Peter Toner 1943-2026 RIP: Historian of the Canadian Irish

On the Acadiensis website, David A. Wilson gives a moving obituary of Peter Toner , 41-year member of the University of New Brunswick Saint John history faculty, in the form of an acute analysis of his work and its significance as well as a record of their (mostly long-distance) friendship. 

It is worth reading even if you have never heard of him, with glimpses into the strangeness of historical careers.  Wilson actually wrote this profile three years ago. Peter Toner died on August 9, 2026.

Carlo Ginzberg (1939-2026) and Orde Morton (1940-2026) RIP, historians

To my surprise, the Toronto Star published an article recently on the passing of the Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg.  It's from a wire service, not a Star original, but still, I would not have thought his importance was enough to catch the's Star attention.  

The article says his: 

pioneering work transformed the study of the past by recovering the voices of marginalized people. ...

Ginzburg was a pioneer of microhistory, which focuses on small, specific units of analysis — such as an individual, a community, or a singular event — to reveal broader themes and issues within history.

That's about right, though surely it was not an entirely new idea. Sometime in the 1980s I made a radio documentary for CBC Ideas that we called "Four New Historians" -- and each of the four historians I profiled had recently written a book that might have been called microhistory.  

I went to New Haven, Connecticut, to interview Ginzberg, then a visiting scholar at Yale University (CBC budgets in the 1980s!), about his recently translated book The Cheese and the Worms. It explored the world of a sixteenth-century miller in a north Italian village who argued that life emerged from the universe as easily a worms arose in cheese -- and was eventually executed for heresy for the vigour with which he defended his atheistic views.  

The other three were Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, author of Montaillou, Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre, and Jonathan Spence, author of The Death of Woman Wang.   

Not coincidentally, I had recently written about obscure marginalized people who had lived in 18th century New France, and while I had written it before I encountered any of these books, they had given me a sense that I was not completely alone in the world in what I was writing about.   

I remember Ginzberg as quiet, thoughtful, fluent in English, perhaps less talkative than he might have been in his own language, but generous with his time and attention. Reading the article, I recalled him fondly. 

***

F. Orde Morton was the son of W.L. Morton, the historian of Canada, Manitoba, confederation, and much else. Like his father he was a Rhodes Scholar, but his first career was with Canada's department of External Affairs. I note his passing because he made some history as well as writing about it. His recent death notice says: 

In 1969 Orde was informed that he would be dismissed from External Affairs on the ground that his being gay made him a security risk. In 1970 he returned to Oxford at St. Antony’s College on a Canada Council doctoral fellowship, and in 1974 completed a doctorate with a thesis on Brazilian history at the time of Independence.

He taught and wrote Latin American history for a time, before turning to a business career. 

Paul Rutherford (1944-2025) RIP: historian of media and culture

The Globe and Mail reports the death at 81 of historian and longtime University of Toronto professor Paul Rutherford:

Paul was a historian of popular culture and mass media in the Department of History at the University of Toronto for 43 years. He was the author of seven books and editor of two volumes that explored this academic space. His ideas profoundly influenced the field of cultural history, emphasizing the role of mass media in shaping society. In so doing, he advanced the field of cultural theory in Canada.

One way or another, I met, or interviewed, or somehow knew most of the Canadianists around the UT history department over quite a few years, but I don't think I ever met or spoke to Paul Rutherford. My early impression was that it was fresh and somewhat bold to have a UT history prof who didn't do national political  history.  Historians could do media? -- it sounded like a good idea to me, and Rutherford was very productive in that field. 

Janet Ajzenstat (1936-2025) RIP: political philosopher

Unlike most of the prominent historians of Confederation (and virtually all of the political scientists), Janet Ajzenstat grasped (and conveyed) the depth and seriousness of the political thought that underlay the constitution-making of the 1860s.  She died about a month ago, and I missed the notice of it.

I called her out of the blue at McMaster University in 1991, when I was making an Ideas radio documentary "Historians on Confederation." I was just beginning to think of constitutional history as something worth working on. She had been deeply engaged with 19th century political thought for a long time by then, but she was still on that contract/sessional/temporary pilgrimage that so many of the most original scholars seem to endure.  

