Today in 1609

This Day in History reports that on July 30, 1609, Samuel de Champlain, supporting his Huron, Montagnais and Algonkian allies, fired his arquebus at a Mohawk war party.  As Champlain tells it:

Our Indians began to call to me with loud cries; and to make way for me they divided into two groups, and put me ahead some twenty yards, and I marched on until I was within some thirty yards of the enemy, who as soon as they caught sight of me halted and gazed at me and I at them. When I saw them make a move to draw their bows upon us, I took aim with my arquebus and shot straight at one of the three chiefs, and with this shot two fell to the ground and one of their companions was wounded who died thereof a little later. I had put four bullets into my arquebus.

Coincidentally, Charlevoix notes Charlotte Gray's suggestion that the early August long weekend -- variously called Natal Day, civic holiday, the August long weekend, etc -- should become Champlain Day across the country.

Image: Canadian Museum of Civilization

Amanda Laplace on internment camps

Photographer and history student Amanda Laplace, descendant of a World War II era Jewish refugee, has begun a photo essay on the internment camps in southern Quebec, which include, to my surprise, Fort Lennox on l"Ile aux Noix -- mostly known as a Parks Canada site focussed on the 18th century Richelieu Valley military campaigns.  She writes:

I haven't had much luck in getting the project out there as of yet, but I thought maybe you would be interested in seeing it. I have the photographs showcased on my website under the section "POW Camps in Southern Quebec 1940-46." There is a second part to it which you can see under the heading Book work. 

History of Canadian cultural politics

I've recently been involved in a small oral history project, documenting the cultural history moment that shaped the foundation of the Writers' Union of Canada forty years ago. Recordings and transcripts will eventually be archived and available, but for the moment the Union is presenting brief selections from the conversations as podcasts.

A little of the conversation I recorded with broadcaster and novelist Howard Engel can be heard on the Union website. More to come.

The website also has a brief history of the Writers' Union.

This month in Canada's History

New Canada's History, reaching subscribers now, has articles by Tina Loo on outport resettlement in Newfoundland, Bill Waiser on wartime internees labouring in the national parks, Mark Reynolds on that time we invaded El Salvador (who knew?), and more.  

My own column is on journalist turned aspiring Ph.D Mary Janigan and her recent history of  early 20th century federal provincial relations, Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark

Controlling access to your dissertation

The American Historical Association recommends that historians completing doctoral dissertations should embargo online distribution of them for six years

Students who must post their dissertations online immediately after they receive their degree can find themselves at a serious disadvantage in their effort to get their first book published; it is not unusual for an early-career historian to spend five or six years revising a dissertation and preparing the manuscript for submission to a press for consideration. During that period, the scholar typically builds on the raw material presented in the dissertation, refines the argument, and improves the presentation itself. Thus, although there is so close a relationship between the dissertation and the book that presses often consider them competitors, the book is the measure of scholarly competence used by tenure committees

Update, August 2:  Historiann offers a thoughtful opposition to this policy, and curates some thoughtful discussion from her commenters.

Is Canadian history boring or is it just the names?

You're gone, you're history, you're in the archives

The name Historica-Dominion Institute always sounded like a temporary offshoot of the merger of the two organizations. Now they are renaming.

Stephen Smith, Chairman of the Board of The Historica-Dominion Institute, announced today that effective September 3, 2013 , the organization will change its name to Historica Canada.

But I can't say the new name sets my pulse aflutter.  Quick: between "Historica Canada," "Canada's History," "Heritage Canada," and "Canadian Heritage," how many Canadians could quickly explain what differentiates each one? Or keep their audience awake while they tried? Which one is a government department, now?

We are in a time of great identifiers.  Think of Apple, Google, Amazon: distinct, quirky, unforgettable. Why do the organizations pitching Canadian history and civics as lively and dynamic opt for bland when they name themselves?

I know that internet porn filters made "The Beaver" unsustainable. But would not any of these organizations have been more distinct and more top-of-mind as, I don't know, something like Orca, or Matapedia Foundation, or the Lightfoot Institute, or McClung? (Kudos to The Dorchester Review -- more vivid, more rooted than, say, The Canadian Review of Right-Wing Stuff.)

Have to say, though, it isn't just the history/heritage world. The Canadian Auto Workers and the Paperworkers are about to ask us to call them "Unifor."

