History of M-my G-g-generation

There's a big poll out in the US that has Kamala Harris leading in every single age and gender grouping except one:  men over sixty, who prefer the other guy by 12 points. 

Well, the dementia stats are starting to grow in that group too.

Historians in the court: professorial advice for the U.S. Supreme Court

The leading historians of the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and nineteenth century constitutional politics are turning up in droves to offer friendly advice to the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Trump v. Anderson. That's the one about Trump's eligibility or ineligibility to be a candidate for the presidency of the United States, in light of his role in an insurrection against it.  

Short version: were it up to the historians, the Trump would be toast. They make very strong arguments in two short readable briefs that the intent of the legislation at issue was very clearly to prevent people who do what Donald Trump did from being eligible to stand for the Presidency or any other elective office of the United States.

One brief comes from Jill Lepore, Drew Gilpin Faust, and David Blight. Based on her pieces in the New Yorker, I'm inclined to believe Lepore is right about just about everything all the time, but she's also a Harvard prof and director of the Amendments Project (which is relevant, Trump v Anderson being all about the meaning and intent of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution.  The other two have solid credentials too.

A second brief comes from twenty-five academic historians, notably James MacPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom, first published in 1988 but still taken as an authoritative one-volume survey of Civil War history, and Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton prof and history of The History of White People.  I have not minutely scrutinized the two briefs to see if they have any substantive disagreements.  they look to be broadly in sync.

Law and history are different fields. A lot of historians called as expert witnesses have come out feeling pretty beaten up from the differences in what historians and lawyers think of as "evidence."  But since the issue here is the specific meaning of one particular statute from the 1860s, and since many of the current Supreme Court judges fixate on what the actual meaning and intention of the Constitutional framers was at the time, why should not the expert analysis of a lot of historians who are deeply informed about this exact question be relevant? 

Historians, including these ones, cannot help quoting what politicians said in legislatures about what the legislation in question means. (If you read Canadian constitutional history, you may be amazed how often what John A. Macdonald said in parliament about the BNA Act, 1867 has been treated as if it was the same as the BNA Act, 1867.) Judges like to observe that what matters is the words of the legislation itself, not what people said in trying to sell a bill to their fellows.  

Do the historians fall into this trap? A lot of Supreme Court clerks are probably madly pursuing this very question right now. The historians do quote a lot from the legislative debates, but they must be aware of the trap here and do not fall blindly into it. 

What standing do any of these profs -- presenting as amici curiae, friends of the court -- have to tell the judges what the law is? They do address that (and declare no party to the case assisted them in any way):

Amici’s interest in this appeal arises from the gravity of the case before the Court and the necessity of grounding any decision in a proper historical understanding of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. As eminent American historians with expertise in the relevant era, actors, and events, amici are well qualified to assist the Court by establishing the original intent, meaning, and public understanding of the Disqualification Clause. (The Lepore group)

We have professional interests in helping the Court reach its decision by appropriately analyzing probative historical evidence. (The McPherson group)

You can read 'em yourself (see links above). Will Supreme Court judges think like Ha'vid profs?

History of Canada and the American Civil War

Filmmaker and writer Julian Sher, who had a lively piece in the April-May 2023 Canada's History on a Canadian corner of the American Civil War, has also had a series of articles in the Globe and Mail on a similar topic.  He's a little more confrontational in the newspaper pieces, which expose Canadian complicity in the Confederacy's pro-slavery secessionist campaign.

He does makes a strong case for the pro-slavery views and support for the Confederacy of more than a few prominent Canadians. But I thought the series a little one-sided (as an editor titled it: "The American Civil War was Canada's Fight Too. And We Were on the Wrong Side."   It did seem to skimp on coverage of serious reasons why British North America had concerns about a heavily-armed United States with strong and enduring annexationist views regarding the provinces to the north. (He does acknowledge there were abundant Canadian supporters of the Northern cause, if briefly.)

So I was pleased to see a couple of letters to the editor making precisely this point, one signed by Alan McCullough of Ottawa, a friend of this blog. 