She seemed at once like someone who actually knew about the things I wanted to know about, and we kept loosely in touch. (Happily, the next time we talked she was a real professor, at McMaster.) I promoted her Canada's Founding Debates in 19998; she gave my 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal its most penetrating review.  Her book Discovering Confederation: A Canadian's Story is something unique: a memoir about confederation.  

She moved in circles much to the right of mine, but I never found her scholarship "Conservative"  -- the values she upheld were closer to the 19th century liberalism that she saw underpinning the confederation settlement. 

I think I last saw her in 2024 at a conference in Quebec City on the 1864 Quebec Conference.  She had given up posting to her blog by then (though it's still available online).  

Image: from the online obituary.

A Short History of Death UPDATED

Ruth Compton Brouwer's recent article in the Journal of Canadian Studies, “'[L]ike a page from history'? A Half-Century of Death Notices in The Globe and Mail" might be said to break new ground. It's a study of the history of paid death notices over the last fifty years.

These aren't the obituaries written by journalists about the famous. Brouwer is interested in the paid death notices submitted to newspapers by families seeking to inform their friends and acquaintances about the death of a loved one. (The last surviving trace of the classified ad, almost.) 

Brouwer observes that death notices used to be short, factual, semi-official: date and cause of death, family links, time and place of funeral, etc. Not much more.

Barebones and sober in 1970, death notices evolved, albeit slowly, over the next several decades until, in the 21st century, they have become a lengthy and fulsome celebration of a life, a determined attempt to vivify the deceased’s unique personality. Their content reflects both the era when their subjects were in their heyday and the narrative choices that their biographers make in presenting their life and values.

Brouwer observes that "obvious airbrushing notwithstanding, death notices are a valuable source for scholars, providing a wealth of information about such matters as the significance, and signifiers, of social class, gender, religion, and family values in the fashioning of the deceased’s identity."

It has struck me occasionally that whenever the deceased had that simple cottage on Lake Whatever, the death notice will emphasize what an important place it played in their life. By comparison, actual homes barely rate a mention.

Update, June 13: Charles Levi writes:

Thanks for alerting me to the CJS article.  As someone who actively uses death notices in their sideline historical work (that PhD thesis will never really be finished) I also have noticed how hard it is to ferret out the essential biographical details from the massive texts.  

And also what tends to be missing (often discarded partners). And yes, there is a distinct focus on cottage country and international travel, and not much about primary residences.

What is more striking, over the last seventy-five years, has been the complete disappearance of marriage and birth notices, which used to take up a fair amount of space. and which were very useful.  I am curious to know why that happened.

Is it that Facebook and Insta and whatever are good enough for births and marriages but a death still requires a "tombstone," particularly when the remains are as likely to be scattered as interred? 

Update, June 16:  Charles Levi:

There was something more public about the birth and marriage notices when they were in the newspaper. You didn't have to guess whether anyone had been married, and then search for whatever social media notice they had posted.

 It probably has to do more with the breakdown of "society", which has been facilitated by those smart phone things and social media. After all, even when birth and marriage notices were in newspapers, it was only certain types of people who posted those notices. As far as I know.

  

 

Maria Tippett 1944-2024 RIP, cultural historian

Judy Stoffman in the Globe and Mail provides a detailed obituary of Maria Tippett, and places her (accurately I think) as a pioneer of academic cultural history of Canada. 

She led a charmed life, living part of the year in Cambridge, England, where she was a senior research fellow at Churchill College, married to the Cambridge historian Peter Clarke, the master of Trinity Hall.

During the summer months, they would return to British Columbia – at first to Bowen Island then later to South Pender, one of B.C.’s idyllic Gulf Islands. There she and her husband began their day at 7:30 a.m. at their writing desks, then discussed what they had written in the afternoon.

Joy Parr 1949-2024 RIP, historian

I have a list of postable things I have yet to get done. But it's high time to note the death of the great historian Joy Parr, who died May 16 in Southhampton, Ontario, not far from her birthplace. 

There's a tribute to her by Jessica von Horssten on the Niche and Active History blogs (Sensing (everything) Changes: A Tribute to Joy Parr – NiCHE (niche-canada.org)  and an obit from Queen's University where she once taught. (Joy Parr, former Queen's History professor, passes away | Department of History, Queen's University (queensu.ca)  from which I have borrowed this photo.