Well, good luck to Historica Canada, anyway. We may spend time explaining it is not a government department, but it will still do good work.

Archives: what's become of the 1921 census?

Lisa Dillon of the Université de Montreal's demography program observes that the 1921 Census of Canada entered the public domain on June 1, 2013.... except that Library and Archives Canada, which holds it, has not made it available.

Dillon notes that during the tenure of the previous archivist, Ian Wilson, there was close and productive collaboration between the archives and the Canadian Century Research Infrastructure Project.  As one result of CCRI's work, she reports, the about-to-crumble-to-nothing microfilms of 20th century censuses were digitally scanned, so that now a searchable 1921 census could readily be made available via the LAC's website. But.... 

During Dr. Daniel Caron’s tenure as chief Librarian and Archivist, drastic cuts to LAC’s budget coupled with a shift in priorities at the very top led it to privilege partnerships with private industry and to neglect its relationships with the academic community and the volunteer sector.

Dillon wonders about LAC's deal with Ancestry and draws attention to a petition urging LAC to make the 1921 census available immediately. Sign it here.

Academia and Open Access

Noting the attention paid to Ian Mosby's important story about dietary experiments on First Nations kids in the 1940s and 1950s, Andrew Smith considers the inaccessibility of academic scholarship, much of which is paywalled by the journals that publish it.  Mosby's article is the key to a significant public debate, but it is only accessible only to Histoire sociale/Social History subscribers or those who schlep themselves over to the journals room of an large university library.  (Actually, as he notes, HS is now making Mosby available online for a couple of weeks.)

Andrew moves from that oddity to criticism of a British proposal to provide "open access" to scholarship -- by making scholars pay for it. This is a kind of vanity-press program, becoming increasingly common, by which scholars who want to be published in a refereed journal pay the costs of publication themselves. (PloS, the Public Library of Science online suit of journals, a pioneer of this system, currently bills contributors from $1300 to $2900.)

Evidently there is a new proposal in Britain to make this the standard for academic publishing. Andrew: "As I’ve said before, this particular way of funding Open Access publishing is a terrible idea." 

There was a solution forming to this problem decades ago.  It was called collective licensing. It began almost a century ago with broadcast performances of music, spread to photocopying, and was poised for adaptation to online distribution.  In essence, institutions and distributors played or copied what they liked, some tallying or sampling took place, and a broad-based negotiated fee, supervised by regulators, covered the costs. Access was guaranteed and mostly seamless; costs got covered. What's not to like?  

But in Canada currently, collective licensing seems to be going down the drain, in favour of something called "educational fair dealing," which essentially means that schools and universities, the largest users of educational materials like journals, get to appropriate published materials for nothing.  Fair dealing has been sanctified by the Supreme Court of Canada and incorporated in the latest copyright revisions. 

But if the principal users of scholarship take everything for nothing, it does not mean that the costs of scholarly publishing go away. Is it any wonder that journals end up behind paywalls, or that academic task forces recommend that journals bill their contributors for the privilege of contributing to knowledge?  

It has been universities and ministers of education who have been the prime drivers behind "fair" dealing. Naturally they are keen to keep their overheads down, and not much concerned with the implications. But academics and their union, CAUT, have been slavishly supportive of the administrators -- and done much to create the chains that Andrew now observes weighing down open access to scholarship.  Doesn't look to be getting better, either.

History of forelocks

The Guardian online offers its readers the Republican  -- minimal coverage of royal baby gossip -- or Royalist - all baby all the time  -- options. Seriously.

Could major Canadian newspapers and the CBC News consider something like this? Particularly the CBC, which operates like a branch of Hello Canada right now.  (Actually Hello gives a better balance of  Canadian versus royal celebrity news than the CBC, I think.)

[Consumer alert: this blog does not offer a Royalist option.]

History of Svein

In this year's pretty terrific Tour de France, Canadian rider Svein Tuft "won" the lanterne rouge.  That's given, unofficially, to the rider who finishes dead last. He was 169th out of 169.

