Friday, March 15, 2024

Tiya Miles: A Cundill Prize Event in Montreal


The Cundill Prize announces Tiya Miles, author of the 2022 Cundill History Prize winner All That She Carried, giving a talk and an interview with Nahlah Ayed at McGill University on April 3. 

This is what I wrote about All That She Carried  -- full title: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake in my Literary Review of Canada review early in 2023.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Historical Empathy: A Canada's History Event


Canada's History
announces the 2024 Canada's History Forum, a three-hour online event on the theme of "Caring about the Past: Engaging With Historical Empathy," Thursday, April 25.  Registration is free but required. Details at the link.

Update to "History of Free Trade"

My post of March 5, reflecting on the death of Brian Mulroney and views of free trade grew into a discussion, with comments and updates.  I've just added another update, drawing attention to writer and publisher Ken Whyte's essay on the "Terminal Decline" of independent Canadian cultural expression, which one of his sources describes as taking place "in the fifth decade of neo-liberalism." The link in the first line here will take to the full discussion.

And Rick Salutin has a Mulroney/free trade consideration in the Toronto Star which suggests again that the people I have been quoting are not isolated voices.

Translation: A Personal History



Canadian history in English (at least by me) does not get translated much -- not even into French. So I was kinda chuffed to be reminded (while looking for something else) that there are editions of The Illustrated History of Canada in English, French, Spanish, and Russian.  I'm only a contributor, but still. 

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Prize Watch: historian takes the Gelber


Homelands: A Personal History of Europe
, by Timothy Garton Ash, is the 2024 winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize (run from the Munk School at the University of Toronto) for the world’s best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs that seeks to deepen public debate on significant international issues.

I've always liked the work of Timothy Garton Ash, partly just for his back story. He was a graduate student doing research (on postwar European labour history, essentially) in East Germany. But this was 1989. As East Germany fell apart around him, he began writing terrific dispatches for British newspapers, based on all the contacts and background he had already built up among the East Berlin workers who were bringing down the Communist regime.  Since then he's been a prof at Oxford with a very active academic career, but also writing constantly on Europe for British and American periodicals.  

I have not read Homelands, but I just might have even without the prod of the Gelber.  I also cannot help noticing that "personal" in the title of his history. Historians inserting themselves in the histories they write -- it's the trend, people, if you want readers.  

Perhaps inevitably, the Wikipedia article on him has a little John LeCarré touch: 
Garton Ash cut a suspect figure to the Stasi, who regarded him as a "bourgeois-liberal" and potential British spy. 

Although he denies being or having been a British intelligence operative, Garton Ash described himself as a "soldier behind enemy lines" and described the German Democratic Republic as a "very nasty regime indeed". 


Tuesday, March 05, 2024

History of free trade

 


Amid the Globe and Mail's coverage of Brian Mulroney's life and career last week (headlines: "great patriot," "Canada's greenest prime minister," "extraordinary statesmen," "Quebec's illustrious son"), a couple of pieces stood out. 

In the Business pages, under the headline "Economically speaking. we're all living in Brian Mulroney's Canada." Tony Keller gives a triumphalist account of Mulroney's free trade project, mocking anti-free traders who thought "the Americans were bent on deflowering our national virtue" and celebrating the great benefits free trade brought, including the dispute settlement mechanism Mulroney inserted into the agreement. Isn't that the one that had to be killed off because it was used exclusively by American businesses to claim millions in compensation for Canadian government programs? 

In the Opinion pages, Andrew Coyne's column, likely written before Mulroney's death was announced, is all about the anemic growth rate of the Canadian economy in recent decades. The article comes with copious statistics about how we used to have one of the world's highest GDP per capita rates, terrific capital formation figures, and other measures of growth and prosperity, all of which seem to have been falling away for decades. Coyne seeks no specific cause for these seriously worrying developments. But the charts suggest they really started to gather force about a decade after the implementation of free trade

Hmmm.

Today Maude Barlow wonders where all the free trade prosperity is these days. Maybe she fears we really are living in Brian Mulroney's economy?

Update, March 7: Jared Milne writes:

Reading your commentary on 'free trade' in Tuesday's blog post, I find it ironic that Andrew Coyne cites so many OECD statistics in his article to describe how Canada's struggled economically in recent decades. The thing is that Mel Hurtig was doing the exact same thing 20 years ago, and he cited 'free trade' as one of the main reasons for it. 

 It's a shame that critics like Hurtig, Eric Kierans and John Ralston Saul were either ignored or dismissed as cranks when they were making their warnings about what was coming. At a time when populists on both the left and the right are savaging the whole idea of neoliberalism, they look like prophets in hindsight. 

