HIstorical empire to run

Deborah Morrison, head of Canada's National History Society, which publishes the mag but has been steadily increasing the scope of its historical enterprises in recent years, is leaving the job after a dozen years.  There's an appreciation of her achievements here. They are looking for her successor

Rural History and Culture Association shuts down

Saskatchewan's Rural History and Culture Association is folding its big tent. The organization has announced it is closing down this week, mostly because founder and moving spirit, Mike Fedyk, is moving out of the province.

Between 2006 and 2010, the RHCA initiated 12 historical re-enactments, community festivals, concerts and other events in 11 different communities and also published one book. RHCA events attracted over 10,000 people, major media attention and raised over $30,000 for heritage and community organizations in Saskatchewan.

Even from remote Ontario, I was frequently impressed by the original and successful historical events the RHCA created around rural Saskatchewan and how effectively they promoted them. Happily, I got to write up the organization's doings -- all too briefly -- in a Beaver column in 2009.

The RHCA goes out on a high note. publishing their first book, Fort Walsh to Wood Mountain: The North-West Mounted Police Trail, in the next few days. (More info here.) Well done, Mike Fedyk.

Osgoode Society at 30

I spent Friday at the one-day legal history conference the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History had organized to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary. [added later: and met with surprise and pleasure no less than two self-identified readers of this blog] An impressive number of the founders from 1979 were present (and looking remarkably youthful), but the day was in the OS tradition: lots of new scholarship, a good representation of younger scholars, and a strong leavening of lawyers and judges among the profs of law and history.

Retired Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry was there. In the late 1970s McMurtry was attorney general of Ontario. He just thought the law as a learned profession needed to pay more attention to its history, so he went out and got a legal history society founded, persuaded a thousand or so of his close friends and colleagues to sign up as supporting members, and recruited Peter Oliver of York University to launch a publication program.

It's been gangbusters ever since, and the field of legal history has thrived for several reasons. It's partly because people interested in the field know there is now a possibility of publication. Partly because legal history seems to allow scholars to take up political-constitutional issues that have not been fashionable in history departments for a long time. Partly because law schools have ceased to be purely black-letter, "train 'em for practice" places and started to give more encouragement to all kinds of legal scholarship, including historical studies.

But the existence of the society with its broad reach, from academic scholars to practising lawyers, has clearly given the field a tremendous boost. That enables the Osgoode Society to draw on the support of law societies and law foundations -- and to hold its conferences in congenial surroundings like Osgoode Hall.

The OS also launched three new books last week: Blake Brown on 19th century juries, Barry Wright's collection on Canadian state trials, and William Kaplan's biography of Ivan Rand. As soon as they update the OS website a little, you will be able to read about them. [Update: actually, you can here.]

(And, blush, they will publish a book of mine next year.)

Historica-Dominion lives

Down last night to the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse in Toronto for the new Historica-Dominion Institute's launching party. I was a little sceptical here about the merger when it was first announced, and boy, did it get noticed. So it is only fair to report that my old and new friends there make a strong case that good things will surely flow from the new institute. And indeed, they still put on lively parties with interesting people.

Hmm, the face is familiar....

... would that be Tim Horton, maybe?

The Dominion Institute recently generated a lot of interest with its report on the what, when, and how of Canadian history teaching in high schools across the country. Now it has another poll study out.

This is the annual Canada Day poll, and this year they analyzed the visual memory of Canadians. Results are, well... pretty dire.
You can still take the faces test yourself, from the DI website.

Dominion Day at the Dominion Institute

Happy Bloomsday, by the way. I like the postcard the Dominion Institute found to illustrate its upcoming Dominion Day event. (One little institute and they have their own day!) "All manners forgotten, they made a mad dash for the grill."

More substantive: the Institute's new research (released yesterday) on Canadian history teaching in high schools across the country. Press summary here; full report here. Quebec, British Columbia, and Ontario come out best (or maybe, least worst).

John Flinn and the DCB

Down yesterday to the University of Toronto to have a drink in honour of John Flinn, who has just endowed the Dictionary of Canadian Biography with a couple of hundred thousand dollars to sustain its endeavours, particularly in translation.

Appropriately, the DCB responded with a biography. They told us Flinn, born in 1920, went to Harbord Collegiate in the 1930s and studied Greek, Latin, German, French, and English there. He spent much of the war listening to German military radio traffic, then spent most of a decade in France working up one of those immense French doctorates in medieval French literature (and yet still speaks the language with one of those charming Toronto accents). And then he did the French to English translation for all the DCB volumes from 1966 to 1998. Well, he might still do a little something for them if they asked, he said yesterday. He's only 89.

Interesting question arose. Will the DCB (now fifty years old) continue that long line of handsome volumes -- or will future development be entirely online? John English, the general editor, mentioned that the average length of stay for a visitor to the DBC online is eleven minutes -- apparently that is huge, for online statistics. (Scholarship with an attention span of eleven minutes?)

Live-blogging the CHA conference?

Ah, no. Canadian history hasn't discovered the blog yet, as I was saying. I found precisely one blog post related to the conference.

But it's a keeper. I'm glad to have found Andrew Smith's CanHist blog and this post about the conference.

[Update June 1: Andrew Smith's blog has more CHA postings since I wrote this. On the Congress, Ajzenstat's not to be missed too]

Today the CHA website has a list of prize nominees posted in April, though the prizes themselves were given out on Tuesday, May 26. It's from the publicists at Between the Lines Press and not from any historical source that I learned that Ian McKay was awarded the CHA's John A. Macdonald Prize the other day. From the BTL press release:

At its Annual Meeting in Ottawa, the Canadian Historical Association awarded the thirty-first Sir John A. Macdonald Prize to Ian McKay’s Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920. The prize is awarded annually to the non-fiction work of Canadian history "judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of the Canadian past."

Reasoning Otherwise is the first volume of Ian McKay’s groundbreaking multi-part history of the left in Canada. Using the strategy of “reconnaissance” (investigating history without purposely adding up the good and bad) first outlined in Rebels, Reds, Radicals, McKay examines the people and events that led to the rise of the left in Canada from 1890 to the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. By seeking out the stories of leftist movements and leftism in Canada in this substantial work, McKay fills an astonishing void in Canadian scholarship, providing a comprehensive survey of a subject on which little else has been written except that which takes a very specific viewpoint or which focuses only on a portion of the whole.

Ian McKay is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

The claim that the history of the left in Canada is "an astonishing void" rather staggers me, but that's no knock on the book.