Granatstein: Books and honours

Is it news if Jack Granatstein has a new book out?

The Weight of Command, just out from UBC Press, is a collection of interviews Granatstein conducted over many years with senior Canadian military commanders of the Second World War and/or those who knew them and served with them.

Meanwhile friends of Jack and of the Canadian War Museum will gather there on September 13, when the Museum inaugurates the J.L. Granatstein Reading Room of its library/archives.

Update, September 6:  we hear this event has been postponed.

Money and Defence Scholarship

Amir Attaran poked a hornet's nest the other day with a comment in the Globe & Mail about the extent to which the Canadian military subsidizes academic research that, in Attaran's view, supports military policy rather than scrutinizing it. The opinion is here and there have been several follow ups (to track em all, search Attaran while you are on the Globe site), notably one by Jack Granatstein and a way too personal response by Attaran.

Attaran certainly taps into a view I've heard. Simple version might be: war studies get funded, peace studies don't. The more subtle version is a concern about the closeness and sympathy that grows between the funders and the funded. Granatstein says scholars are way too independent to be swayed. He's right that $5000 ain't ever going to buy Granatstein's opinion, but the problem is real. Granatstein himself has often written about the herd-mentality in academe.

Bet historians doing Security Studies, Defence Studies, Peace Studies around the country are talking about this one.

Is your work just grist for fictioneering?

The terrific Toronto cultural journalist Kate Taylor last weekend covered the troubling court case involving the documentarian Judy Maltz. Maltz had researched and produced a film, No.4 Street of Our Lady, about the experience of her Jewish family and how it was protected and ultimately saved, by a Ukrainian Catholic woman, Franciszca Halamajowa, during the Holocaust

A would be novelist in Toronto saw the film and wrote a children's novel, using Maltz's research and information and giving the characters their original names, but changing and re-inventing their stories at will. She then published the book without any credit or notice to her source.

Recently the Federal Court of Canada ruled that Maltz had no right of action here, and that not even her moral rights, let along her copyright, had been violated.

I suspect this decision is debatable in law. I'm even more inclined to think it violates the ethical standards of writing and publishing. I was pleased to read historian Jack Granatstein testifying on behalf of the dignity of authorship:

In court, historian Jack Granatstein had argued for Maltz’s side that it was inappropriate for the book not to credit the documentary for detailed pieces of original research, such as information drawn from a soldier’s diary entry, but it wasn’t an argument that carried the day.

In academia, it is considered crucial to acknowledge the source of any ideas or original facts, but copyright is a much narrower beast.

I suspect, however, that many academically-based historians would not be inclined to defend their work in this way. Academic publishing and academic culture strongly encourage authors to surrender their rights and interests and accept anything that is said to disseminate historical work. Too many academics are far too deferential with regard to their rights of authorship, even when they are able to forgo their financial interests in their work.

CAUT, the professors' union, is so deeply invested in the right of universities and education ministers to pirate even copyrighted work in order to ease institutional budgeting, that is hard to imagine it supporting the lonely stand that Jack Granatstein took.

Book Notes, Granatstein reviews King or Chaos

David MacKenzie's new book King and Chaos: The 1935 Canadian General Election was published recently. I have not read it; I'm noting it mostly so I can quote a delicious line from Jack Granatstein's review of it in October's Literary Review of Canada.

Granatstein notes that this is one in a series of books on specific Canadian general elections, the previous ones all written by political scientists. He notes: 

This book is less committed to theory, has fewer charts, and is more straightforward in its approach. The ­series editors should be congratulated for asking a ­historian to write one of their titles. 

This month at the Literary Review of Canada

Quite a few historians reviewed or reviewing in the current Literary Review of Canada. (Many items are limited to subscriber access)

Historian Donald Wright reviews a couple of books on environmental policy: Fossilized: Environmental Policy in Canada's Petro-Provinces by Angela Carter, and Solved, by former Toronto mayor David Miller, on cities' responses to climate change.

Journalist John Cruikshank reviews historian Eric Sager's Inequality in Canada: The History and Politics of an Idea along with Share the Wealth, by Gauvin and MacEwen. The former he calls a history of the idea of (economic) inequality; the latter is policy advocacy.  And Elaine Coburn reviews Joan Sangster's Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism.

Historian Christopher Dummitt reviews historian Peter Price's Questions of Order, which might be called a sceptical history of the idea of confederation. A good deal of the article addresses what Dummitt calls the moral panic of historians attempting to address Indigenous/Canadian issues in ways Dummitt disapproves.