Her now some thirty-five years old book The Gender of Breadwinners, about mostly women knitting-factory workers in Paris, Ontario, and mostly male furniture-factory workers in Hanover, Ontario, first drew my attention to her work.  Indeed, I published a long profile of her in one of my first columns for The Beaver magazine (now Canada's History) in the early1990s.  It probably was my first discovery of how essential and revealing gender history can be.  And yes, as she tells me in the profile, men have gender too.

Excerpt from "Lives of Men and Women" (The Beaver, 1992)

Talking to the women of Paris -- including some who immigrated in the early years of the century and remained Penmans employees into the 1970s -- Parr learned how women's work in the factories changed life in Paris. More than elsewhere, women owned homes or boarded together in self-supporting groups. They might marry younger men and expect them to share the housework. They would leave the factory for a few years to raise children and expect Penmans to take them back when they chose to return. They were militant about their rights, but they had a hard time with outside unions with traditional ideas about women and work. In Paris, being a woman and a factory worker was always complicated -- but always possible. Paris showed the "women don’t work" rule never applied everywhere. It opened a way for Parr to explore the many curious ways in which ideas about what men and women "ought" to do have shaped work and home – and politics and labour strife, too.

In Hanover, the subject of the second half of Parr's book, wives worked at home and men built furniture in Daniel Knechtel’s factory. That seemed a more normal work situation, but when I told Joy Parr that I had wondered how she would apply her theme of gender, she laughed. "As if only women have gender!"

Peter Russell, 1932-2024 RIP, political scientist

I was sorry to read of the recent death of Peter Russell, the University of Toronto sage on many aspects of judicial, constitutional, and political history, though he identified as a political scientist.

Emmett Macfarlane has already published this tribute to him, which is well worth reading.

I knew Peter Russell slightly, and only late in his long career. We got on very well even though I had disagreed with him by name in 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal over his inclination (then) to dismiss confederation as a thing made in London and imposed on helpless colonials. I'm still inclined to think I was right enough, and I found much more to admire and agree with in his more recent constitutional history, Canada's Odyssey -- not only because at one point he was kind enough to set out a viewpoint that "Christopher Moore has so forcefully argued."

One story of his instinctive kindness. On March 29, 2017, some constitutional history nerds around the University of Toronto decided to hold a breakfast to celebrated the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria's signing into law the British North America Act, 1867. I was invited. Perhaps forty people attended, and we went around the table introducing ourselves. It seemed everyone was a Dean, a Principal, a Senator, an MP, or at least an Emeritus. A certain snowflake lapel pin was much in evidence. 

I was not going to compete in those stakes, so I merely said my name and "I'm a writer about Canadian history." (Which I am, and proud to be!) Peter Russell happened to be seated next to me and, before introducing himself, he said at once, "He's much more than that. He's one of our best constitutional historians." (Update: I'm thinking he did not include the word "constitutional.") Which was a lot more than he needed to do. It probably had some impact on that audience, all of whom would have known him well. You can see I did not forget it.

[Photo from the Emmett Macfarlane Substack.]

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, historian of France (1929-2013) RIP

The New York Times recently noted the death of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the historian of France.

Ladurie did not write Canadian history, our usual turf here, but he had influence. In the late 1990s, a friend studying in France told me the book everyone there was reading was Ladurie's Montaillou: village occitan de 1294 à 1324.  I found a copy in the French-language section of the bookstore in the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. It took me a hellacious long time to get all the way through this long book in small print and scholarly French prose. But I was rivetted throughout, and when finished I felt like the only anglo in the world who knew his book. Shortly after, I was browsing the magazine rack at a supermarket checkout and saw a review in Time magazine of the English translation .

Montaillou remains on my bookshelf and my shortlist of great history books of all time.  

At the time I was beginning to write the book that became Louisbourg Portraits. I don't compare the two (okay, maybe a little), but Montaillou certainly increased my confidence that one could write the lives of people from the past who were quite insignificant in their own times, with historical seriousness and in an entirely nonfictional voice. I needed such inspiration at the time.

Later I interviewed him (studio link, Toronto-Paris) for a CBC Radio "Ideas" series called "Four New Historians" that examined the 1980s vogue for big histories about otherwise anonymous people. Other historians I interviewed for the series included Carlo Ginzburg, Natalie Zemon Davis, Jonathan Spence, and Robert Darnton, almost all of whom are cited in the Times obit. 