Both links there, one from Policy Options, the other from Medium, are worth following. Also relevant: economic commentator Armine Yalnizyan, taking down the whole panic over GDP per capita, and setting out what changes in that metric really expose:  

 The reason you should be worried isn’t that GDP per capita is falling, but what the proposed fixes are.

Update, March 11:  One more contribution to the discussion of economic and cultural backsliding by Canada, Ken Whyte, former editor of Saturday Night, National Post, Maclean's, etc, now publisher of Sutherland House Books, examines the decline of independent Canadian cultural expression "in the fifth decade of the neo-liberal era," i.e., since the Mulroney government's adoption of free trade, free markets, and globalism. 

This analysis of the struggles of Canadian cultural expression is much more plausible than the "Who killed Canadian history?" plaints pointing to wokeism, social historians, and minority voices as the problem.

Full throated praise of Mulroney's achievements -- and much more muted "hmmm's" as well -- continue to appear, and not always from the expected sources.

 

 

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Book Notes: Griswold on women's diaries


A new anthology of women's diaries written between 1599 and 2015, organized with entries covering each day of the year, searches for the dominant emotion running through them. 

And concludes: it's frustration.

Has the dominant emotion of men's diaries been determined?  Hmmm. 

Friday, February 23, 2024

History of digital publishing: from podcasts to audiobooks?


The current Walrus has a profile of the indigenous Canadian broadcaster Connie Walker, who broke out with the very successful CBC podcast "Missing and Murdered," from 2016 and then moved to Spotify for a series called "Stolen," that earned both a Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Broadcasting Award in 2023. Spotify subsequently told her she was being cancelled. As the story says, "Walker, whose success represented a beacon of hope for despairing journalists, was now a symbol of the profession’s alarming, inescapable collapse."

There has been a spate of stories about the cancellation of podcasts, particularly the complicated, deeply researched ones in which Walker made her reputation. The pennies that digital advertising brings in don't often cover the overheads of that kind of work, it seems, not when there are a million people trying to break into podcasting, some with off-the-top-of-the-head chatty content that makes Top-40 Radio seem like Shakespeare.  Maybe a great retrenchment in podcasting is on the horizon, at least for those that aren't subsidized or feature a celebrity.

Meanwhile, I've been listening to "Miracle and Wonder: Conversations With Paul Simon" by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam, produced by Gladwell's podcasting enterprise Pushkin Industries. It's a podcast except that it isn't. It's presented as and offered for sale as an audiobook instead. I can't help thinking that this may be Malcolm Gladwell observing the dismal economics of podcasting and seeing if audiobook publishing enables a different pricing regime more aligned with the real costs of production. Though since it seems that Spotify and Amazon already have some kind of monopoly control of audiobooks now (and everyone I know gets audiobooks free from the library app Libby), I'm not sure how that's going to work out. But "Miracle and Wonder" may be a sign or symptom of change working out in digital 'casting.

What started me on this post, however, was not thoughts on the evolving history of digital audio marketing. (That's just to justify putting this in a history blog, perhaps). It was how much I'm enjoying "Miracle and Wonder." 

Gladwell's team recorded thirty hours for a five hour audiobook, Paul Simon is fully engaged, and it all becomes a wonderful exploration of one musician and his music. There is a lovely balance of music  -- old Simon recordings, new Simon live demonstrations, clips of music that inspired him, whatever --  all fitted into a structured conversation about the shape and meaning of Simon's career. It would be a waste of paper, almost, to print this audiobook -- the music is absolutely central to it. Gladwell gladwellizes elaborate theories from sociology texts and musicological theorists to interpret how Paul Simon got to be Paul Simon,  and these deep-think dives actually work pretty well. But Simon hardly engages with those parts -- he's just talking and thinking and riffing on all the music in his head.

If you are a bit jaded with what you are finding in podcasts, or you have any interest at all in Paul Simon, take a listen. Malcolm Gladwell probably hopes you will purchase it here for US$14.99.  You have your own sources for audiobooks/podcasts.

These are the days of miracle and wonder.  Don't cry, baby, don't cry.


Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Book Notes: Ibbitson on Dief and Pearson


I’ve been reading John Ibbitson’s The Duel: Diefenbaker, Pearson, and the Making of Modern Canada.  It’s a puzzle.