John Baglow reviews Ravi Malhotra and Benjamin Isitt's biography of early British Columbia radical Eugene Thornton Kingsley, Irene Gammell reviews a biography of Hanako Muraoka, the Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables, and Marisa Grizenko reviews a biography of Joichim Foikis, Vancouver's "official" Town Fool of the 1960s.

Malcolm Gladwell's The Bomber Mafia has provoked its own firestorm of criticism among specialist historians of the air war during World War II, but Jack Granatstein's review is mostly admiring.  

(I was sorry to see Granatstein digging up in this review the old canard that the 1992 CBC documentary film "The Valour and the Horror" was marred by "many factual errors."  I've long ago discarded the material, but I well recall the historians' brief (not Granatstein's) where the widely-cited numbered list of "factual errors" include things like "the script has a typo on page X" and many more saying in effect, "I don't agree, so this is false." The Senate hearings that sought to coerce the CBC into spiking the documentary was not a shining moment for the Canadian historical profession, with some noble exceptions.)

Patrice Dutil on the "absence" of history UPDATED

[December 13: See Patrice Dutil's response below my post. Further replies welcome.]

 I happened to hear Larry Ostola interviewing Patrice Dutil on the Witness to Yesterday podcast the other day, when they were discussing Dutil’s new edited collection, Statesmen, Strategists & Diplomats: Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Making of Foreign Policy. 

In the Literary Review of Canada a few years ago, Jack Granatstein called Dutil’s previous edited collection, The Unexpected Louis St-Laurent, “one of the few recent edited collections held together by more than the binding.” The podcast discussion of Statesmen… confirms that the coherence of that collection was no accident. Dutil describes how an editor should create a collection of essays. In the case of Statesmen, he goaded his invited contributors into focusing on issues he identified, sent them questionnaires for judging the prime ministers on predetermined criteria, and generally wielded a strong editorial hand to ensure the collection had more order and consistency than such volumes generally display. Obviously this is hard on the contributor who had planned to submit some halfbaked piece on a vaguely related topic, but it does make for essay collections that are actually worth reading. Would-be editors, take note.

This Patrice Dutil – call him Dutil One -- is a well-organized guy. He knows what the historical/cultural scene needs and is not shy about making it happen. He founded the Literary Review in which Granatstein later reviewed him. While leading the Champlain Society, he put the organization back on its financial feet, enlarged its membership, and modernized its programs. He also launched the Witness to Yesterday podcast on which he was interviewed. His own scholarship, meanwhile, ranges from nineteenth-century Quebec politics to the roots of modern public administration, and his books range widely across the Canadian political past. I admire him hugely. (He’s also a friend of mine.)

But there’s this other Patrice Dutil – Deuxtil? -- who perplexes me. Because I was also recently reading his essay, "Past Imperfect" in November’s Literary Review. That issue of the Review covered, among other things:

• ·    the latest bestseller by historian Charlotte Gray;
• ·      Ken Dryden’s history of suburban youth in the 1960s;
• ·      an oral history of Montreal’s Haitian street gangs;
• ·      RH Thomson’s meditation on First World War family history;
• ·      Ken McGoogan’s sixth book on Arctic exploration history;
• ·      A history of black Canadian athletes in the early 20^th century. 
• ·      Michael Crummey’s latest novel of Newfoundland history.

And then there is also the essay from the Deuxtil side to tell you none of these books really exists. Because Canadian history is dead. His topic sentence is “The absence of Canadian history is clear for those who have even a passing knowledge about it.” And the culprit is, well, “wokeness” and the spineless trend-seeking of policymakers and bureaucrats.

The claims of Deuxtil strike me as, well, implausible. Simply to juxtapose them against the contrary evidence, as above, seems to undermine them almost fatally. Still, dead?

“[By the 1990s] all the provinces had washed Canadian history out of the high school curriculum.” Really? My kids went through the Toronto public school system in the 1990s and 2000s. They got lots of history, even when it was labelled social studies or something else. Just because every grownup says, “They never taught us that in school!” does not actually mean they weren’t taught that in school.

“Only the disregard of history can explain the removal of most of the monuments to Sir John A. Macdonald.” Only the disregard of history? Didn’t learning some history -- of the operations of the Indian Act, the neglect of treaty obligations, the consequences of the residential school system – also play a part in those decisions? Deuxtil can disagree with the conclusions people draw, but that’s hardly evidence of history being “disregarded.” Monuments once noticed only by pigeons now provoke lively discussion everywhere.

University presses … are practically the only ones still willing to publish Canadian history.  But non-academic presses published pretty much all the history books reviewed in the LRC alongside Patrice’s essay. The other day the society that publishes Canada's History magazine brought out its annual Book and Gift Guide to promote literally hundreds of historical works from academic and non-academic presses all over the country. Also in November, it sponsored an event at Rideau Hall in Ottawa to honour history teachers doing inspirational work in schools across the country  -- though Deuxtil assures us there are no history teachers in schools across the country.