I recall Ladurie talking of reading the verbatim transcripts of the Inquisition's heresy-trial interrogations of the unhappy people of Montaillou. He described how people in our situation -- interviewer and interviewee -- were used to putting our thoughts in order before answering a question. But thirteenth century peasants, or his own relatives in rural Normandy, would tend to ramble on in endless detail while getting to the point. "Of course this is very boring," he said (he spoke English well, but I remember how he said 'vairy beurre-ing'), "but for the historian it is useful!" 

We met him later when he came to Toronto (to accept an honorary degree, I think), and Timothy LeGoff of York University invited us to a party for him. He was very engaging. He was delighted to discover my wife's Irish ancestors had come to Canada in the mid-nineteenth century. "La famine de patates!" he said instantly. (It was the 1830s, actually, but still.)

The Times' obit writer is not very well informed on exactly what the Annales school of French historians aspired to do, but it's still an intriguing life. Father a Vichy cabinet minister who went over to the Resistance, mother the daughter of a viscount, himself a militant communist in his youth, and a lot of books, including an early study of climate change in history.

He disliked the abridged English translation of Montaillou. I guess you will have to grind through the original as I did. 

Ladurie Photo Credit: New York Times.

      

Ruth Holmes Whitehead (1947-2023): keeper of Mi'kmaw testimony

I was sorry to hear of the recent passing of two historians I knew slightly. Christopher English (1939-2023), was a historian of France at Memorial University who went to law school in mid-career  and then developed a popular and successful legal history program at Memorial. William Westfall (1945-2023), was a York University historian of nineteenth century Ontario Protestantism and wise and knowledgeable about much else too.

But I wanted to note in particular the loss of Ruth Holmes Whitehead, (1947-2023) whom I did not know at all. Without being deeply involved in the topic, I usually found that the richest and most insightful material on the Mi'kmaq of Atlantic Canada often came from Whitehead. Almost all her publications were compilations of Mi'kmaw oral testimonies, though often backed up with archival references to previously recorded material. 

I rather assumed she was herself Mi'kmaq. The brief author biographies in works of hers have called her a "Mi'kmaw scholar" or "Mi'kmaw historian and ethnologist" -- which is rather ambiguous -- and I called her that myself in print at least once. 

But the rather scant obits of her I have seen note her birth in South Carolina and her career in Nova Scotia, particularly at the Nova Scotia Museum, in ways that seem to make clear that she was not indigenous. (Glad to be corrected here)  I don't think there is a "pretendian" issue; the misunderstanding was mine. And the material she collected and published will endure. 

Update, September 18:  I'm not trying to make this an obituaries blog, but ... death happens.  My X/Twitter feed this weekend was full of grief for University of New Brunswick historian Elizabeth Mancke, gone too soon and much mourned, it is clear.  She helped inspire the Borealia website, I understand. As yet no formal obits or profiles have turned up there or from UNB.

Obituary: Peter C Newman, connoisseur of power

The cap always looked silly.

The Globe and Mail offers two obituary essays on Peter C. Newman, who died yesterday: one by historian Allan Levine, the other by journalist/publisher Kenneth Whyte.  

It's the historian who defends Newman the historian (gift link) in regard to the Hudson's Bay  Company histories that were Canadian bestsellers in the 1980s. Allan Levine is right, I think, to record the pettiness and insecurity with which the academic community attempted to belittle Newman's historical work. It was not an edifying spectacle. And Levine's account of how he worked successfully with Newman for decades is illuminating. 

But I think Ken Whyte is on the right track to pass over the HBC books with the comment, "The series leaves something to be desired as history" and to focus on Newman's journalism, his real work.

Newman's genius was in interviewing. How he got seasoned businessmen and veteran politicians to imagine that he was on their side and could be trusted with the most damning admissions -- which he always went right ahead and published -- continues to be mysterious and astonishing. Newman/Nixon might have been better than Frost/Nixon.  

His focus was always power (he incorporated himself as "Power, Inc."), and I think that is what sank his histories. The subjects were all dead -- he could not talk to them. And in a way, he could not take them seriously, because being dead, they had lost all power for him.