Sher's most vivid story of a Canadian Confederate ally concerns prominent Torontonian George Denison, who spared no effort to support the south and the cause of slavery.  Good to see the DBC Denison entry has this covered well, and notes that Denison's southern loyalties ruined his chances for military preferment in Canada. (There's still a Denison Avenue in downtown Toronto.)

Book Notes: going foreign for the summer

Okay, this blog says "History (mostly Canadian)," but we can go abroad from time to time.  

One of my summer reads, on the recommendation of historian, activist, blogger Claire Potter has been Ted Widmer's Lincoln on the Verge. On the surface, it looks like another American presidential hagiography. This one is a long, immensely detailed and annotated account of virtually every single moment of the thirteen days Abraham Lincoln spent travelling by train from his home in Illinois to Washington, DC, for his inauguration early in 1861. If a child of 1861 remembered in 1920 what she thought she recalled of the great man's passage through her town, Widner devotes at least a paragraph to the history of the town and to each version of the alleged memory. Long-gone blogger Historiann used to call examples of this kind of worshipful attention to the lives of Founders and Presidents a "sausage fest" every time another one appeared.

Yet Potter has a point: Widmer's onto something. Beyond the pleasures of a well-told microhistory that comes from a lifetime of diligent trawling through obscure sources in which Lincoln is only a peripheral interest, this is a history with an argument to make. 

Lincoln, Widmer insists, was a fluky nobody as president-elect. He won only because the vote split four ways.  But his candidacy was the closest thing available to a principled rejection of the slave power in the United States, just as attempts to appease it were coming to be understood outside the South as useless, ineffectual, and immoral. Widmer effectively argues that Lincoln's long circuitous train trip and its endless whistle stops allowed people of the northern states to see a new leader.  The crowds gathering to hear him say a few words often outnumbered the population of the towns themselves. Something important to American history was happening, as Lincoln and his crowds saw in themselves a conviction that the Union should be saved and slavery somehow ended. The awkward homely man was growing into President Lincoln.  The crowds were growing into the Northern consensus that slavery and the union were incompatible and that war would be unavoidable if one was to be ended and the other preserved. 

Widmer also effectively makes a case Lincoln took his bearings from the 1776 declaration of independence ("all men are created equal") rather than the 1797 constitution designed to allow (and disguise) slavery. And indeed the consequence of Lincoln's victorious war was substantial amendment of that constitution to bring it more into line with the Declaration.  

It often seems that Canadians know too much American history just as we know too much of American current events.  But Widmer keeps me reading as he developed this point.  And it's topical. The book was published before the 2020 election, but Widmer recounts how 1860 was the previous case of the losers conspiring to use the official Congressional certification of the vote as the moment for a coup d'etat. (Could some Trumpian thug possibly have seen this book and said, hmmm?)  

A little earlier in the summer, seeing Colm Feore as Richard III at Stratford sent me looking for a historical backgrounder on Shakespeare's villain.  Sure, Shakepeare was writing for the Tudors who controlled what could be said and seen in his day, and sure, he made up most of his drama, as a playwright should. But a recent biography by Chris Skidmore convinced me he had the essentials down: Richard was surely one murderous son of a bitch, and lethally dangerous to be around. His only saving grace was that everyone else of consequence in War of the Roses England was just as awful. if he didn't whack them, they'd have whacked him in a heartbeat.  Did, in the end.  Skidmore's is a clunky uncreative piece of work, though it has the evidence you need. A much better read on the period is The Winter King, Thomas Penn's biography of Richard's killer, Henry VII, founder of anothe line of murderous psychos, the Tudor dynasty.

Any reads to match these from Canadianists? I may have some more summer reading reports to come.

Update August 10:  I see the standard history of the Civil War, McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, says briefly of Lincoln's railroad voyage, "This tour may have been a mistake." And Widmer does have to keep finding genius in some pretty anodyne speeches, dismissed by McPherson as "platitudes and trivia."

American historians and journalists disagree. It's about slavery

For several months, the New York Times's 1619 Project has been attempting to convince Americans that their country's real foundational date is not 1776, but the year that the first African slaves were imported into the British colonies that later formed the United States.

Now some pushback from historians. Prominent ones, too (which is to say I have heard of most of them, and read at least three). Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James M. McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York and Gordon S. Wood of Brown University are the professors asking for corrections of fact.  The Times is having none of it, and standing by its reporting pretty much in toto.