“To compare [the CBC’s] awareness of history with that of its counterparts in the United States and in Europe is to invite ridicule.” Well, watch “Real Time with Bill Maher” some Friday night: it is almost guaranteed he will abuse young Americans for their pitiful ignorance of their history. Americans constantly lament  their country’s ignorance of history. The Brits do the same, and in France ignorance of the past is a crise nationale in perpetuity. Every country has pundits who believe their youth to be uniquely ignorant of their nation’s glorious past.

Now, Deuxtil's concerns are not entirely ill-placed. I surely do share Patrice’s faith in the valuable things history can provide. It would indeed be good if Canadian history was more written about, and published more, and found in more bookstores, and read more, and taught more, and discussed more, and if all us practitioners were showered with more respect and more money by our grateful and admiring fellow citizens. Free lunches too, maybe.

But arguments about the parlous state of Canadian history in recent decades need to be put in some historical context. There’s history here that seems terribly absent from Deuxtil’s determination that the less-than-optimal conditions for a thriving historical conversation in Canada amounts to the death of history at the hands of wokeness.

A few decades ago, we entered into free trade agreements with the United States and the rest of the world. These offered fulsome “guarantees” of continued protection for Canadian culture. But very rapidly thereafter, all the major Canadian publishing houses became American-owned. The place of independent booksellers and the share of Canadian-authored titles in the Canadian book market both began a rapid decline soon after, from about twenty per cent to about five per cent. As the artist Charles Pachter used to say, what makes art universal is promotion and distribution. Shouldn’t control over decisions about the promotion and distribution of Canadian writing of all kinds be relevant to discussions of the decline, or “death,” of historical writing?  

Also: many Canadian provincial governments have for decades joined the political trend that promotes privatization, tax-cutting, and reduced public spending as the path to prosperity. Education budgets have been tightened -- so were health budgets and housing budgets, but let’s stick with education -- and priorities shifted toward job preparedness. Those policies have been tough on music programs and remedial math classes and the English curriculum, but yes, also on history teaching. The matter needing attention here is not some special plea for history. It’s the policy framework of educational spending by provincial governments. 

Sure, the CBC’s not what it might be  -- but should we put the blame solely on statue-removers and curriculum planners? The CBC’s current weaknesses need to be related to policy choices that have undermined Canadian telecommunications content in favour of private networks and unrestricted foreign streaming services. “It’s the state or the United States,” said a smart guy nearly a century ago who was worried about Canadians knowing enough about themselves.

To the extent the losses that Deuxtil mourns actually exist, these causes seem more consequential than cynical media or changes in some place names.    

But still: A country that has fallen asleep and forgotten its past? If it had, I would have had to find a new line of work decades ago. I’m still not dead yet. You aren’t either, Patrice. Let’s do lunch.

UPDATE, December 13:  Patrice has thoughts:

Old friend, I look forward to this discussion. You will see, after a long COVID separation, that I am still one. Thanks for your blog on my article in the November 2023 issue of the Literary Review of Canada. It was my attempt to salute the 25^th anniversary of J.L. Granatstein’s Who Killed Canadian History? and it's continued relevance.

Now, you’re not happy with me and I welcome your challenge, but I think we’re on the same side of the tracks here. You don’t agree with me that history has been neglected in Canada or that the general ignorance of our past by our governing politicians has had a deplorable effect on our civic culture. I think you're wrong. We passed significant anniversaries in this country--the Great War, that claimed over 66,000 young lives a hundred years ago and, of course, the 150th anniversary of Confederation, without notice. Did I miss the documentary featuring Christopher Moore talking about what happened 150 years to create a country that, against all odds, has survived? Or, for that matter, your cross-country lecture series on the topic? As a society, we practically did nothing--nothing of genuine, lasting importance, for sure.

You point out that very issue in which my essay was published featured no less than seven articles on various aspects of Canadian history. The LRC no doubt delivered another excellent issue but you are pointing to the ONLY oasis in the desert of Canadian print culture. The LRC was pointedly created in 1991 for that very purpose. Now, is there a second such publication that does this? Many friends point out that Canada’s History seems to be doing just fine, so what’s the problem? Again, I delight in the continued existence of the old Beaver magazine, but I don’t know about its state of health. I hope it continues to thrive. Is there a third? I would also point out the Dorchester Review, another small journal that caters to more conservative tastes but that focuses on Canadian history tirelessly and that boldly challenges conventional thinking. Ok, we’re up to three. For me, that’s just not enough. 

