Three Weeks in Ottawa

Today Peter Robb of the Ottawa Citizen and I do an AMA on Three Weeks in Quebec City and constitutional history.  With some contemporary excursions, too:

Q. Do you think Macdonald, Brown, Tupper et al would like the Senate of today?

A. The Senate might not surprise them, but none of them cared much about it. It’s the Commons that would shock them. In their day, parliamentarians made and unmade governments, shaped policy, and held leaders closely to account. They even made constitutions, as at Quebec City. As party leaders, those three men might enjoy the untrammeled power today’s leaders wield. But as parliamentarians they would gape in amazement at how today’s MPs seem so disinclined to exercise the great powers and responsibilities they hold as the elected representatives of the people of Canada.

Best history books, 2013, continued

Jonathan Scotland emails from Western in London:

I'm a longtime reader, but have never emailed before. Here's my suggestion for your best book list: Sandra Campbell's biography of Lorne Pierce, Both Hands, from MQUP. It fills tons of gaps and is well written to boot. 

 Just knowing I have longtime readers is a gift to me. Anyone else have books to recommend?

Update:  Yes. The Writers' Trust polled a crew of Canadian writers about their choices for the year and now has them up at its website here. fiction nonfiction, history, kids's, poetry, no borders (other than the 49th).

Brian Busby of the never dusty Dusty Bookcase offers: 

 these two books of highly creative and accomplished non-fiction: Conversations with a Dead Man: The Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott by Mark Abley (D&M)

This Great Escape by Andrew Steinmetz (Biblioasis)

History Books of the Year 2013

The Brits, who are good at this kind of thing, are beginning to deliver. History Today has suggestions from a number of British historians and also a compilation of Twittered suggestions from readers. The Guardian has a slew of best of the year lists, though no history or nonfiction lists.

Quill and Quire's nonfiction choices included James Daschuk's Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, along with Amanda Lindhout's Sudan captivity memoir, Priscilla Uppal's memoir of her mother, and Tom Smart's study of Christopher Pratt.

Canada's History has its 2013 Book and Gift Guide, which isn't quite the same thing, but could prove useful

I'd be glad to report your notable history reads of this year, Canadian or other, and might even come back with some of my own. Just email

(Image: from History Today)

The power of History (News Network)

Last month we took note of History News Network's online poll to find "the least credible history book."  Seemed like a nice summertime giggle.  But now the ah, winner, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson by evangelist David Barton is being removed from sale by its publisher, Thomas Nelson.

Indeed The Jefferson Lies does sound like drivel:  the slave-holding agnostic Jefferson as a God-fearing civil rights activist who based the Declaration of Independence on the Bible?  Naah.  Barton does not stand up to fact-checking at all well.

But removing it from print?  No doubt there are a slew of wingnut Christianist publishing houses that will bring it out again instanter, and Barton's "martydom" will probably be good for his sales and his profile. But the idea that a publisher will attempt to kill a book just because it lost out in an online poll --- I hope that is not what HNN expected or intended. Thomas Nelson agreed to publish the thing, didn't they, so their reputation is already tagged to this book.  Cutting and running when it gets controversial doesn't help them.

Second place in the contest went to Howard Zinn's zillion-selling leftist history A People's History of the United States.  Is some chickenheart publisher going to kill that one off too?

The way to deal with a bad book is to call it a bad book  Killing a book because some of us don't much admire it -- I don't think so.

Hat tip: Sullivan's Dish

Casualties of war: Looting the library

In The Walrus blog, librarian Jean Weihs recounts a minor episode of the War of 1812:  the looting of the Toronto lending library by American troops. The American commander, to his credit, was shocked:

....much to my mortification I discovered that Some of the Men had pillaged a number of Books belonging to the Toronto library, as soon as the circumstance was made known to me I interdicted an intercourse with the Shore and a general Search was made and all the Books in the Fleet collected and boxed up with intention of having them returned immediately, but circumstances in Some degree beyond my control have prevented my carrying those wishes into execution before this late period. I have now the pleasure of Sending you (by the Lady of the Lake, flag of truce) Two Boxes containing the Books that were taken from York by any person belonging to the fleet.

But the subscription-based circulating library, which had been in operation since 1810, never reopened.

Top Ten (Fictions) on the Ancient World

Vancouver writer Annabel Lyon, author of the novel of Aristotle, The Golden Mean, provides the latest in The Guardian's long-running Top Ten Books lists.  Hers is Top Ten Books on the Ancient World. Her choices are historical novels when they are not classical texts.

MacDougall on Ralston Saul on William Lyon Mackenzie

Rob MacDougall at Old is the New New ponders John Ralston Saul's arguments in last year's bestselling A Fair Country -- and finds himself explicating the political thought of William Lyon Mackenzie in interesting ways.

A hundred years at the BC Court of Appeal

Today in Victoria, B.C., Chief Justice of British Columbia Lance Finch will open the 2010 sittings of the British Columbia Court of Appeal -- and will mark the one hundredth such opening, the centenary of the court.