The Washington Post has a summary of the disagreement.  (The Post has a serious paywall, and the story may be more accessible via the link in this History News Network story which is where I started.)

For some reason the historians' critique began on the World Socialist website, "founded on Trotskyite principles." Pretty sure these historians are not very Trot, but historical debate is where you find it, I guess.

Update, January 17, 2020:  the World Socialist website has a pretty impressive Historical section, including this section on "1619," which has many long interviews with historians.

Jefferson and Baldwin: history of illusions about education

History News Network links to an essay in the current Atlantic magazine by the remarkable American historian Annette Gordon Reed. It's at once a review of a new book by another remarkable American historian, Alan Taylor; a sharp analysis of Thomas Jefferson's idea of republican education; and another proof of how deeply slavery warped the slaveholders as well as the enslaved. Being the Atlantic, it also offers links to related articles it has published: such as an essay on Jefferson and slavery the magazine published in 1862.

I try to imagine a Canadian magazine that might even consider attempting some similar treatment of a theme in Canadian history.  Oh, well, we are a small country.

Gordon-Reed's theme, via Taylor, is of Jefferson's dream of building the University of Virginia into a kind of seminary to train Virginia's future leaders in the virtues of study, contemplation, debate, and public service, the kind of education needed to preserve a republic. Being young masters from the slaveholding class, of course, the actual students mostly behaved like complacent entitled assholes, much to Jefferson's frustration and despair.  Gordon-Reed, who is African-American, may have smiled a little as she explored this story as a commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the University of Virginia.

This Jefferson story reminds me of the plight of his near-contemporary, William Warren Baldwin, the gentlemanly reformer of Upper Canada. Baldwin believed in the Law Society of Upper Canada and its college, Osgoode Hall, in the way Jefferson believed in the University of Virginia. "There was no society for which the country should feel so deep an interest as for the Law Society. Without it, whose property was safe? Whose life could be ably defended?" Baldwin declared Osgoode Hall -- in the building of which he was the prime mover -- was designed "not so much for the mere personal accommodation of students and barristers but for the nobler end of elevating the character of the bar and securing by early habits of honorable and gentlemanly conduct the respect and confidence of the public."

Baldwin's law students were not slaveholders' sons, but they proved about as rowdy, entitled, and complacent as Jefferson's. Baldwin was so shocked that he resigned as head of the Law Society and never held public office again.

This being Canada, there are not fifty articles and essays on Baldwin's thoughts about the role of education in shaping and preserving a constitutional monarchy. I crib the quotes above from my own paragraphs in The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario's Lawyers (1997), and there isn't a whole lot else accessible on the whole topic. We all do what we can.

History of American health

There is a heartbreaking story in a recent New Yorker that speaks volumes about the unhappy state of the United States.

As the war on abortion, on contraception, on Planned Parenthood, and on universal health insurance has taken its toll across rural America, what remains are Christian Crisis Pregnancy Centres. These are awash in money from both their churches and from state and federal funds transferred from medical/social programs, and they have become ubiquitous in the rural American landscape. They are mandated only to counsel against abortion and in favour of abstinence. But many of the good Christian women who staff them, often as volunteers, cannot help but see and empathize with the struggles of the young women who come to them, drawn by desperation, lack of alternatives, and the cash and other benefits the centres offer. 

Eliza Griswold's article, "The New Front Line of the Anti-Abortion Movement," explores how workers in and clients of these centres, awash in resources and unable to provide any of the most needed and useful services to women in regions beset by poverty, opioid addictions, teen pregnancies, and family breakdown, struggle along.

Meanwhile, a tiny factoid in a book review in the New York Times Book Review: over 14 years, 42% of 9.5 million Americans afflicted by cancer had lost all their life savings within two years of diagnosis.

Altogether, it encourages despair over the fate of this great nation, and wonder about how it got there.

Impeachment: Historian explains it all for you

Warren Hastings impeached,
 acquitted in Britain, 1795

Jill Lepore, Harvard historian, New Yorker writer, and Cundill Prize nominee, has in the current New Yorker an explanation of impeachment that goes back to 1376 to make sense of it all.