Our newspapers don’t carry enough articles that are historically minded—by that I mean that they will carry commentary that stretches back to uncover precedents to what is currently happening. There's stuff on the internet, of course. But it's not reliable and its riches can only be sought after if there's an appetite for it. The appetite for a shared experience of history--a rich one that includes innovative museum exhibits, lively debates, and an ongoing conversation is just not available in the country. 

Let’s look at the  school curriculum. Sure, your children attended Ontario high schools, where a credit in Canadian History is a requirement to graduate. The same thing exists in Manitoba, and in Quebec (for grades 7-11). Elsewhere in Canada, our high school history is wrapped into “social” or “civic” studies. It’s just not enough, Chris. Students are not taught how to "think historically"--you know well that it is a habit of mind. Instead, they learn trivia--stuff they forget instantly. 

You seem to condone the vandalism and removal of the statues to Sir John A. Macdonald. I found this to be deeply sad. The monuments, school names, street names, building names, were renamed without any serious, informed debate and simply because a very small segment of the population militated for it (nobody else cared). I don’t understand why you don’t share my sadness. Did these people not read your 1867: How the Fathers made a Deal or your Three Weeks in Quebec? I know you have your doubts about Macdonald—I do too. But your books showed eloquently how Macdonald was at the centre of things. Your books were ignored. Canadian cities and towns are putting up as “public art” utter monstrosities instead. Canada is diminished by this thoughtless erasing of a man who was considered a hero in his day. How very unfair to that generation.

Onto books, now. It is now very difficult to publish history books outside university presses. Of course, many are, but we are far from the days when the much regretted Macmillan of Canada or McClelland and Stewart routinely published great books of history. There is just no market for Canadian history books. Have you seen the "Canadian History" section at Indigo? The world doesn't seem to need much of Canada, after all. Charlotte Gray has lamented the lack of support for freelance history writers. I agree. We need more research on this topic, though. 

Last, I just don’t see your point on the CBC’s appalling record in covering Canada’s history. I think it’s a deep shame. The CBC, because it has the money and the mandate—and I’m talking about its television networks, here, not radio, because I’ve heard you there a few times —  lost its way on this a long time ago. Show me a documentary—even an interview of Christopher Moore explaining his books on CBC-tv (or any other network outside TVOntario's niche The Agenda, and I’ll reconsider my views). Had it done its job right, I’d be assigning documentaries profiling you to my students. Heck, had the CBC done its job right, you with your Hollywood-handsome looks, would be hosting a weekly program. You should be the Canadian male equivalent of Lucy Worlsey on the BCC! I’ll note that the historians who actually make it to CBC radio are very few and far between. I’ve published ten books and never once have been invited to appear. Yes, I’m jealous, but I can live with it (God forgive me). Compare that to other public televisions in the US, France, Britain, Germany? You're pulling my leg.

You and I both agree that public policy has failed here. Just look at what is happening in Toronto regarding its Dundas Street. No other jurisdiction is looking to change the name Dundas because there is simply no evidence that he ever acted to delay the abolition of slavery. It was the complete opposite! This is the same city council that is now looking at the possibility of naming a neighbourhood stadium in honour of Rob Ford, the late mayor who embarrassed the city around the world with his shameless duplicity and incompetent management.

I’m convinced that Canadians of all regions and all stripes are eager to learn more about their history. The problem is indeed the curriculum makers and their politician enablers. Can the tide be turned? I see hope in the new Canadian Institute of Historical Education (CIHE.CA). These brave people—who are putting their dollars on the line, with no tax credits whatsoever—deserve support.

I want to point out that history--Canadian history in particular--is dying at the university level. People who focused on political history are retiring and they are not being replaced. That's your market, Christopher? For me, that's the core question: How do we rebuild the market and the appetite for Canadian history? It’s a conversation you and I need to have when we discuss our newest discoveries. Now pass the salt, my soup's getting cold.

Update, December 18:  Elsbeth Heaman comments:

Dear Patrice, I very much enjoyed your response to Christopher Moore and agree with several of your arguments (though not all, of course, thinking mine own little scholarly contribution was a real addition in 2017. Jack G. thought so too, you know, told me so!).

But I cannot resist observing that the call is coming from inside the house. I attach a screenshot of something I sent to my (11!) followers on Mastodon the other day. If the partisan-conservative political scientists are the vanguard of the attack on and erasure of history, as here suggested by their ignorance of your work on Macdonald, including the collection of essays that surely deserves some mention, then why blame left historians? Why not begin with your own Augean stable?!  

