Historical Empathy: A Canada's History Event

Canada's History announces the 2024 Canada's History Forum, a three-hour online event on the theme of "Caring about the Past: Engaging With Historical Empathy," Thursday, April 25.  Registration is free but required. Details at the link.

History of ideas on the Radio; and Creative nonfiction

Bernie Lucht, longtime Ideas producer at CBC Radio, and now a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, participates next Wednesday evening in

an intimate conversation ... about his work at CBC as the producer of "Ideas", sharing his personal experiences about what goes into producing the admired and engaging radio program.

Lucht's Ideas was always hospitable to programs about Canadian (and other) histories, including several of mine (eg, this one), but also from such luminaries as David Wilson, now general editor of the DCB, Margaret Macmillan, Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, and other historians. Next Wednesday night, as Lucht talks at Ryerson, Ideas launches a two-part "trial" of John A. Macdonald for crimes against humanity (based on a talk previously given at Queen's University). The participants in the trial are all lawyers, icluding Riel descendant Jean Teillet, so the potential for irritating historian-listeners is not low, but there you go.

And while we are booking your time for you, registration deadline approaches for Writing True, the 2918 Creative Nonfiction Collective conference May 4-6 in Toronto. At the conference close I'll be leading a Sunday walking tour of the Toronto neighbourhood "The Literary Annex."

Peter Russell on Incomplete Conquests

If you are in Toronto and interested:  Peter Russell, the author of last year's constitutional history (and constitutional proposal) Canada's Odyssey: A Country Built on Incomplete Conquests, is speaking on next Friday evening, January 12, 19th at the Yorkminster Park Baptist Church community hall in North Toronto .Free admission, all welcome, it says here.

Update, Jan 12: Sorry, was in such a hurry to post this in time that I failed to notice it's next week.  Thanks to Allan Williams for the correction.

History of Storytellers: Doug Gibson's Canada150 tour

For 2017, publisher turned performer Doug Gibson  (see here talking of the diplomat and memorist Charles Ritchie) is launching his third national tour performance/lecture project: stories of great Canadian writers from 1867 to 2017.

Usually, in each decade only one novelist or short story writer in French and one in English will be chosen. Inevitably, this means that the show will be controversial (“How could you possibly leave out X from the 1980s?”), but Doug Gibson will be happy to provoke spirited debate about our best authors. And while the show will be in English, everything on the screen, such as book titles, and their titles in translation (“Kamouraska and Kamouraska , you say?”) will be bilingual. We all may learn more about our great French authors, and about our epic Haida storyteller, Skaay, revealed to us by Robert Bringhurst.

 Shows will tour from May to December, and they invite contacts from show bookers as well as audiences.

Doors Open Toronto - and Aristophanes

Is Doors Open a thing where you are?  It's pretty widespread in Ontario now, the weekend in which historic, or unique, or usually inaccessible buildings are open to the public to tour and explore.

It's this weekend in Toronto.  In one of my neighbourhoods, the local Business Improvement Association has partnered with the local historical society to offer walking tours of "The Junction's Revitalized Main Street":

Participate in an introduction to the history and character of West Toronto's hidden gem, the former City of West Toronto. Start at the site of the old business district, then be guided west to explore the local history of whiskey, wine, women and vaudeville. Learn more about the Junction by visiting the original locations of the homesteads of the area's founding fathers, several former town halls, Toronto's first mosque and the four theatres that once made up one of the city's first theatre districts.

Led by my friend Neil Ross, author, comedian, historian, also recently the author of Comedy Can Be Murder, which is somehow about Aristophanes and Groucho Marx at the same time.

Talks in T.O.: Wright on Creighton doing history, MacMillan on women doing history

Maclean's reports on Margaret MacMillan, in Toronto to deliver the Bluma Lecture at Toronto Reference Library, April 4, on the question of women doing history

“There’s been a bit of a debate here in Britain,” she says in an interview, “with some saying women don’t write the big biographies or the sweeping histories, and asking why. Yet I’ve never felt there were topics women weren’t ‘allowed’ to approach or that I couldn’t do.”

But

when she was a student at the University of Toronto a half-century ago, “there was one woman among the history faculty, and she soon departed for friendlier climes in the U.S.” Nor did her professors ask MacMillan—as they did the male students—where she planned to do graduate work.

Sold out, but will be available online here.

A week later, Saturday April 9, Donald Wright delivers the Creighton Lecture  (poster here) on the man himself, Donald Creighton, followed by a day-long conference on biography.  That's also in Toronto.

Update, April 13:  Toronto Star: Catherine Porter's followup on the MacMillan lecture.

Celebrated historian Margaret MacMillan swept into town this week to give teh Bluma lecture at the Toronto Reference Library on women who made history and women historians.

I crunched some numbers for the occasion.

Last year, 132 new history books by Canadian authors hit our bookshelves.

Of those, only 34 had female names on their spines. When you remove the three books with no official authors, books written or compiled by women make up just 26 per cent.