Lanterne rouge is not a mocking award. It actually acknowledges what an accomplishment it can be to finish at all.  Another rider, Lieuwe Westra, made it all the way to Paris and then had to withdraw in the midst of the last day's ride, right beneath the Arc de Triomphe, with just 40 km left to go out of 2100. Anyway, last place in overall time is hardly the only measure of how one performed in the Tour. Sprinter Marcel Kittel was 166th of 169, but he won several stages, including the final glory run down the Champs Elysées, making him a new star of world cycling.

This was Tuft's first Tour de France, and at 36, he is said to be the oldest rookie in the history of the tour - another reason why just finishing was a notable achievement, though in fact he did great work throughout for his Orica- Greenedge team this year.

There is a terrific profile of Svein Tuft here in Bicycling magazine, and it makes him sound like a very unusual athlete and a very Canadian (laid-back West coast variety) personality.  They should give him the Order of Canada for his lanterne rouge.

Update, July 24:  The blog Science of Sport has provocative essays on doping in cycling, and on measuring current performances against benchmarks set in the drug era and against estimates of what is physiologically possible for an undrugged athlete.  They have not concluded that the doping era can be assumed to be over.

The Last Viking is Amundsen, Roald Amundsen

Amundsen

I once wrote a review (of Pierre Berton's Arctic Grail, so this is a LONG time ago) in which I argued that one of the difficulties in writing about Arctic explorers is that all the Scandinavians were the same guy.  

Well I must have that conceit deep in my psyche, because in my recent note about Stephen Bown's biography about Roald Amundsen,The Last Viking, I managed to say it was a book about Viljhalmur Stefansson.

Totally different guys, different careers. They may have had the same tailor, but I should still know the difference. Stephen Bown's book is about Amundsen, the guy who beat Scott to the South Pole, who may have been the first actually to get to the North Pole, who did the Northwest Passage in the ship Gjoa, and died trying to rescue some other Arctic explorers.

The other guy

HIstorians in the news: Ian Mosby

Historian Ian Mosby is all over the headlines (Star, CBC News) as the press jumps on the very disturbing story he has uncovered about federal government scientists using aboriginal kids as unwitting research subjects on ... the effects of starvation.

Mosby published the research behind the story in the journal Histoire sociale-Social History and announced it on his food history blog.  Great to see it making the jump from scholarly research to public policy discussion.

History of A.D. Harvey

Votoschopp?

The Guardian shows that what "independent historian" A.D Harvey has done in his career is deceptive and unethical and transgresses against the canon of transparent, testable scholarship.

Have to admit, too, some of it -- plagiaring himself under a pseudonym, inventing new personalities for every essay, inventing the Dickens-Dostoyevsky conversations -- does sound like kinda fun.

Harvey, who is 65, was born in Colchester just after the second world war. His mother was a Jew from Hungary who had fled from the Nazis; his father was a lumberjack – the Essex, rather than Canadian, variety.

 Okay, that sounds invented too. But even as A.D. Harvey, he works at it.

Update, July 2, 2014:   A note from A.D. Harvey reasonably rebukes me for my scepticism about his father's career:

Re your blog-posting about me last year: THE GUARDIAN journalist, being a journalist, misrepresented what I said about my mother.She was a Jew from Budapest (born in Transylvania!) and came to England in the autumn of 1939 when the Horthy regime in Hungary adopted Nazi-style legislation excluding the Jews from citizens" rights: she came on a passport of which the validity had been retrospectively curtailed to a few weeks by the new anti-Jewish legislation. She was not therefore a refugee from German Nazism, but from Hungarian anti-semitism, though her mother and sister were, in 1944, sent by the Germans to a collection centre for deportation but then released.

But my father really was a lumberjack! Possibly not many people in Canada know that they have trees in Britain too! He actually grew up on the edge of what in southern England passes as a large wood. The people who cut down the trees in such places now designate themselves as "tree surgeons"  (yes, really!) but I don"t think that fairly describes my father, as I have seen him pull down an old tree by chaining it to a tractor, and on one occasion, when he had sent his workmen off to the pub, he managed to cut down a tree so that it twisted in falling and pinned him to the ground, where he was found two hours later by his employees when they returned to work. That doesn"t at all sound like "surgery" does it?The large logging gangs with several haulage vehicles which  I suppose are characteristic of North American forests do not of course exist in southern England: on the other hand the oaks and elms he cut down with an axe (chain saws just coming in here in those days) would be considered large trees in most of Canada.