I only had one extensive interaction with Peter Newman. The year I chaired the Writers' Union of Canada, Newman was invited to give the Hugh MacLennan  (sorry, it's the Margaret Laurence!) Lecture, always on "A Writers' Life," and given at the Union's annual meeting, held that year in Kingston, Ontario. The series, inaugurated by Hugh MacLennan in 1987, comes with a notable fee and has attracted many of Canada's leading writers, most of whom have clearly been honoured to talk about their writing with other writers and the general public.

Before the speech, we took Newman to dinner at Chez Piggy: myself as chair, novelist Audrey Thomas, our ED Penny Dickens, and Pierre Berton. Pierre was his usual genial expansive self, companionable with everyone. Newman clearly wished he was anywhere but there, and spoke to no one but Pierre, leaning over throughout the dinner to whisper to him as if to exclude everyone else.  

The speech he gave later was probably the weakest Laurence Lecture ever. He must have had some assistant cobble together a string of old chestnuts about writers and writing from a dictionary of quotations. But his stature as a writer was respected --he got a substantial ovation. Then he skipped the reception -- he had a car waiting to take him home.  

I concluded Peter Newman was a complete asshole. I have not yet seen the obituary that either refutes that (I have met people who defend his character). Or says it out loud.  

Daniel N. Paul 1938-2023 RIP, indigenous historian

Daniel N. Paul, Mi'kmaw elder, activist, and historian of his nation, was the author of several historical works, most notably We Were Not the Savages, the history of the confrontation between Mi'kmaq and European civilizations, which he declared to be "the first such history ever written by a First Nation citizen."

We Were Not The Savages, first published in 1993 and repeatedly republished since, is a detailed history, based on both documentary and oral sources, of Mi'kmaq-European conflicts, treaties, legal battles, and ongoing tensions from earliest times to the present.

Paul was born on the Indian Brook Reserve of Sipekne’katik First Nation in Nova Scotia. He attended Indian day schools but described himself as largely self-educated. Early in his career he was employed by the federal Department of Indian Affairs. He was later executive director of the Micmac Confederacy and other indigenous agencies as well as a Nova Scotia Justice of the Peace.  He was named to the Order of Canada in 2006.  He continuously revised and expanded We Were Not the Savages up to its most recent edition in 2022, when he was 84.

“While I have learned a great deal from the writings of Indigenous Peoples from all over Turtle Island, there is one book that has been my anchor: We Were Not the Savages by Mi’kmaw Elder and author Dr. Daniel N. (Danny) Paul. I have relied on his book as both a shield against the longstanding, widespread anti-Indigenous racism in society and as a powerful sword of knowledge, challenging racist and false government propaganda about our peoples.

                                                       -- from the foreword to the 2022 edition by Pamela Palmater. 

John Reid's appreciation of the importance of We Were Not the Savages appears in Acadiensis online.

Julian R.D.J. Gwyn 1937-2023 RIP, scholar of Atlantic history

This one is personal. At the very origins of my historical career with Parks Canada, I wrote an article entitled "The Maritime Economy of Ile Royale" -- my first publication, in fact. And no time later, Julian Gwyn, professor of history at the University of Ottawa, economic historian of Nova Scotia and much else, enthusiastic consultant to the Louisbourg reconstruction project, breezed into my office at Louisbourg and told me the article was terrific and I should immediately proceed to graduate studies with him at the University of Ottawa.

Which I eventually did. Except he was on sabbatical the year I wrote the thesis, so he did not supervise it, and we became friends instead. We even published a little book together, in French, no less: La Chute de Louisbourg: Le journal de siege ... de Gilles Lacroix-Girard (Editions de l'University d'Ottawa, 1978.)

That was Julian -- endlessly active in historical work, keen to make connections, quick to make things happen, a generous mentor and encourager (while also being no mean polemicist). That most of his career he was about the only Canadianist seriously engaged with the economic history of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic Canada seemed to spur rather than inhibit all that activity.

Julian retired years ago and became a gentleman farmer in rural Nova Scotia, and we didn't see him often.  Things I learned from his obituary: he had a notable military career in his youth; he helped run about half the historical and cultural organizations in eastern Canada; he had more marriages and more children than I knew; he was a devout Christian; and his full name was Julian Reginald Desgrand Jermy Gwyn, which tells all one needs to know about his British roots.

David E. Smith 1936-2023 RIP. Peter Seixas 1947-2022 RIP

David Smith, longtime political scientist at the University of Saskatchewan and student of constitutional and parliamentary history, died early in 2023.   