In one view, nicely expressed by an English solicitor general in 1691, “The power of impeachment ought to be, like Goliath’s sword, kept in the temple, and not used but on great occasions.” Yet this autumn, in the third year of the Presidency of Donald J. Trump, House Democrats have unsheathed that terrible, mighty sword. Has time dulled its blade?

Impeachment is a terrible power because it was forged to counter a terrible power: the despot who deems himself to be above the law. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention included impeachment in the Constitution as a consequence of their knowledge of history, a study they believed to be a prerequisite for holding a position in government.

Short takeaway:

“High crimes and misdemeanors” does have a meaning. An impeachable offense is an abuse of the power of the office that violates the public trust, runs counter to the national interest, and undermines the Republic. To believe that words are meaningless is to give up on truth. To believe that Presidents can do anything they like is to give up on self-government.

History of build that wall: Francophones in New England

19th century New Englanders torch a Catholic church in Bath, Maine

Franco-American historian David Vermette has a notable piece on the Smithsonian History website about the time when the invasion of French-Canadians from Quebec was seen as a dangerous threat to New England.

In 1892, the New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In Canadian and Quebec historiography, the movement of some million francophones out of Quebec and into New England to rebuild the textile industry workforce after its Civil War collapse has mostly been recorded as a crisis for Quebec -- with the Catholic clergy being prime movers in colonization projects in the Saguenay, the Laurentians and other areas intended to prevent the draining away of francophones from Quebec.  Perspective is everything, I guess.

Vermette is the author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans. published by the Quebec (English-language) publisher Baraka Books.

Image: US National Gallery of Art, via Smithsonian History

First Last Spike History

Today is the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, at some place in Utah.  (What, you thought the CPR was the first.)  Lawyers, Guns, and Money is on the story, incidentally noting the nefarious role of TransCanada Pipelines (currently changing its name to plain TC) in criminalizing infrastructure protests.

History of the black president

Most interesting thing I have read on things Americanah since the election is Ta-Nehisi Coates's long essay for The Atlantic, "My President Was Black"

You can read the whole thing here on the magazine's site. I started with the online text, but after a while I realized it was going to be a long read. For that reason and others, I wanted an actual copy of the magazine in hand.

When's the last time you bought a magazine at a "newsstand"? It's not that easy any more to go out and buy a single copy of a magazine. Cost me over ten bucks too.  Still, glad I did.

Coates makes one powerful point with his long opening scene of crowds of hip-hop artists and other black musicians arriving at the White House one night for a concert. Black Americans will no doubt find themselves invited to the White House in future, but it may be a long time before they feel so much at home"

The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other initiatives. Obama once stood in the Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the Hamilton creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled using each word on the cards. “Drop the beat,” Obama said, inaugurating the session. At 55, Obama is younger than pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama’s enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country’s first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop’s foundational generation.

Alan Taylor on the American Revolution as civil war and class war

Amid all the bicentennial publications a few years ago, I thought Alan Taylor's The Civil War of 1812 was the book that really needed to be read.

This year, it seems Taylor is giving readers something like the civil war of 1776 in his new book American Revolutions.  This is the NYT review (print on the weekend), but Slate has a pretty good take on the book's import.

Yet even as these new leaders wrap themselves in the banner of patriotism, authentic defenders of liberty and equality, they hide the way their own interests are served by stoking the populist flames.

History of boomers in American politics

Donald Trump was born in 1946, Hillary Clinton in 1947, Bernie Sanders in 1941. This is not the beginning of the end of the US democracy. It is the last hurrah of the post-World War II baby boom.

With Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, instead of Barack Obama (born 1961), claiming to represent the next generation, there may be a problem here.
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Worst Presidents and Prime Ministers

I avoid podcasts because, while I can read quickly through the longueurs of a long text, I can't speed-listen, and I tend to get bored and distracted through the dull bits. For those reasons, I have not got through it all, but I have been listening to this 90 minute discussion of Worst American Presidents Ever, recently held at the Organization of American Historians.

I was attracted partly because it features former star HistBlogger Claire Potter and the admirable Annette Gordon-Reed (who once commented on this blog, so major props there) -- plus a couple of guys. And it is pretty entertaining.