The link below, concerning recent developments in the Times Literary Supplement versus A.D.Harvey, may be of interest.

Canadian publishing evolutions

More notes on the evolution of Canadian book publishing:

Denis Smith, historian and friend of this blog, draws our attention to his new book General Miranda's Wars: Turmoil and Revolt inSpanish America, 1750-1812, (more Latin-American than Canadian history, he acknowledges) and also to its epublisher, Bev Editions, which has an interesting list of new books and re-(E-) prints of many distinguished Canadian books and authors.

Meanwhile, Heather Lownes at Douglas & McIntyre in Vancouver, the bankruptcy of which we recently mentioned, reminds me that the imprint has been revived under new ownership and has reintroduced history offerings, such as a new paperback edition of Stephen Bown's biography of Vilhjalmur Stefansson Roald Amundsen, The Last Viking. 

The new D&M catalogue downloads from here.

Tour Canadien de France

Gotta say it's a terrific tour this year. Great weather and fabulous locations every day. While they were in Corsica, my family kept saying, "Let's just GO." At a recent stage that finished beneath Mont St-Michel, once of the commentators said, "One thing about the Tour de France: of all the sports, they do have the most beautiful stadium to play in."

Good competition this year too: lots of changes in the leading categories, and lots of dramatic surprises: a young Colombian who goes up hills like he was born doing it, a young German sprinter who actually beat Mark Cavendish head to head.  Too many crashes for sure, because of too many teams, probably, but a lot less drugs, it seems.

And Canadians -- an actual contingent of Canadians, and getting noticed. Svein Tuft in his first tour, constantly doing lead-out work for Orica-Greenedge when it was leading the Tour, then placing 6th in the time trial at Mont St-Michel. David Veilleux, also in his first tour, not winning anything but doing a daily job of work for his Europcar team, and once spending a whole day in the camera's eye in a bold breakaway.  My boy Ryder Hesjedal crashed out in the first days and continues with a cracked rib. (Another was continuing with a cracked pelvis. Try that for a month.) Ryder's not going to win this year, but he's in there, carrying on to Paris -- and if the rib is healing he may yet come out to play in the Alps.

I go on a little because you will read none of this in your local sports pages.  And I have to say that TSN2, the Canadian broadcaster, is doing a perfectly disgraceful job. No added Canadian coverage, regular switches or curtailments of service, just in case you want to PVR.  And if the race runs one minute over the scheduled time, they abandon coverage always just at the climax, and usually to present a pre-scheduled press conference by the preening thugs who run the National Hockey League. A few years ago, when the Tour got popular, NBC in the US and TSN here elbowed Versus and OLN out of the coverage -- but do they really have to make the coverage worse than those shoestring services did?

Fortunately, you can follow the vital stuff online and free from a thing called Steephill.tv that aggregates the highlights and all the best coverage, or from the tour's own website, letour.fr (from whence the image above)

Parliaments in Australia and Alberta -- cont'd

Doug Bailie comments on a recent post here:

In your post on Parliamentarianism in Australia and Alberta, you seem to make the assumption that proportional representation involves parties appointing MPs. It’s true that in some countries using proportional representation people vote for party slates and have no control over which candidates make the list or which candidates are listed at the top and which at the bottom. These are called closed lists.
However, most countries using proportional representation use open lists or, instead of a party-defined list, preferential voting, thereby providing voters with various ways of expressing their preferences for individual candidates. Voters in those countries therefore have more choice over who represents them than we in Canada do.
If we don’t like the candidate our preferred party has nominated in our riding, we can either vote for a candidate representing a party that is not our first choice (or an independent), or decide that voting for the party is more important and vote for the not-so-great candidate anyway.
That’s the same choice faced by voters in countries with closed lists.
A few years ago, the Law Commission of Canada recommended an open-list system of proportional representation for federal elections. Some Canadian supporters of proportional representation prefer the type of preferential voting that was used to elect MLAs from Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg from the 1920s to the 1950s. Either way, it would mean more choice for voters.
The letter-writer in the Calgary Herald may have been guilty of over-reach. There’s no guarantee that backbench MPs elected by proportional representation would exhibit greater independence. But the House of Commons would be more representative of voters and that would mean greater accountability.

Thanks, Doug.  In my post I didn't make the distinction between open-list and closed-list PR systems because, well, even despite your explanation, that does still strike me as a distinction without a difference .