Happy holidays, hope you are well, I hope the covid distance you mention wasn’t a personal incapacitation.  

 

History at the LRC this month

One of those published volumes of diaries by the indiscreet diplomat Charles Richie includes a sardonic recounting of Richie's travels with Louis St-Laurent on the prime minister's round-the-world tour in 1954. There's a ludicrous incident where he has to lend the PM a pair of pants. Generally Ritchie despairs over how completely out of his depth his elderly, exhausted, crochety boss seems to be. That seems to have permanently shaped my image of St-Laurent.  

So I was surprised by Jack Granatstein's perspectives in his review -- in the current Literary Review of Canada -- of a new collection of essays, The Unexpected Louis St-Laurent: Politics and Policies for a Modern Canada, edited by Patrice Dutil. Granatstein quotes the sharp joke of St-Laurent's aide Jack Pickersgill: "St-Laurent made governing look so easy that Canadians believed anyone could do it -- and that's why they elected Diefenbaker." He does note the unhappy world tour, which he finds sapped the PM's energy in his final years of power, but he ends with the comment, "Louis St-Laurent looks more and more like a giant."  He admires this essay collection, too, "one of the few recent edited collections held together by more than the binding."

Also in this LRC, David Macfarlane reviews Greg Marquis's John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and the3 Year Canada was Cool, Graham Fraser draws our attention to the significance of Jolelyn Letourneau's La Condition Québécoise: une histoire dépaysante, and Margaret Conrad reviews environmental historian Alan MacEachern's history of the Mirimichi fire of 1825, "one of the most famous natural calamities of the nineteenth century."

But the must-read of the issue, for historians anyway, is Christopher Dummitt's review of three recent books about Louis Riel, in which  Dummitt casts a cold eye on two books that have been very widely admired, Jean Teillet's The Northwest is our Mother and Max Hamon's The Audacity of His Enterprise. Dummitt is particularly sharp in his takedown of the straw-man style of argument in which works written decades or even centuries ago are attacked as if they represented the modern historical consensus on the Métis and Riel.

[Is it worth saying I have read the LRC and its reviews, not all the books mentioned here? Done]

Granatstein on a parliament deciding

Jack Granatstein had a good solid piece in yesterday's Globe and Mail on the constitutional significance of Canada making it clear by its declaration of war, September 10, 1939, that Canada's Parliament, and only Canada's Parliament, could make that decision.

But the force of Mackenzie King's "Parliament will decide" that Jack salutes here needs to be qualified a little.

Mackenzie King was the first parliamentary party leader (in the world, I believe) to be chosen by an extra-parliamentary group rather than by the elected MPs of his caucus. Ever after, he pounded home the message, in defiance of all precedent and of all the fundamental principles by which parliaments work, that the Liberal MPs were accountable to him and not vice versa. So he could say "Parliament will decide" knowing that as long as his party held a majority and its MPs were kept from exercising their constitutional mandate to hold the government accountable, he really meant he would decide.

That's how Canadian politics has operated ever since, to the point that most of our political scientists and commentators are unable to grasp there even is an issue here. Pity.

(Photo courtesy LAC -- even Mackenzie King's organizers could not spell his name sometimes.)

Our readers write...

Ted Betts, who runs a lively blog, Franklin's Ghost, devoted to the Franklin expedition, sends a comment and a suggestion.

By the way, you are absolutely right about the ROM History Wars. I was at one last year with Desmond Morton, Granatstein and Bernard Landry supposedly commemorating the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, but really debating whether English rule was a net benefit or detriment to Quebec. Professor Morton was informative if you didn't know much about the battle (my g-g-g-g-g-grandfather was one of the Fraser Highlanders who marched onto the field first). Granatstein was appalling though in his derogatory belittling of not just separatists but of Quebec as a contributor to Canada. Not a great moment in Canadian historical engagement. [That's about my memory of the event too, though I was struck by the size of the crowd and the evident appetite for intelligent debate about Canadian history -- CM]

I would so love it if you introduced comments on your site! I'd have relayed that story but somehow never think it significant enough to send an email about. I think you would find a lot of good feedback and information, and dialog. I just don't think there is enough dialog in history. In my blogging and social media experience, it helps build a community of like minds to be able to voice thoughts interactively. I'm sure you've given it lots of thought though.

Comments? -- I remain open to advice. Meanwhile archaeologist Andrew Stewart sends a note about the farflung influence of Canadian historians

I am reading the book Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Cambridge historian Richard Miles. It’s a fascinating history of Punic civilization in the western Mediterranean, 800-160 BC. I was intrigued by his reference to literature about this region and period that cites Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Apparently some historians of the ancient world are now using White’s reconstruction as a model to explain interaction and relationships among “civilized” (Near Eastern and Greek peoples) and indigenous central and western Mediterranean peoples. Imagine – our own little Great Lakes explaining some of the foundations of the ancient world!