The short answer seems to be, duh, Nixon.  But the longer answers are succinct and interesting too. They emphasize the difference between inconsequential and worst.  They suggest choosing, say, Reagan (a Claire Potter suggestion) is a category error, because you and I despise his whole program but it was his program and he got it through and held a lot of support. Jacob Weisberg suggested a Best President needed Big Events; A Consequential Impact on Them; and the Right Kind of Character, so a Worst President presumably failed somewhere in these areas too.

I once refused to participate in a historians' poll of Best Canadian Prime Ministers on the grounds that it was impossible.  No sure why picking a Worst appeals to me more, but...

Leaving out a long of short-term and inconsequential prime minister, who is up (or down) there?

• Alexander Mackenzie actually had a good program and some accomplishments, but building a party that could hold power was not among them, and it probably should have been, so has been seen as a notable failure. Though, going against Macdonald and a depression were a big handicaps.
• Robert Borden? I've been coming to think that Canada's huge over commitment to the First World War was terrible for the country and did not help the world much. But it's what Borden wanted, and he was pretty successful.
• R.B. Bennett? I haven't been much persuaded by the recent rehabilitations of Bennett, and he did have the character shortcomings a Worst PM would need. But he was up against the Depression, and the Privy Council when it really was off the rails. Would someone else have done better?
• John Diefenbaker?  Not very capable of running a government, but from this distance were his actions very consequential?
• Louis St-Laurent?  Much the same issues as Dief, maybe.
• Stephen Harper?  Looking pretty unsuccessful even on his own terms, right now, and hard to see where the rehabilitation will start to come from. The uninspirational character issue is going to nag.  But it's too soon to say. Consequential -- or not so much?
• Paul Martin and John Turner -- maybe Arthur Meighen, too -- probably underperformed relative to expectations more than most.  No one expected much of Mackenzie Bowell, I guess.

Nominations and protests welcomed.

Hat-tip: Historiann, who notes the coincidental presumptive nomination of a "ground-baloney faced Cheez-Whiz haired racist sexist birther ragetroll."

Update, May 9:  John Morgan takes exception regarding Alexander Mackenzie:

For someone who never wanted the responsibility, I think he did a pretty good job. It wasn't as if there was any kind of unified Liberal Party in the decades and years leading up to Confederation. They were a real factious bunch that were united only in their opposition to the Conservatives. After no one else wanted to take on the responsibility, Mackenzie finally agreed. Given his self-educated stonemason background, this was quite an accomplishment. His sterling character and accomplishments helped to set Canada as a country of equality, tolerance and respect for the rule of law. Canadians are known worldwide for their honesty and integrity. I'd argue it was Mackenzie's character and his policies that helped set this in motion. Considering what he was up against, he had a remarkable record of reform.

What rough Donald slouches toward Ottawa? UPDATED

There is something appealing in the calculation that at least the nomination of Donald Trump as Republican candidate for the American presidency would do more than anything else to ensure that the Democrats will win the US presidency next fall -- and rebuild their numbers in the Senate and House and in local races too. But, God, to actually go through that race seems like a terrifying gamble -- though indeed having any of this year's Republican candidates so close to the presidency is pretty horrifying. Look how terrifying the whole Trump prospect is to some American commentators.

Americans joke (mostly joke) about moving to Canada if the wrong person becomes president.  But how secure against a Canadian Prime Minister Trump are we, really?

In direct elections, like mayoral contests, we have produced some doozies, for sure. Remember the recent gun-toting, coke-snorting, drunk-driving, obscenity-spouting, work-avoiding mayor in a certain large Canadian city!

But parliamentary democracy ought to protect us better than the plebiscitary popularity contest that the American presidential race has become. In a representative democracy, someone loathed -- or simply seen through -- by everyone he or she actually encounters in person, except their dependent flunkies, ought to be quickly blocked from power by his or her fellow representatives.

Unfortunately, we ain't so protected at all. We may have a parliamentary system, but leadership in our political parties is not parliamentary at all. In Canada just about anybody can aspire to become a party leader without support from anyone actually charged with representing the people.  