I will not be there today, but I take a certain interest, since the Court of Appeal of British Columbia is the subject of a forthcoming book of mine, to be published by UBC Press in April. (Details in UBC Press's Spring 2010 scholarly catalogue, downloadable here.)

At the first sitting of the court, Tuesday, January 4, 1910, the Daily Colonist reported that the Supreme Court room at the Victoria court house was “crowded with members of the bar and interested citizens when their lordships entered.” After remarks by Chief Justice James A. Macdonald, there arose “the last of the old gladiators… straight as an arrow and belying his white hair by his easy carriage”: the Treasurer of the Law Society of British Columbia, Charles Edward Pooley, who had been practising in Victoria for forty-seven years. Pooley brought the congratulations of the bar and offered some reminiscences about courts and judges of the province’s frontier days. “His brother members,” he said, “looked forward to a transaction of court business without delay of justice.”

According to the Colonist, “their lordships created a very favourable impression indeed,” particularly the chief justice. “His keen logical mind, his finely-marked face, and the clearness and decision he evinced in getting at the meat of things all drew the attention of the visitors and the counsel he heard.”

BC filmmaker Meghna Haldar has made a rather terrific film about the Court and some of its memorable cases, recently shown on BC's Knowledge Network, and coming again on January 13. Info here.

History of Charlottetown

The Canadian Encyclopedia's Feature Article online for today notes the Charlottetown Conference, just about to start 144 years ago this week.

It's a nicely-turned piece by the encyclopedia's Editor-in-Chief James March. It's his piece, but I was chuffed to see the influence of my 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal on it, particularly in Marsh's last paragraph.

History of Anne of Green Gables

Amid the commemorations of the centenary of Anne of Green Gables, I recall that Anne is actually a child of federalism.

When Prince Edward Island joined confederation in 1873, among the first senators the Island sent to Ottawa was Donald Montgomery, a farmer in his sixties who the next year became grandfather to Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Lucy Maud's mother died before she was two. Her widowed father, the senator's son Hugh John, was a not very successful merchant. So the senator, in the best traditions of Canadian political patronage, secured Hugh John a government job in the new North-West Territories. Off he went, leaving his baby daughter effectively orphaned, in the not-so-tender care of her grim and elderly maternal grandparents, the MacNeills of Cavendish.

It's generally agreed by critics, I think, that Lucy Maud's unloved childhood inspired the wish-fulfillment story of orphan Anne, who is loved and who teaches her adoptive parents to love. But no one ever seems to note it was confederation politics that left her abandoned by her surviving parent.

Story of Canada 2008

When a writer hasn't had a new book out for a while, reprints and re-editions are a lovely thing. So here's to announce the new revised updated 2008 edition of The Story of Canada, the history of Canada for kids and families that has been been getting a wonderful reception in all its various editions ever since the first some fifteen years ago.

Not quite a new title, but we added new material and new images. And hey, getting a box of crisp new copies of your own work delivered from the publisher feels like something. At better bookstores everywhere.

I appreciate all the support Key Porter Publishing has given this book over the years. Fond memories of working with Janet Lunn and Alan Daniel, too. Mostly it's all the appreciative readers we have to thank.

Back in 2000 Quill and Quire chose The Story of Canada as one of the ten best Canadian children's books of the twentieth century.

History: Um, let's think of it as a special interest

Quill and Quire magazine has just published a listing of the top-selling 50 titles by Canadian authors during the Christmas rush, December 2007. (QQ uses the relatively new BookNet system, which is said to generate pretty reliable data. Before BookNet, it was often rumoured booksellers called a title a hot seller when they wanted to generate interest in it -- because it was not selling.)

Anyway, lots of good books in the top fifty. Literary fiction, current events, hockey, how-to, memoirs, the whole gamut. But not a single title I would have claimed as a "history" title. You won't find any of the books on my Notable History Books list (see below, January 2) in BookNet's top 50 sellers.

Reading List: Storck, Journey to the Ice Age

Peter L. Storck is an archaeologist at the Royal Ontario Museum. I missed his Journey to the Ice Age when it appeared in 2004 (from UBC Press). It is an autobiography of his decades of studying the paleo-Indian presence in Ontario -- "paleo" meaning the very first people who moved into this part of the world as the glacial ice gradually retreated, to Barrie, to North Bay, to north of Timmins. It's also an account of a rigorous, complicated, and often unsuccessful research program aimed first at simply finding sites that have survived 10,000 years and more, then at extracting meaning from them.

One of the book's charms arises from Storck's acute sense of landscape. He constantly describes going to places I know well -- a farm near Alliston, a gully on the Escarpment near Hamilton, a hilltop just west of Blue Mountain -- and then imagining the paleo-landscape: tundra, cold lakes, shorelines and islands, migrating caribou herds.

Archaeologists often get cast as rugged, bearded guys in plaid shirts coming back with arrowheads. What a complex intellectually challenging discipline it actually is! Storck's book catches that.