Capturing Hill 70 and the state of Canadian military history

UBC Press has just released Capturing Hill 70: Canada's Forgotten Battle of the First World War, edited by Douglas Delaney and Serge Durflinger, and with contributions by seven other Canadian military historians.

I know because I just received a copy, and I received a copy because I read it in page proof and supplied a backcover comment. I called it "a meticulous work of battle history" and said it "showcases all the strengths of Canadian military history today."

Still sounds about right to me.  By August 1917, a competently led battle on the Western Front was a weird mix of complicated, mathematical engineering and insensate horror.  Capturing Hill 70 does not neglect the latter, but the 'meticulous' part is how its authors analyse the former: how staffs organized "battle procedure," the slide-rule calculation of artillery fire plans, the logistics of ammunition supply, even the application of railroad and tramway technology to casualty evacuation.  It ain't trumpets-and-drum history, but it casts a powerful spotlight on modern warfare a century ago, and it is well done.

The only part of Capturing Hill 70 I didn't much admire was the "Forgotten" in the subtitle, and the undertone grumbling here and there that suggests that military history in Canada 1) is neglected, 2) has not had enough written about it, 3) is insufficiently memorialized, and generally 4) doesn't get the respect it deserves.

This has been a theme of military historians at least since Jack Granatstein wrote Who Killed Canadian History? And maybe they need to get over themselves.  (By the way, Granatstein contributes a superb article here on manpower issues and the conscription crisis behind Hill 70, with the vital data powerfully deployed in a short space.).

Let's be clear.  There is a substantial corps of good, well-trained, well-organized and productive military historians in Canada. They have lots of access to publication, and they are prolific. They have access to notable centres of military history, not only in universities but at the War Museum, the forces' Directorate of History, the military colleges, and various private foundations. The bookshelves are full of military history, and the documentary films pour forth unceasingly.  These complaints of neglected and forgotten military history have a poor little rich kid sound.

I'm talking here about military history, but the same applies to a lot of Canadian history fields and subfields.  Any historian can make a case that his or her particular specialty deserves more respect and attention and should have had more published about it.  Frankly, it's pretty much always a waste of time. If you think your subject is understudied, then do your work. And stop bitching.  You probably have it pretty good.      

History Books of 2015

Not such a banner year for Canadian history or historians, I would say, after looking over some lists of notable books of 2015. No real buzz-making title (say, Gwyn on Macdonald, a few years ago) or stirrer of controversy (Dashuk's Clearing the Plains) or obviously authoritative work of scholarship.  The important book surely ought to be the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I fear it will not be widely read or in the end even followed very much in the long run, but maybe we should not judge history books that way.

The most noticed titles seem to have been Rosemary Sullivan's biography Stalin's Daughter and Dean Jobb's Empire of Deception about the early 20th century swindler Leo Koretz.

Stalin's Daughter got a ton of critical praise and won the Hilary Weston prize, among other nominations. Empire of Deception made several notables books of 2015 lists, including the Globe's, CBC Books' and the National Post's, and was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Nonfiction Prize.

Stretching "history" a bit, we also might note from the Globe's Top 100 list Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff's study of the collapse of BlackBerry, Losing the Signal, and John Ibbitson's Stephen Harper. Critical reaction seemed divided among those who liked Ibbitson's rather sympathetic study of Harper and those who preferred Michael Harris's very unsympathetic Party of One.

It was a pretty good year in Canadian military history. Tim Cook completed his two-volume study of Canadians Fighting the Second World War with Fight to the Finish.  Doing the First and Second Wars in two big volumes each since 2007 is a remarkable achievement of research and writing that has been pretty widely recognized, but maybe with this last one book journalists were beginning to say, oh, another Tim Cook book. It seemed a little less widely noted, though it was much present in pre-Christmas bookstores. Jack Granatstein, equally prolific (and for decades!), also had a new military history about Canadians in the Second World War, Best Little Army in the World.  And Granatstein's sometime co-author David Bercuson provided a one-volume Second World War history, Our Finest Hour. David O'Keefe's One Day in August, about Dieppe, was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize.