Indeed, we have already had a few examples. Someone from Vancouver told me the main difference between Sarah Palin and Premier Christy Clark of BC is mostly that Clark is in power and can do anything she wants for four years. Clark had the support of precisely zero of her cabinet and caucus colleagues when she secured the leadership of the British Columbia "Liberal" Party with the support of a lot of ten-dollar voters.  And there was  Bill Vander Zalm years before her.  In Ontario, it remains largely unexplained and unexplored how Patrick Brown, an unknown and little-regarded federal backbencher, somehow became leader of the opposition and alternate premier in Ontario. But he does seem to have been well-funded from somewhere.  And that's about all you need to buy the most votes in a leadership race in Canada.

Even in the larger federal arena, it would be pretty easy for, say, rich, colorful, egotistical, combative Kevin O'Leary to invest in purchasing the leadership of a major Canadian party.  Certainly it would be a hell of a lot easier than what Donald Trump is going through south of the border.  O'Leary would only have to invest, a million dollars in buying 100,000 party memberships and maybe another million recruiting people to hold them for him, and he'd be leader of the opposition.  Facing a sufficiently unpopular government, he'd have a good shot.

I like to argue that Canadian MPs should return to the parliamentary process, and hire and fire their own leaders because it would make parliament work, it would rebuild representative democracy, and it would create a direct line of constant accountability between voters, their representatives, and the leaders of governing and opposing parties.  That is, I like the positive reasons for making leaders accountable to MPs who are accountable to voters.

But we should give a thought to the more defensive, protective, just-stop-the-disaster side of making parliamentary democracy work.  Wouldn't it be nice to know Donald Trump couldn't happen here?  So we could prepare to offer all those Yanks asylum in good faith.

Update, February 15.  Adam Radwanski observes that for their upcoming vote-buying orgy/leadership selection process (pick your preference), the Conservatives are raising their prices and complicating the sale process.  You can still buy a party leadership, I guess, just not so fast or so cheaply.  The idea of leadership accountability in parliament is still beyond what's thinkable.

Sunny ways down south: would Yank strategists consider doing a Trudeau?

Did you hear about the Republican presidential nomination candidate who was so wrong that the other Republican presidential nomination candidates noticed?

In Canada a few months ago, even observers who detested the Harper government tended to concede its Machiavellian cleverness in the use of money and strategy to micro-target, to concoct wedge-issues, and to rally the base, all in the service of turning 30% core support into another majority. Tax gimmickry, the fomenting of hijab hysteria, ad-buys selling fear and anger -- we may have hated them, but lots of analysts thought they were clever campaign tactics. They might be mean but they are smart, went the refrain.

Funny how campaign strategists are all geniuses until they turn out to be idiots. In the end, the candidate who most effectively rejected anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment, rejected divisiveness, and appealed constantly to Canadians' better natures ("Sunny ways") won overwhelmingly. Nasty strategy turned out -- who knew? -- to be stupid strategy. Supporting refugees, instead of vilifying them, turns out to be just what we Canadians do.

I wonder if there is a genius American political strategist who is looking at the tsunami of hatred and division and micro-targeting that most of the American candidates are currently surfing on, and then looking north and saying, "Hmmmm...."?

"What interests Canadians?" War Plan Red

Princeton University Press has a recent book, War Plan Red, about American plans for the invasion of Canada in the 1930s and -- sweet revenge -- Canadian plans for occupying the United States. But even the author, Kevin Lippert, has trouble taking it seriously. He describes how he got started:

I was having a conversation with one of [Princeton Architectural Press’s] Canadian distributors, a woman whose job is to sell our books in Canada, and she goes, “Are you working on anything that will be of interest to Canadians?’ I say, “I don’t know, what interests Canadians?” She says something like, “Canadians are very worried about what Americans are thinking of them.”

He has the story of the American plan of the 1930s, and also of James Sutherland "Buster" Brown, the mad genius Canadian soldier who worked out how Canada would prevail by a blitzkrieg invasion southward.

Not being a Canadian conspiracy theorist, Lippert seems not to mention Fort Drum, the large, not well known American military base about as close to Ottawa as American geography allows.  It is tasked with rapid deployment of up to 80,000 troops in an emergency.  Just in case.