(Disclosure:  I'd be one of the 132-34 = 98 (in a series edited by Margaret MacMillan, just to complicate things).

Conferences

Went last Saturday to a daylong event on and about the Toronto Carrying Place, which drew on the fact that Samuel de Champlain and Etienne Brulé were in the vicinity (loosely defined) 400 years ago.

Almost two hundred people at 9:00 am on a sunny Saturday morning for a history event!  And all organized by keen young people at the local historical societies of Etobicoke, Swansea, and West Toronto Junction).  There was a morning panel session in which a lot of people (including Carolyn Podruchny, John Steckley, Annie Veulleux, Christian Bode, me) talked history. But they also organized a walking program along the Carrying Place that included an original music performance by Ars Musica, related dramatic monologues from Humber Shakespeare, and an enactment of the Haudenosaunee ritual one dish one spoon (suitably adapted).  Nice to see an awareness that a history event can be more than talking at you!

Same lesson from two First Nations speakers, Gary Sault of the Mississaugas of New Credit and Amy Desjarlais of the Anishnabe. They spoke, but they also drummed, chanted, and prayed.  Don't often see a non-indigenous historian trying that! Not easy, either.

Speaking of conferences, I'm looking forward to the Active History conference in London, Ont, next week, as promoted here.

Museum notes

Okay, maybe we should look to Buzzfeed for history links. Like this one, the story of the retirement party the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic held in Halifax for the rodent control officer who is retiring after seventeen years aboard its historic vessel CSS Acadia.  (But we're not doing no cat videos!)

Also tonight the Royal Ontario in Toronto notes 400 years of francophone activity in Ontario with a Champlain night: Patrice Dutil of the Champlain Society hosts Jose Brandao, Douglas Hunter, and Kirby Whiteduck.

Photo: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, via Buzzfeed.

Champlain goes to ROM

On September 22, the Royal Ontario Museum, mostly an institution not much engaged with the history of Toronto, Ontario, or Canada, observes the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain's first visit to what is now Ontario.  ROM will host a ROM Speaks panel discussion, "Champlain: The Man, the Explorer, the Enigma."

It's in partnership with the Champlain Society, another happy sign of that organization's renewed energies and historical entrepreneurship.

Great Canadian mysteries: Franklin

Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History launches "The Franklin Mystery: Life and Death in the Arctic"  in Ottawa June 4, 10 to noon, at Library and Archives Canada.With historians Louis Kamookak and Lyle Dick and the Ottawa Inuit Children's Centre.  Reception to follow.

RSVP (today please) to forsterm[at]uvic.ca

Don Smith and friends on Toronto Island

Donald Smith, Professor Emeritus and author of Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices From Nineteenth Century Canada, M. Jane Fairburn, author of Along the Shore: Rediscovering Toronto’s Waterfront Heritage and Maxwell King, Educator and member of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, speaks tonight on "From Menacing to Hiawatha: Toronto Island and Its People in the 18th and 19th Centuries," announced as "an evening of lively discussion on the presence of the Mississaugas in the Toronto area in the 18th and 19th centuries."  That's September 18, 2014, 7:00 p.m. at Ward's Island Clubhouse, Toronto Island.

Can't make that?  There's the Ontario Historical Society session October 23

 

History and zombies

(Click to embiggen)

Spadina Conversations starts tonight at Spadina House, hosted by Toronto Historic Sites  The theme is 1920s Toronto and its analogies with today. But the series is cleverly called (click-bait!) Myth-Making: Zombies, War and the Art of Advertising.  

Tonight's is the zombie one, "Vampires versus Zombies." Kelly Michael Stewart, host of "Fright Nights at the Projection Booth," and Andrew Watson, author of "Zombies, Environmental Declensionism, and the Fate of Humanity: Symbolism in the Zombie Metaphor, 1968-2013," discussing the topic "Do 1920s movie monsters reflect 1920s society? What does our fascination with zombies say about us today?"

Subjects for following Tuesdays include 'twenties and contemporary advertising, then a comparison of myth-making about war in the 'twenties and today, with Jonathan Vance and Ian McKay.  Full details here.  

Royal Proclamation considered at York University, Monday

The Active History team that produced the Royal Proclamation series this week is hosting a discussion on the same theme at York University on Monday, the anniversary date.

That's at 305 York Lanes --the York central concourse and shopping area -- 3:00 to 5:00 pm, with Victoria Freeman, Tom Peace (by skype at least), Keith Jamieson, Colin Coates, and me.

Update, October 7:  Not in Hogtown:  Charlevoix has a roundup of other RP250 events.

Creighton Lecture at UT: David Cannadine (with update)

The University of Toronto history department has never been very good at publicizing the annual Donald Creighton lecture generously endowed for it long ago; they don't even manage to get one organized every year.

But let's help them out.  The lecture is tomorrow Friday, 4.00 pm at the George Ignatieff Theatre 15 Devonshire Place on the UT Campus.  Free admission.