I confess I was not much convinced by much of what David Smith wrote on Canadian parliamentary system. In the Literary Review of Canada, I wrote an, um, sceptical review of his book The People's House of Commons, in which he argues that our parliamentary system can only function if we all accept our subordination to the crown. I wrote:  

He declares that “sovereignty in Canada rests in the crown and not the people,” that “the heart of the constitution … is monarchy,” that we live under a “monarchical constitution that makes no provision for the people” and that “there is no base for popular constituent power.”

I said fairly bluntly why I did not agree, and that prompted him to write an dismissive reply that ran as a letter to the editor (still available at the article link above).

But sometime later we were both at a conference, and he made a point of seeking me out. We sat in the hotel lobby and discussed constitutional and parliamentary questions at some length -- without either of us ever raising the elephant in the room. It was very friendly and stimulating, and I enjoyed his company. Clearly neither of us was the kind of crank our published exchange might have suggested. 

The Smith obit was accompanied in the newspaper I saw by a recent obituary of Peter Seixas (1947-2022) who died in October. Professor Seixas was an authority on historical thinking and historical consciousness at the University of British Columbia, and directed a large and much praised pan-Canadian Historical Thinking Project.  

    

History-adjacent: Dorothy Eber 1925-2022 and Douglas Lambert 1930-2022

I have not been keeping up with historical obits here lately. Too many? Mostly scholars and scholarly work with which I have not been familiar? Summer doldrums? Bit of all three, maybe.

But I want to note the recent death of Dorothy Eber and the elegant obit by Judy Stoffman in the Globe. Eber was a Montreal-based journalist, but her historical contribution was oral histories of Inuit informants. She started with Inuit artists, and moved on to Inuit historical testimony in general. Perhaps most important, by the late stages of here career her Inuit translators, whom she credited lavishly, seemed to be launching an Inuit oral history program all of their own. I had the pleasure of profiling her for Canada's History in 2008, and you can read it here (scroll down a bit in the link).

Another history-adjacent death: that of Douglas Lambert. He was not a historian. He was a lawyer and then a judge: Mr Justice Douglas Lambert of the British Columbia Court of Appeal, 1978-2005. But his recent death notice makes a point of mentioning his particular contribution to judisprudential and national history:

He was perhaps best known for his significant contribution to the evolution of the law on Aboriginal Title and Rights. His ground-breaking judgments on Indigenous law, 23 in all, span a quarter of a century, and include Haida Nation v BC, which protected Haida Gwai forests and enshrined the province's duty to consult and accommodate Indigenous nations.

Lambert's decisions (and dissents too) on indigenous matters at the BC Court helped crack that province's once rock-solid denial of aboriginal rights, and his interpretation of title and treaty law had a profound influence at the Supreme Court of Canada as well. I'm not sure how well it is understood how far ahead of the political community the judicial community has come to be on these matters. It's fair to say Lambert was also ahead of most Canadian historians in grasping the fundamental change that would have to come to Canada's understanding of treaty rights and obligations, aboriginal title, and self-government.  

I did not know Lambert at all, but I got to know of him while researching The British Columbia Court of Appeal in the late 2000s. 

(Among some historical deaths I did not get to: that of Gordon Darroch, pioneer of quantitative history (I remember when that was a thing), recently remembered by York University.)  

Patrick Watson (1930-2022) and Irving Abella (1940-2002) RIP, two different historical practices

No one in the last fifty years introduced more Canadians to glimpse of the history of Canada than Patrick Watson, who died the other day at ninety-two. Watson, quite apart from his glittering career as a pathbreaking broadcaster and documentary filmmaker, was also the inventor of the Heritage Minute.  Tell me you -- and your family, and your friends, and you kids -- have not seen them a million times.

I profiled Patrick Watson once. He told me the germ of the Heritage Minute was his time as a juror on a one-minute film festival held in association with Montreal's Expo 67.  He came away with a sense for how much could be achieved in a very short film. When the Bronfman Foundation sought his advice on a Canadian heritage-promotion project, he instantly said "one-minute movies" He would insist on movie techniques for the Heritage Minutes, even at great expense: strong production values, good acting and costuming, high-quality lighting and sound, original music, even the use of 35 mm instead of TV film. Above all, he insisted on what he called "compressed narrative" -- a very brief story that  could stand, even benefit from, repeated viewings.