H/t: Three Quarks Daily

History gets active in the United States

Democratic Party presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders, responding to the Black Lives Matter campaign against police killings of black Americans, recently declared that the United States was founded "on racist principles."

To which the rest of the world would probably have said, "Duh!"  But the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, a strong supporter of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, responded with a New York Times op-ed declaring that it was not so and proclaiming that the idea of the United States founded on racial slavery is "a myth."

Yes, slavery was a powerful institution in 1787. Yes, most white Americans presumed African inferiority. And in 1787, proslavery delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia fought to inscribe the principle of property in humans in the Constitution. But on this matter the slaveholders were crushed.

Turns out that in the United States, the history blogosphere lives. There has been an outpouring of online responses from historians to Wilentz's argument.  The blog We're History, by a collective of Americanists, has been all over it, and at History News Network, Matthew Pinsker offers Wilentz's initial response to his critics and links to other Wilentz statements on slavery and the constitution -- as well as to Pinsker's own blog posts on how to teach the subject and the controversy.

Wilentz attributes opposition to his position mostly to

scholars and activists on the left who are rightly angry at America’s racist past.

and he may be right that the history bloggers who have seized on the issue are not a representative sample of the political affiliations of all American historians. And few of his critics have access to the op-ed pages of the New York Times, probably.  Still good to see the liveliness of the HistBlog down there and the engagement of historians in live issues.

Photo: from We're History

History of what poor people deserve

Being rich and right wing -- jeez, it seems to mean you can believe anything that sustains your situation. This is Very Serious Economist Gregory Mankiw, explaining how conservative pundit Arthur Brooks tells poor people that conservatives really care about them even as they shape laws to keep them in poverty:

For example, take the proposal to increase the minimum wage. Conservatives have many reasons to believe that it is the wrong way to help the working poor.  [....] Brooks believes that the key to personal happiness is “earned success.” A higher minimum wage means that fewer people have the opportunity to experience it.

So if fast-food workers get paid $15 an hour, somehow it is axiomatic they will not have earned it, and they won't be happy.  I wonder what Gregory Mankiw and Arthur Brooks are paid, and how much less they would actually earn if this metaphysical scale were applied to them.  Mankiw should try working the counter at McDonald's for an hour, and see how happy it makes him.

Update, August 21: I've been having a stimulating correspondence with reader Craig Yirush, who believes I quote Mankiw out of context here, and that he (and presumably Brooks, whom neither of us has read) really means only to argue that minimum wages cause unemployment to rise, and that therefore a great number of unemployed people are denied the opportunity, etc. 

"First, when the cost of hiring unskilled workers rises, businesses hire fewer of them." I take this to mean that the result of a minimum wage will be net job losses, and thus fewer low-skilled people will be able to experience any kind of earned success.

I was confident at the time that I was not misquoting, but I'm beginning to see that there may be an alternative reading in which Mankiw/Brooks are not so blindly cruel as it seemed. As long as the link above is alive, you can read the whole thing and decide for yourself.   (Note: some economists doubt the minimum wage hikes = unemployment hypothesis, but that's a different question from the point I made that CY challenges, I think.)

History of racism: the confederate flag in Canada

That debate over display of the Confederate flag that developed after the Charleston church murders is no longer exclusively American. The Nova Scotia-based Citizens against White Supremacy has launched a campaign to have display of the Confederate flag considered a hate crime across Canada.

Among the leaders of the project is Dalhousie University historian and director of its Transitional Year Program, Isaac Saney, a scholar of Cuban and African history.

A lot of Canadians probably associate that flag mostly with Duke boy cars, Texas barbecue, and immoderate beer consumption.  But there has been an interesting revaluation going on in the United States, much of it driven by historians of public memory, of how closely the Confederate flag maps with resistance to civil rights and to efforts to preserve the triumphs of segregationist and white-supremacy regimes. The removal of Confederate regalia from the South Carolina legislative grounds may be only the start, as retailers stop stocking it and manufacturers abandon its imagery.

Canada has a much more developed tradition of hate-crime legislation and empowered Human Rights Tribunals. Watch for someone to try applying those to Confederate flag displays in Canada.