Historians and issues in the news

• Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa, historian of Poland, speaks out again against Poland's criminalisation of  objective scholarship on Holocaust questions.

• McMaster historian Ian McKay and Jamie Swift comment on the odd story of the residents of Vimy Ridge Avenue who petitioned in 1928 to change the street's name to Glenhurst Avenue

Adam Gopnik and Canadian history

At first I was entertained and amused at Adam Gopnik's "We Could Have Been Canada" in the New Yorker of May 15. The election of Donald Trump, maybe, has left Gopnik thinking that that whole American Revolution was a mistake, a surrender to extremism that continues to mark American life. Maybe things would be better, he reflects, if Americans had taken to the slower progressive amelioration that he associates with .... Canada. "We could have ended up with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near continent-wide Canada."

The essay is full of Gopnik's characteristic cleverness and erudition. And of course an argument that maybe Canada came out better than the Yanks is going to be pleasant reading for us Canadians, and students of say, Loyalism, and admirers of the parliamentary tradition, and....  It becomes even better when furious American patriots declare him disloyal if not treasonous, as here at History News Network.)

But Gopnik's essay goes deeper than a single facile observation to the effect that sometimes moderation is no vice. A writer in Adam Gopnik's thrall once described to me what he liked about Gopnik's nonfiction:

He is just: take a text, take another text, take a third text, and then think about them, and then write with such clarity. He did one on the Mormons. Talk about a minefield, but he just danced among them, just to make sure we all understood how complicated this issue was and how fairly he was going to treat it.

Gopnik is surely layering texts in this piece. He devotes a couple of pages of the New Yorker's precious real estate to Justin du Rivage and Revolution against Empire, a recent Yale history Ph.D turned book (I'd never heard of) in which du Rivage argues there was, not a purely "American" revolution, but an international struggle of "authoritarian reformers" and radical whigs. The American revolutionaries, he argues, were a local variant of the radical whigs, but in many ways the "authoritarian reformers" built better outcomes in the long run.  Empires are not the only evil, Gopnik writes. He jokes that when the taxation of trade routes in the empire is the problem, a Senator Palpatine may be more useful than a Han Solo.)

While mulling over du Rivage's argument, Gopnik also notes Alan Taylor's recent Revolutions (okay, heard of that one), and its argument that, once removed from the protection of empire, the new United States became easy prey to, e.g., the Barbary Pirates, and had to develop the now familiar American militarization, in a way Canada did not.

He takes up Holger Hoogk's Scars of Independence (new to me), which is mostly about the sheer violence of the American Revolution. Gopnik draws the lesson: war creates atrocity, atrocity firms up hatred, hatred fuels extremism, fear to the dark side leads. He notes that John Wilkes was a British radical whig who became an American hero and the namesake of John Wilkes Booth, who shot Abraham Lincoln. "Those who say, 'Thus always to tyrants,' can say it only when they shoot somebody," he observes.

Gopnik is willing to acknowledge contrary evidence, too, such as Jonathan Israel's case in The Expanding Blaze (unknown to me, but Gopnik says it is forthcoming, so...) that the American Revolution actually fuelled the movement to abolish slavery. But he is dubious. The authoritarian radicals building a more modern efficient empire abolished slavery much faster and more effectively than the heirs of the American Revolution did.

I'm left, not just with the boost to the Canada ego, or even with the skill and seeming ease with which Gopnik manoeuvres through a lot of big ideas. What also strikes me is all the big ideas he has to work with!  Big ideas that seem to flow endlessly from big, recent historical monographs of the American academic historical factories. Would that we had a few more Canadianists operating at a similar level! Gopnik may be admiring Canada and what he sees as its happy evolution from under the sway of the authoritarian radicals. (I can see the CHA papers already: they were racists, they were patriarchal, they were elites.)

But Gopnik is not citing any Canadian historians, any Canadian texts at all, as he leaps, as he dances.

Update, May 25:  Jerry Bannister writes from Dalhousie:

American liberals tend to like their idea of Canada far more than its messy historical, political, or scholarly realities. For all its supposed cosmopolitanism and sophistication, the New Yorker remains an American magazine, written by and for people living in big American cities. As a subscriber for over 20 years, I say that as an observation rather than an insult. I think it's one of the best magazines in the world. But its writers see the world through American eyes. Which means that even a PhD thesis written at a big American university will invariably get more attention than a dozen books written and published in Canada, regardless of the quality of the former or the latter. We can complain, cajole, or create as much as we please, but, at a certain point, we need to face facts. It's not us; it's them. There are plenty of big ideas out there in Canadian history, though they are published in Canada.

