Prize Watch: The CHA Prizes for best books

The Canadian Historical Association is announcing its 2025 prizes, including this list for best scholarly book in Canadian history (in English) published in 2024.

Crystal Gail Fraser, By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. University of Manitoba Press, 2024.
Gregory M.W. Kennedy, Lost in the Crowd: Acadian Soldiers of Canada’s First World War. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.
Mark G. McGowan, Finding Molly Johnson: Irish Famine Orphans in Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024.
Shannon Stunden Bower, Transforming the Prairies: Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada. University of British Columbia Press, 2024.
Matthew S. Wiseman, Frontier Science: Northern Canada, Military Research, and the Cold War, 1945-1970. University of Toronto Press, 2024.

Which lets me mention that I have been reading Gregory P. Marchildon's Tommy Douglas and the Quest for Medicare in Canada from U of T Press. It's a very big book and I have been proceeding slowly (not for lack of interest!).  I have been learning a great deal even about relatively recent events that I would have thought I was reasonably familiar with. 

So, more to say later.  But the thought had crossed my mind that this might be in the running for a prize like this one. Then -- checks copyright page) -- I find it was published this year, in 2025, so presumably not eligible for this prize this year.

Congratulations to these nominees for their 2024 books, and since I have not looked at any of the books nominated, I have no quibble with the jury's choices at all.

You can also consult the list of the four books up for the CHA's best French-language book here.  I have not read any of these either, though the New France one looks interesting.

Apparently the Congress -- where all the academic societies in the arts and social sciences, like the CHA, get together in a lollapalooza of a gathering every spring -- has been cancelled for 2026.  But that's too insiderish for me to parse.  I liked it better when it was called "the Learneds," anyway. I once had a sweatshirt that said that, with a nice pink rhododendron image. 

William Osler and Rick Hill

I used to have a copy of Michael Bliss's biography of William Osler, but it was one of the casualties of a big downsizing of my library I did a couple of years ago, so I haven't able to consult it after the Toronto Star began publicizing new exposures about Osler's racist statements and his donations of aboriginal skulls, (some labelled " dug up near Caledonia") to medical/anthropological collections, where they remain. (The Star stories make no reference to Bliss's book, though the article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal does, briefly.)  I recall Bliss found Osler a highly admirable personality, but I don't know if these aspects appeared in his account.

The Star's related story, about the half century of work by Rick Hill, the Six Nations historian, curator, and activist, in recovering and repatriating indigenous skeletal collections from around the world for respectful burial, reminds me of the tributes due to this remarkable historical scholar and activist, who ought to be honoured for his remarkable career beyond just when a headline story involves him. 

  

Pandemic history readings

Canada's History, nicely ahead of the game, has a lively 2006 piece about Canada's experience with the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19.  It is online here.   And a website from the War Museum here. 

Among histories of the event: Mark Osborne Humphries's The Last Plague (from 2013) -- is the title suddenly becoming inadequate?

Also, a recent American econometric study of the economic impacts of the Spanish flu, argues that they were brief, not that severe, and rapidly recovered from, even in the face of 700,000 American dead (and 60,000 Canadian). Possibly reassuring if the state of your investments/pension fund is just another thing to stress about right now. (Update, March 19:  Kevin Drum, my source on this link, is now having second thoughts about the possibility of escaping without economic demage.

Update, March 17:  Helen Webberley from Melbourne, Auz:

We always think of plagues being only a medieval issue where the average age of death was in any case young. They had appalling filth and no real medicine, so plagues were inevitable, and fatal. 

Secondly we think of our modern world as so sophisticated that any disease will be minor, localised and easily treated. Thanks for the reference. It will show that neither of these two thoughts are totally true.

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.

Bliss on Banting at the DCB

I see that this week's featured biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography online is of Frederick Banting, who died 21 February in 1941. It is by Michael Bliss  -- who continues his long record as a productive, publishing historian despite being dead for most of a year.

Book Notes: Wright on Sick Kids Hospital

When our daughter learned that there was a hospital just for children, she was excited.  Just for kids!  Could she go?

Her mother and I looked at each other, chills going down our spines.  You know, on the whole, we'd rather she would not have to.

One of University of Toronto Press's principal (and few!) histories for this fall is Sick Kids: The History of the Hospital For Sick Children by David Wright, professor of history and scholar of health policy at McGill in Montreal. Pub date December, but in stock October, it says here

Mad Dukes and Englishmen

Rabid?

People keep doing research and spoiling some of the best stories in the process.

I was always kinda charmed by the story that the Duke of Richmond, briefly Governor General of British North America, died of rabies near the future site of Ottawa, after being bitten by a fox. It has lots of authority behind it. Here's the DCB, for instance:

During the summer of 1819 Richmond undertook an extensive tour of Upper and Lower Canada. At William Henry (Sorel, Que.) he was bitten on the hand by a fox. The injury apparently healed, and he continued to York (Toronto) and Niagara (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.), even examining military sites as far distant as Drummond Island. Returning to Kingston, he planned a leisurely visit to the settlements on the Rideau. During this part of the journey the first symptoms of hydrophobia appeared. The disease developed rapidly and on 28 August he died in extreme agony in a barn a few miles from a settlement that had been named in his honour. Some accounts suggest that the duke had been bitten by a dog; stronger contemporary evidence, however, supports the view that he had received the rabies infection from a fox.

Sadly, however, a recent issue of Ontario History carries an article on the subject by Hugh Whitney, a senior veterinarian and no slouch at historical research either. He's skeptical of the rabies diagnosis and suggests the Duke died of the usual aristocratic complaints: dissipation and alcoholism, with maybe a series of strokes at the end, brought on by long days in the hot Canadian sun. And he makes a pretty good case that explanations other than rabies need to be considered.

He does need to explain away the first hand testimony about rabies as something of a cover-up by military officers who found the "drunk in the hot sun" explanation a bit undignified. Another piece of evidence: the fox also bit the Duke's dog, Blucher. Blucher survived.  Hmmm.

Update, February 6:  Chris Raible takes me to task a little:

A story that can, by "doing research," be spoiled is hardly a "best" story.
The problem is that such tales perpetuate.
We are all so "kinda charmed," we continue to pass them on.

So I have to give up that theory that some stories are too good to be fact-checked?  Oh, well....

History of Depression, not the economic kind.

Edward Shorter, historian of medicine at the University of Toronto, a historian who teaches in a faculty of medicine, gets some attention from HNN for his new work How Everyone Became Depressed: the Rise and Fall of the Nervous Breakdown.

Have you noticed any difference in the response to your work from historians versus psychiatrists?

Psychiatrists are very interested in the historical perspectives because they can see the obvious power that an understanding of history brings to appreciating the current situation.
Historians haven’t been so interested. 

Ouch.

The interview is by Robin Lindley, who looks pretty cross-disciplinary himself:

Robin Lindley (robinlindley@gmail.com) is a Seattle writer and attorney, and features editor for the History News Network. His interviews with scholars, writers and artists have appeared in HNN, Crosscut, Writer’s Chronicle, Real Change, The Inlander, and other publications. He has a particular interest in the history of medicine, the subject of several of his articles.