Franklin's World. Covart's description of how she built her podcast and the audience for it in the last couple of years suggests how the podcast has become the dominant internet media medium  (outside of social media, at least), leaving blogs very much in some second rank.  Now it's happening with history too.

Covart is a Ph.D historian of early America who, without being explicit about it, seems to be mostly making her way outside the university milieu.  She's thoughtful about what drives historical culture these days:

I viewed the “David McCullough phenomenon” from a front-row seat. I worked for the Boston National Historical Park as a seasonal interpretive ranger. At the start of summer 2001, visitors came to the park wanting to know how to climb the Bunker Hill monument, tour the USS Constitution, and where they could find Cheers. By the end of summer 2001, and throughout 2003, visitors started asking really detailed questions about the American Revolution and they wanted in-depth answers. Many would preface or end our conversation with something to the effect of “You know, I really hated history, but then I read McCullough’s John Adams because everyone else was reading it.”

I have a long way to go, but Ben Franklin’s World has allowed me to create a smaller version of the “McCullough phenomenon” for scholarly history. 41 percent of my audience has read a book or visited a historic site because they heard a site director or a historian speak about their work on the show. Emails, tweets, and interaction in a Facebook group for listeners, reveal that Ben Franklin’s World is inspiring conversations like those I witnessed between 2001 and 2003. Moreover, the show is providing listeners with a better idea of the important work historians do.

Myself, I'm not much in the earbud habit or generation, and I mostly find audio too slow. But I recognize that podcasts are where the impact is being made now, while lively history blogs are becoming thin on the ground.

You can listen to Ben Franklin's World here  Covart: "People are tuning into scholarly history and they think it is interesting and cool"

Full interview at AHA site

History-blogging as forbidden?

Odd conclusion of panelists at large American conference of American Academy of Religion:
 

The unanimous opinion of the #aarsbl15 blogging panel. Grad students should not be blogging. Thoughts? #aarsbl2015

— Andrew Mark Henry (@andrewmarkhenry) November 22, 2015

Pushback is instant, as here:

.@andrewmarkhenry I don't know what that panel is, but that's horrible advice. Having a robust blog while on job market certainly helped me.

— Sarah T. Roberts (@ubiquity75) November 22, 2015

And here:

A lot of my friends and colleagues who secured TT jobs in the past 5 years blogged and or hosted podcasts. https://t.co/r7HOAWlrYY

— Jim Clifford (@jburnford) November 22, 2015

Active History conference, London, ON, in October

Active History, the lively multi-contributor HistBlog, is holding a conference at Huron College in London on October 2-4.  New Directions in Active History will review the mandate of the website and assess the process of "active" history, which broadly refers to historical work that reaches out into public discourse and policy deliberation.

Beyond being a constant reader, I have no connection to the website, but they've invited me to be a panelist at one of the sessions.

On Someone Else's Blog

This ain't, you may have noticed, a very confessional blog.  But Eizabeth Glenn at the University of Toronto Press blog recently asked me a bunch of questions about this book, and they mostly called for first-person answers. Excerpt:

How did you become involved in your area of research?

I am a historian by training, but I have always worked as a self-employed, trade-market book writer. I cover Canadian history very widely, but I had never done anything related to legal history until I got a call from an editor in 1994. The Law Society of Upper Canada wanted its history written; would I be interested? I heard later they had approached some leading legal scholars who said it would take ten years and cost a million bucks. I agreed I could do it a bit faster, on a smaller budget.