Prize winners and nominees -- note the presence of women:

• Rosemary Sullivan's Weston for Stalin's Daughter, as mentioned above
• Jean Barman won the CHA's John A. Macdonald Prize for French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest and its original interpretation of early west-coast history.
• Daniel Macfarlane won the Ontario History Chalmers Award for Negotiating a River, his study of the St Lawrence Seaway.
• Susan Pederson won the Cundill Prize for The Guardians, on the League of Nations.
• Elizabeth Fenn won a Pulitzer in History for Encounters at the Heart of the World, a history of the Mandan nation of central North America.
• Legal historian Constance Backhouse won the Molson Prize for her body of work.
• Edward Metatawabin was nominated for a G-G for Up Ghost River, to my mind the best and most substantial of the residential schools memoirs that are beginning to appear.
• Lawrence Hill received the Pierre Berton Award for popular Canadian history for his novel of slavery and loyalism, The Book of Negroes.

I'm thinking the late-breaking international history book that we ought to be reading is Mary Beard's big new history of Rome, SPQR.  Unfortunately it was sold out in Toronto and wider ("even online!" reported my outraged daughter) in December, so I have not yet received my Christmas gift copy.

I should acknowledge my own book this year, Three Weeks in Quebec City, made no award lists, no notable book lists, and no bestseller lists, and was pretty much buzz-free, apart from here.  But it got excellent reviews in venues as various as the Globe, the Literary Review, and Geist.  I tell myself it is quietly making its way by word-of-mouth among those who need to read it. (Actually some evidence of that! 1867, my previous book on confederation, couldn't even get a review in the CHR, but has gradually become pretty much the standard work on the subject)

Feel free to think the same about your own works, neglected here or elsewhere!  Corrections and additions and suggestions from your own reading gratefully received.

Update, January 6, 2016:  A lot of history on the recently released Hill Times 100 Top Political Books of 2015 -- including even Three Weeks in Quebec City.

Canadian History Still Not Dead Yet

Harper Collins has a tenth anniversary edition out, substantially updated (I hear), of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History?

Granatstein was hugely successful in provoking controversy when the book first came out -- and I'm always in favour of lively debate about history, so I was okay with the book even when I disagreed with it.

It is, however, a book that brings out the mouth-breathers and doom-predictors, and it seems to license them to say anything. HarperCollins's webpage for the new edition declares that "Canada is one of the few nations in the western world that does not teach its history to its young people." This has been said so often people seem to take it seriously.

Point one: Substitute the name of any western nation for "Canada" and you will be able to find an identical claim from someone in that country.

Point two: I have had two children in Toronto public schools. Canadians history is all they do. Endlessly. Repetitively. I have lost count of how many times my kids have done Canada in the First World War.

Maclean's on the First World War

I must say that when I saw Maclean's was going to publish a Remembrance Day issue with 66,349 different covers, each one with the name of an identified individual Canadian casualty of the First World War, my first reaction was surprise:  does Maclean's still sell 66,000 individual hard copies of any issue?  I can't remember the last time I have seen one.

But since it evidently does, I'd say its a commendable contribution to the closing of the First World War centenary.  And since I do see Maclean's online, let me also give a shout-out to Jack Granatstein, who has been contributing since the late summer a relentless series of articles detailing the grim and bloody battles that constituted the Hundred Days campaign culminating in the Armistice.  Canadian troops made their greatest advances of the war during the Hundred Days -- and suffered 25% of all their casualties suffered during nearly four years in action.  Say this for Jack G:  he delivers.

"Governmental idiocity of the highest order"

Jack Granatstein considers the Harper government's policies on Library and Archives Canada.

Gotta say the Canadian Historical Association's new blog is doing a good job covering this story too.

HIstory War II at the Royal Ontario Museum

Last winter I was obliged to be kinda critical of the trendiness and superficiality that seemed to dominate the "History Wars" debate series at the Royal Ontario Museum -- and had Bliss & Granatstein come after me hammer and tongs in the letters column of Canada's History for my pains. But even last year I reported History Wars had moments that were "lively," "stimulating," and vigorous."

And this year looks stronger.  It starts on Tuesday, October 25, with Andrew Coyne and Sheila Copps debating whether Canadian prime ministers have too much power.  Again, it's current events that "History" Wars offers us.  But Andrew Coyne is one of the only Canadian political thinkers who understands the wisdom of having the parliamentary caucus hold party leaders accountable and if necessary fire and replace them.  So there could be a teaching moment there.

I have another engagement, or I could not be kept away.  Take a look at this one and the rest of the series.