The speaker tomorrow is David Cannadine, the British historian of practically anything about British history that interests him.  Tomorrow it's Winston Churchill and the Anglo-American Relationship.

I learned about this by attending the rather-thinly attended Margaret MacMillan lecture in International Affairs today, also at the Ignatieff, where the speaker was the other British historian of anything about British history that interest her:  Linda Colley... who is married to Cannadine.  Twofer!

Update, April 7:  Pretty much a full house, actually, not that I'm claiming credit at all.  Best line from the speaker: Apparently Churchill met an American prohibitionist who said he never drank because alcohol combined the kick of an antelope and the venom of a viper. To which Churchill replied: Now that's the drink I've been searching for all my life. (Until then, I had been sure it was impossible to say anything new about Churchill.)

A line you would not hear many other places, from the reception afterwards:  "I was reading The Federalist Papers on my Kobo on the TTC down here, and..."  Ah, historians.

Not too sweet history

Some how this sounds more appealing than another session on reconceptualizing historians' discourse of otherness in the 20th Century:

The Culinary Historians of Canada, with Fort York in Toronto, present the sixth annual Mad for Marmalade conference on Saturday, February 23, all day at Fort York:  refreshments, workshops, citrus lunch, speakers, marketplace and marmalade competition.  Details and registration here.

Parler Fort returns at Toronto's Fort York

The lively Parler Fort speakers series at Fort York in Toronto returns Monday March 26^{th: "}Battlefield Toronto." Here's their announcement:: 

If Toronto were invaded today, as Toronto was in April 1813, what would you do? Join a volunteer resistance movement? Stand aside to let the professional soldiers do their job? Accept there's no possibility of defeating numerically superior invaders? Or protest the war in a non-violent way? In 1812-14, our predecessors faced those same options.
 As Toronto prepares to commemorate this turning point in our history, join historians RICHARD FELTOE, author of Redcoated Ploughboys: The Volunteer Battalion of Incorporated Militia of Upper Canada 1813-1815 (Dundurn, 2012) and SANDY ANTAL, author of A Wampum Denied: Proctor's War of 1812 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2nd edition 2011) as they discuss the roles played by volunteer Upper Canadians, First Nations allies, and the regular British army in defending Toronto and Upper Canada in the War of 1812. A discussion with audience members will follow.  Admission:  $10  ($8.85 + HST)   FREE for students                                                             
R.S.V.P. to 416-392-6907 ext. 221 or fortyork@toronto.ca Blue Barracks. Event starts at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 7.Complimentary Refreshments provided by Fort York Volunteer Historic Cooks
Presented in partnership with The Friends of Fort York, www.fortyork.ca For more info:fortyork@toronto.ca ∙ www.toronto.ca/fortyork ∙ Twitter @fortyork ∙ Facebook.com/fortyork 
Parler Fort is a series of themed discussions that examines the impacts of past events on our lives today. Featuring novelists, historians, artists and city planners among others, each session explores a topic in a way that sparks dialogue and provides insight into issues that matter today. Fort York National Historic Site is an apt setting in which to enrich our understanding of our city and fortify our connections with one another.

They also announce there will be other, non-military topics in April and May, and some big War of 1812 bicentennial kickoff events starting in June.

Fenians at Fort York

Next Monday night in Toronto, Fort York's imaginative Parler Fort lecture series is doing Fenians.  Peter Vronsky will be discussing his new book on the 1866 battle of Ridgeway and its consequences for Canada.  And David A. Wilson will discuss the newly published second volume of his biography of D'Arcy McGee, assassinated by Fenians in Ottawas in 1868.

Moderating the evening will be:  me.  It's seven pm at Fort York, refreshments from the Fort York kitchens, book table courtesy of Ben McNally's Books.  Come on down.

Parler Fort -- new talk series at Toronto's Fort York

My friends the Friends of Fort York announce "Parler Fort," a series of historical talks at and about Fort York in Toronto.  The first, on September 27, features historians Donald Smith and Margaret Sault on the history of the Mississauga First Nation in the early 19th century and since.  (Details here - scroll down.)

Carl Benn on Toronto history

The St George's Society of Toronto, a mere 175 years old this year, is hosting Carl Benn in a lecture on the history of the city, tomorrow February 5. Details here.

The City, meanwhile, is looking for a historian to direct its War of 1812 bicentennial activities.

Churchill Society on Parliament and Prorogue

The Churchill Society for Parliamentary Democracy, often teetering on the brink of being too Anglophile for my taste, comes on home to offers a forum next Monday in Toronto where some promising speakers will discuss the post-prorogue state of parliament and such. Details here.

Lawrence Martin in the Globe this morning offers the standard nostrums about reining in prime ministerial powers. He still seems to imagine that party strategists, the principal beneficiaries of such powers, might offer a solution. Fat chance. Earlier, Adam Radwanski was regurgitating the "every journalist loves a fascist" approach, condemning Toronto MP Gerard Kennedy's efforts to represent his constituents as troublemaking, treason, and disloyalty, since he's not actually in some leader's pocket.