Open or closed, MPs seated by proportional representation have to be delegates of their parties, surely.  In the PR legislature, it's not us citizens who are represented proportionally, it's the parties, in close proportion to the vote totals we voters have given each party. If PR MPs have any freedom to disagree with their parties, it seems to me, proportionality has to breaks down. Which is to say:  If MPs don't act as the party's delegates ("appointees" was the word I used), the whole point of PR elections is lost. Open-list, closed list, the integrity of the PR system depends upon MPs always being delegates of the parties in whose names they sit.

I can see the appeal of the aspiration to perfect symmetry between party vote and party seats, but it seems to me the more urgent democratic challenge we have in Canada is the accountability one, how to restore control over the executive to the people's elected representatives. Clearly we are not handling that one well.  But tinkering with the electoral system doesn't address that problem at all, except to reinforce it.

If our MPs decided to move to the Australian (really, the parliamentary) system of accountability to caucus, they could pretty much fix the accountability tomorrow. For the moment, MPs really do not have to act as puppets and bobbleheads and tallysticks -- they just do that because they believe we are telling them to.  It's a bug, not a feature, as they say.

But once installed, a PR system, open, closed, whatever, would tell MPs very firmly that they must not make and impose decisions upon the party they represent. We might have closer symmetry of party standings to election night tallies, but the MPs would be there as party delegates -- they would be tallysticks by design.  A feature, not a bug in the system.

I don't want to belabour this -- but New Zealand, Israel, Peru, the Netherlands: there are lots of examples of PR systems reinforcing and institutionalizing leader-driven parties to the detriment of the accountability of executive to legislature. For Canada, PR of whatever form seems to me one of those well-intended changes that make things worse. The serious problem is not in the voting system and won't be fixed there.

That little counter down to the right...

... today turned over 250,000 views (in the roughly three years since I turned it on).

I don't really know what 250,000 means or how many spambots and spiders and such it includes. But it's about 250,000 more than I expected when I started doing this... and I know quite a few of you are real people with whom I share some interests.  Greetings!

Update, July 11:  Russ Chamberlayne explains:

Well, in roughly three years there are roughly a thousand days (excluding weekends), and in those approximately 250 daily views, there are probably 100 rechecks in the same day (to see what the latest is), And among those 150 individual visitors, there might be 50 non-human visits, so for the 100 actual CMHN fans, I say
        BBQ IN T.O.!
 Long (and briefly) may you blog, Chris.

The anti-Heritage Minutes

Drunk History is an American web series.  Funny or not?  I'm not sure.  But the wigs!

History of women and money

Not in circulation anymore?  Pity!

Historian Merna Forster notes that new Bank of England guvn'r Mark Carney may be obliged to preserve some (non-royal) women on British currency -- after having presided over their deletion from Canadian bills.

"I hope the Brits have better luck than Canadians in convincing Mark Carney to address concerns raised about the absence of women from that nation's bank notes," said author and historian Merna Forster, one of the Canadian activists.
"None of our bank notes celebrate specific women in Canadian history," she said from Victoria, B.C.
"As a Canadian who happens to be a woman, I would like bank notes that belong to me to include at least one image of an actual woman -- and preferably more."

Parliamentarianism in Australia and Alberta

Fruits and Votes is a addictive little blog about fruit trees and electoral systems -- most the latter recently, but the crop varies. Recently F&V has news on possible evolution in Australian leadership politics.

Leaders would be elected jointly by caucus and individual party members on a 50/50 basis, leaders could only be removed by a 75% vote of caucus, caucus would regain the right to elect the cabinet and the ministry. These are reasonably radical proposals for the ALP, although it looks like they will pass.

The comments, mostly dubious about the 50/50, are interesting.

And, though F&V supports proportional representation, it casts doubt on a PR romantic in Calgary who promises PV would strengthen backbenchers (!), against all the experience showing that allowing parties to appoint their MPs inevitably weakens backbencher independence:

I am all for PR, in general, and agree with most of that, until the last point. But this kind of over-claiming really is not helpful. Is there any evidence that backbenchers in PR systems (with parliamentary executives) are more “empowered”–which I assume means more able to dissent from the government when their party is a member thereof? I do not think so.