True, I think, about the ideas. (Glancing at Holger Hoogk's book, I'd probably have said, "the American Revolution was violent?  Duhh.")  But I'd welcome readers' suggestions of big ideas in Canadian historical writing.

Update, May 30: We noted more follow up here.

Reimagining the Romance of History in the CHR

Never happened.

Catching up on some reading, I recently opened the June 2016 Canadian Historical Review.  One of its articles is a new take on an old subject:  "Brébeuf was Never Martyred: Reimagining the Life and Death of Canada's First Saint " by James Taylor Carson.  (abstract here)

Carson writes of "the enormous edifice that has been built atop Brébeuf's blessed bones" and condemns historians' uncritical acceptance of hagiography.

Instead of questioning the hagiographic narrative, however, historians have, for the most part, left Ragueneau's first telling, and Brébeuf's consequent legacy, largely untouched for more than three-and-a-half centuries.

For the most part?  This seems an extraordinarily selective reading of the historiography of 17th century Euro-Amerindian relations. A small army of ethnohistorians, anthropologists, and New France specialists has produced a shelf of honoured and influential volumes reassessing the Jesuit-Huron encounter and permanently displacing (for any serious reader) the saint-worshipping folktales Carson disparages. Think of the work of Fenton, Trigger, Heidenreich, Jaenen, Dickason, Sioui, to name a few who actually appear in Carson's footnotes. All historians are tempted, of course, to declare their work "revisionist" or "ground-breaking," but surely it is a good deal less than revolutionary to present Brébeuf as something other than simply a holy Catholic martyr .

I think Carson's real innovation -- at least for an article in a scholarly journal -- is the vivid "you are there" reconstruction of the events of 1649 in what is now called Huronia. His title promises a "reimagining," and there is certainly a lot of imagining:

The invaders passed the snowy months hunting and talking, and when the daylight started to stretch they began to ponder their impending assault on Wendake's eastern towns.

Powder pans flashed. Balls whistled through the air. Knives slit throats. Arrows found their marks. Hatchets crunched heads. Blood pooled. The several hundred not killed were captured, doomed to be tortured.

How does a scholar analyze or criticize this evocative language, often from inside the heads ("they began to ponder") of its subjects?  I find myself thinking of Bruce Trigger's studied rationalism in addressing the same subject:

In The Children of Aatientsic I privileged a rationalist approach. [...] I therefore sought to explain native behaviour as far as possible in terms of rational calculations of how desired ends might be achieved. In doing this I eschewed the alternative romantic approach.

I certainly should not be discouraging historians from stylistic innovation and experiments in form. But which is more successful as a mode of scholarship?

Still fighting the American Revolution

Gordon S. Wood

To the extent that I follow the ever-vigorous field of American colonial history, I've been aware of Gordon S. Wood as the author of major works on the founding of the American republic and, maybe more, as a prolific and thoughtful reviewer of American history titles in liberal journals such as the New York Review of Books and the New Republic.

So there seemed to be something more going on when I found Wood (age 81) writing for the very conservative Weekly Standard a review of a new work by his mentor Bernard Bailyn (age 92 -- these guys do go on producing forever) that is also an attack on just about everybody else among Americanist historians -- and issued in a very "kids today!" tone of voice.

Turns out there is a lot of history to this historiographical spat.  As an intellectual historian focussing on the ideas and philosophies of the American Founders, Wood has always been looked at askance by historians who emphasize class conflict, slavery, aboriginals, women, and the whole social history project, and who doubt or criticize Wood for his alleged lack of interest in such issues. Add to that the fact that Wood turned years ago from new academic research to successful trade-market generalist works (sometimes derided, apparently, as "Founders Chic"), and you can see motives for younger Americanists to start to criticize.

So even as Wood wrote books like The Radicalism of the American Republic and reviews like a very positive one of Annette Gordon-Reed's very unworshipful analysis of Thomas Jefferson's intimate relations with his slave Sally Hemings, he was also beginning to be defined as a rather traditional celebrator of the great and exceptional American Republic. The American history blog The Junto laid a lot of this out a couple of years ago.

Now, praising a book of essays on historiography by Bailyn, Wood comes back at his critics in a review pointedly titled "History in Context":

It’s as if academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should become simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.  

And

It has gotten worse. College students and many historians have become obsessed with inequality and white privilege in American society. And this obsession has seriously affected the writing of American history. The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation’s past has had to turn to history books written by nonacademics who have no Ph.D.s and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.   

As a contribution to a debate among scholars, it could seem like a point worth discussion. Published in the Weekly Standard, surrounded by promos for paleo-conservative seminars and how-to-kill-Obamacare strategizing, it sound more like a new front culture war. Bridges are burning.