A quite different historical life ended almost simultaneously with the death of Irving Abella, deservedly known as the author of None is Too Many, the history of Canada's resistance to Jewish refugees before and during the Second World War. None is Too Many was not only groundbreaking scholarship but also perhaps unmatched in Canadian historical scholarship for its direct impact on public policy and social attitudes.  Its publication influenced the Canadian government to accept the Vietnamese "boat people," which set a pattern for expanded Canadian welcome and acceptance of refugees.  

Beyond None is Too Many, Abella was a productive labour and social historian at York University from his start there in 1968, the author of Coat of Many Colours, a history of Jews and Judaism in Canada, and the founder of the first program of Jewish studies at a Canadian university.

Christopher Armstrong (1942 -2022) RIP And Ray Argyle (1930-2022) RIP

Christopher Armstrong, longtime history professor at York University, died recently in Toronto.

He was a prolific scholar, the author (or co-author, often with H. V. Nelles) of histories both heavyweight (The Politics of Federalism) and lighter (The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company), or financial (Blue Skies and Boiler Rooms: Buying and Selling Securities in Canada), or urban (Making Toronto Modern), or environmental (The River Returns: An Environmental History of the Bow), or cultural (The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta's Bow River, 1845-2000).

Here is a clip of him from four year ago, remembering his late colleague and fellow YorkU historian Ramsay Cook.

 

On the obituary theme, I might also note my friend Ray Argyle, who after a long career in journalism and in his consulting firm Argyle Communications, engaged himself writing a remarkable diverse range of mostly historical books on whatever topic appealed to him, from Canadian political campaigns to ragtime music to the liberation of Paris to George Holyoake and the founding of Humanism. He died the other day at the age of 92, and I don't doubt he had at least four more books in mind.  

I particularly liked The Boy in the Picture, a little book about Edward Mallandaine, the little guy who squeezed himself into the great Canadian photo, the driving of the last spike, right behind some guy with a hammer. Ray as a kid in Creston, B.C. met Edward Mallandaine as an old man.  

Update, July 7: Might note a different historical point here. Both these deaths seem to have involved MAID, medical assistance in dying. I never much followed the debate over legalizing "assisted suicide" (as it was then called) and more or less assumed that if it came in, it would remain pretty rare. Missed that trend, for sure.  

John Duffy 1963-2022 RIP

I did not really know John Duffy, the political strategist and author of a history of Canadian elections called Fights of Our Lives. But I interviewed him about twenty years ago about that book and I remember him well.

Duffy worked as a political communications strategist, consultant to politicians at many levels, confidant to Paul Martin and other leaders, local, federal and provincial, and principal of a strategy consultancy called StrategyCorp. Mostly I think the horde of political strategy consultants constitute just about the worst thing existing in the Canadian political world, and the source of most of its corruption and stupidity. But I thought Fights of Our Lives was clever, smart, lively and perceptive to a degree not often matched in Canadian political writing, and John Duffy's knowledge of and enthusiasm for Canadian political history was impressive -- and infectious.

He thought the historical sense mattered in politics, too. In my notes from twenty years ago, he says:

That old saying “history is past politics” has been a straw man for historians to knock down for a long time. But there is a sort of underground political-history subculture in the political world. Historians like Bliss and Granatstein and Morton may think of themselves as isolated and without influence but they are not. History buffs may be a minority, but they are a significant one, an elite among the political community.... There is a sort of underground political-history subculture in the political world. The top guys have always had a sophisticated knowledge of the past.

 And: 

I really believe Chrétien learned his way of dealing with the Meech Lake Accord from thinking about Laurier. It was not until this book, when I really looked into Laurier’s “Sunny Ways” image and how he used it, that I understood how Chrétien used a folksy image to deal with Meech. Laurier’s was from Aesop’s fables, and Chrétien’s, when asked how he would deal with Meech, was, “Well, negotiating is like when a car gets into a snowbank. It takes a lot of rocking back and forth.” Meech was threatening both parties, and he wanted it to break the Tories before it broke his party, which is what Laurier wanted from the Manitoba Schools Question.

Fights of Our Lives' categorizations of such time-honoured electoral strategies as the Quebec Bridge and the Double Tribal Whipsaw still impress and entertain.