Book Notes: UTP's Canada 150 collection

University of Toronto Press notes the Canadian sesquicentennial with a Canada 150 list of books "that bear witness to the depth and breadth of the nation’s history and the diversity of its peoples." Quite a lot of history on the thirty-title list, and a lot of historians and historically minded scholars:

Irving Abella, Eric Arthur, Janet Ajzenstat, Jean Barman, Michael Bliss, John Borrows, Phillip Buckner, Sean Cadigan, Ramsay Cook, Donald Creighton, Paula Draper, Gerald Friesen, J.L. Granatstein, Allan Greer, Franca Iacovetta, Harold Innis, Bruce Kidd, Patricia McMahon, Kenneth McNaught, Marc Milner, J.R. Miller, Stephen Otto, Arthur Ray, John Reid, Paul Romney, Robert Sharpe, David E. Smith, Veronica Strong-Boag, Robert Ventresca, James St.G Walker.

Not having published many of my, ahem, major works with UTP, I thought I could examine this list quite dispassionately. Until I came to Donald Creighton, who makes the list on the strength of The Empire of the St Lawrence -- "foreword by Christopher Moore."  Blush/gloat: how about them coattails!
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Honours watch: Order of Canada to Bliss, Jonas, Penny

The Star today reports that Michael Bliss has been appointed to the Order of Canada.  Actually he was appointed in 1998; this is a promotion, from member of the order to officer.  From his memoir, Writing History, this is his reaction to the original appointment.

From time to time, I wondered if I had a shot at receiving the Order of Canada, but I doubted it.  I thought I had made too many enemies. ... When my friend Jack Granatstein, who had recently been inducted into the order, offered to organize my nomination, I was flattered and agreeable, though not hopeful.  But what could be the downside?
There was none. It was an unalloyed pleasure when I was offered membership in the Order of Canada in 1998.

Here's hoping the promotion is equally pleasurable, Michael.

These New Year's lists are kinda thin on writers, let along historians, though I do note Toronto writer George Jonas and Louise Penny, author of the Inspector Gamache novels set in the Eastern Townships, there.

Update, January 6:  writer Douglas Coupland too, I'm informed.

Vimy@100 +2 days

Sunday's much televised Vimy commemorations were impressive, though Jamie Swift observed on As it Happens that they seemed much more about patriotism and service than about peace and mourning.

During those [1938] ceremonies, Winnipeg settler Charlotte Susan Wood, who lost all five of her sons to war, and her youngest to Vimy, laid a wreath at London's Westminster Abbey. In that moment, she reportedly asked King Edward VIII: "Why did so many have to die?"

"Please God, Mrs. Wood, it shall never happen again," he responded.

Those kinds of stories have been "noticeably absent in the past few days around the Vimy centenary," Swift said.

"That questioning, that why, that I think Walter Allward shared and so many others shared, seems to have been airbrushed from the commemoration," Swift said.

Still I was struck that Jack Granatstein and Tim Cook and, as far as I saw, every historian involved with the centenary specifically rejected the claim that "Canada was born at Vimy."  That is a consequence of a couple of decades of historical discussion, now decisively closed, I think, at least among historians. (Anniversaries can be teaching moments.)

This month in Canada's History

... it's war, war, war, as Scarlatt O'Hara used to say:  the special commemorative world wars issue, with contributions from Jack Granatstein and Jonathan Vance, a war art feature, and excerpts from Canada's History's upcoming book, Canada's Great War Album

My own contribution is on a guy called Norman Kelly, MA. He is credited in Pierre Berton's big railway histories from the 1970s as his principal researcher.  What ever happened to that guy?

He turns out to be Toronto's deputy mayor Norm Kelly, the guy who took over when the drugs and the guns and Jimmy Kimmel and all that crazy overcame Rob Ford last spring.  I talked with Kelly recently about Berton and about heritage politics.

If you subscribed like you oughta, it would be in your mailbox already, as it was in mine yesterday.  Actually, there is a digital edition too, if you getting out of dead tree media.

Historians at IdeaCity

Here's one big salute to Moses Znaimer, who conceived IdeaCity as a conference to throw together interesting people with big ideas in all fields, and made it so. There's no podium, speakers get just 20 minutes with a big clock running down the time right in front of them. No questions. 500 people, it runs for three days, often 9 am to 8 pm with breaks for things like yoga. And there's a lavish party each night. Intense fun. Cost you about $3000, but like intellectual summer camp for rich people. To press your nose to the glass, try ideacityonline.com
Three writers did us proud on the history of Canada: Charlotte Gray her sharp, pithy, charming self. Jack Granatstein confronting a mostly left-liberal crowd with unfashionable thoughts about why we should support the U.S. And Noah Richler offering, without a note or a prompting, twenty minutes of deeply-thought reflection on how we construct stories and stories construct us.



Yeah, I talked to. Mostly on creativity on the digital world. Sweet for an historian, to be on a panel with cool kids talking about technology and sex. Think I held my own.