John Duffy was the son of the equally-engaging English professor Dennis Duffy, author of many studies of historical Canadian culture and literature, who survives him. Toronto Star on John Duffy

Jonathan Spence (1936-2021) RIP, historian of China

Jonathan Spence, the Yale University scholar of Chinese history, died recently at eighty-five, as noted in this New York Times obituary.

Many years ago I interviewed Professor Spence for an Ideas documentary. I was primarily interested in a small book of his called The Death of Woman Wang, about the life and death by murder of a poor, obscure 17th century Chinese woman. His previous book had been a thick biography of one of the great Chinese emperors, and I asked him about the contrast, expecting, I guess, something about the value of balancing social history and political history, the poor as well as the great.

Instead, he said that when he wrote about the emperor, he had recently received his doctorate, published some notable scholarship, and become tenured at Yale, and so he was interested in power and influence and such matters. When he turned to Woman Wang, he said, he was married and a parent, so his interests had turned to family and personal matters.

It was the first, or at least the most articulate, statement I had heard about the personal issues and concerns that historians may bring to their work, and the autobiographical elements that may be buried in historical work more often than we recognize. 

The Death of Woman Wang is not mentioned in the obituary, I see; the emperor book is.  

The Ideas series, "Four New Historians," looked into big books about little people, you might say. It was based on my conversations with Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie (about Montaillou), Carlo Ginzberg (about The Cheese and The Worms), Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre), and Spence. In retrospect, I think it was a pretty good program, and maybe I should have written it up. (Where?)  Deep in the CBC Archives now, I guess. 

Fernand Ouellet 1926-2021 RIP UPDATED

Fernand Ouellet, one of the most respected and most controversial of twentieth-century Canadian historians, died the other day. His books included the Histoire économique et sociale du Québec, 1760-1850 and his honours the Order of Canada, the presidency of the Canadian Historical Society, and the Governor General's Literary Award.

Ouellet was respected for having led the introduction of quantititative histoire economique et sociale, on the model of the French Ecole des Annales, into Canadian history and particularly the history of Quebec's late eighteenth and nineteenth century. An enormously hard worker and productive writer, he dug out masses of archival data on any subject he touched, and filled his books with quantitative evidence.

He was controversial because his analyses dismissed traditional clerical versions of Quebec history that essentially blamed everything on the Conquest and the English -- and because he also rejected all the new nationalist interpretations that arose in and helped to shape the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. "The social, not the national," drove history in Ouellet's world. The social explanations he found for Quebec's nineteenth century difficulties in modernizing its economy and its society squarely placed the causes in francophone society, not conquest. Not, shall we say, a popular position in the new Quebec.

Le Devoir's obituary article, by Jean-Louis Bordeleau, cites the work of Ouellet and his critics and offers memories and reflections from several historians of 19th century Quebec. It notes he was one of the scholars who moved to Ontario universities to escape pressures on their scholarship from the academic establishment of the time. He died in Toronto, having concluded his career at York University. 

A long time ago in Ottawa, Fernand Ouellet supervised my master's thesis, which was indeed quantatitive and economique et sociale. He was a supportive supervisor, though very preoccupied with his own work and therefore inclined to advise by example. He actually found the thesis worth publishing, but we were both stymied by the traditional establishment at Les Presses de l'Universite d'Ottawa, where even Fernand Ouellet's support could not overcome the refusal to even consider a master's thesis for publication. Eh bien.

I found him a private man, perhaps shy (though not in historical controversies), and more easily animated by his own researches than almost any other topic. We did not remain in touch after I graduated, and I rarely saw him at historical events in Toronto. Sad to say, I was not even sure he was still alive until I saw an obituary in a Toronto paper. 

I have often found useful an interpretation of Quebec politics I once heard from Ouellet. In Quebec, he suggested, the really interesting struggles are usually not between English and French but between Montreal and the rest of the province. And in the long run, whatever the argument, Montreal's view generally prevails. On that line, I would guess that Montreal will not long support the anti-hijab and anti-human-rights movement that is trending currently, and that eventually the province will follow Montreal.

Update, July 12, 2021

Le Devoir follows up its obit for Fernand Ouellet with a long appreciation by his colleagues Yves Frenette and Martin Paquet. It's hard to imagine any English-Canadian publication being interested in providing this kind of consideration of the ideas of any Canadian historian.