On the one hand, a big, skillfully written, and handsomely published trade-market book on a consequential moment in 20th century Canadian politics might seem another blow to the Canadian-history-is-dead doomsayers. On the other, the still-dead crowd might point out that this lively, readable political biography by an award-winning, bestselling national journalist did not get the buzz and attention it might have been expected to generate. I haven't been reading much about it, and never saw much sign of it on the bestseller lists – not that they are such a great neighbourhood for a writer to be found in these days. And lack of attention is one of the doomsayers' key plaints. The Duel was featured on the Witness to Yesterday podcast last month: Ibbitson interviewed by Greg Marchildon)

And the book itself? “One purpose of this book has been to dispel the false narrative that the two Pearson governments accomplished much while the three Diefenbaker governments accomplished little,” Ibbitson declares. I’m not sure that purpose is fulfilled. Often enough, the case rests on Diefenbaker having initiated a study of some question that Pearson later turned into policy. Ibbitson wants to give Diefenbaker shared credit for medicare, for instance, on the grounds that while Pearson’s government implemented medicare, Dief made it possible by naming Emmett Hall to undertake the royal commission report that recommended it.

Ibbitson reports, “Diefenbaker had cannily appointed his friend Emmett Hall … knowing full well where the judge’s sympathies lay.” I’ve always heard Hall’s sympathies initially lay elsewhere, and that his endorsement of medicare shocked the conventional wisdom. Here as elsewhere, a little more evidence might help Ibbitson’s contrarian claims for Diefenbaker.

With my interest in our dreadful party leadership selection processes in Canada, I was particularly interested in anything new on how Dief came to win the Conservative Party leadership in 1956, and how he came to lose it in 1967. I recall interviewing John Courtney, the Saskatchewan political scientist, who described how Diefenbaker, long unpopular within his own party, spent his time as an MP travelling the country signing up new party members, so that when the leadership race began, no one else had any chance of amassing the lead in delegates Dief already had. 

This was a profound innovation: Dief was the first Canadian politician to seize party leadership -- against the established party powers -- by taking control of the membership lists. It's the way everyone has sought to claim leadership ever since, right down to the million-dollar vote-buying orgies of today’s political parties. Of all this, Ibbitson says simply, “He was the people’s choice.” Who have we heard that about recently?

Dief’s departure was equally consequential. He never really accepted that a party convention could remove him from leadership (though it did, in the end, with much consequent difficulty), but equally he did not accept the party caucus could remove him either. He did much to establish the understanding that loyalty runs in one direction only, and that retirement from political leadership in Canada must be left solely to the inclination of the leader himself (usually on election night). Ibbitson does not enlighten us on that one, either, though the question could surely be relevant to the story of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s looming choices.

The Duel is well-written, a nicely structured dual biography going back and forth between two well-described colourful and significant protagonists. Didn’t quite break new ground for me, I guess, but it deserves readers.

Comment From Helen Webberley (Melbourne, Australia)
The post needs a title. [Fixed, thanks.] I did not do any history courses after the WW1 and its aftermath, and I certainly know precious little about the 1950s.
And nothing whatsoever about Diefenbaker! But I think historians today
can learn a great deal about earlier crisis eras.

Comment From Jared Milne (Alberta)

I caught your review of John Ibbitson's book about Diefenbaker and Pearson.  ... I do think that Diefenbaker is one of our most underrated Prime Ministers.

My own ranking of our PMs puts Diefenbaker much higher on the list than most rankings do, because besides the most obvious positives of giving First Nations people the full voting rights that were 93 years overdue and nixing his predecessors' awful racist immigration quotas, he also did a lot of good bread-and-butter things like complete the Trans-Canada Highway, started the path to medicare by creating federal hospital insurance (which is a better support for Diefenbaker's claiming credit for a part in universal healthcare than anyone he appointed), and made Prairie Canadians feel like we really had a seat at the table with his agricultural reform and the National Oil Program.

Diefenbaker might not be one of the all-time greats, but I often don't think he gets enough credit for the things he did right.


Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Canadian Historical Review: An article to read

Birtle Residential School
Article of the week -- my week at least, as I may have been slow coming to it -- has to be “'Not a Shred of Evidence': Settler Colonial Networks of Concealment and the Birtle Indian Residential School" by Tyle Betke. It is in the most recent issue of the Canadian Historical Review (and likely available only to subscribers). It's about sex slavery, and death, and coverup, at a residential school in the early to mid twentieth century.  

It ought to put an end to the "until you prove every case and exhume every body, it's okay to assume it never happened" approach to the whole issue of abuse at residential schools.  Probably it will not.  

Since the link may not make the full text available, I'm copying part of one representative paragraph, concerning the experience of one family: 

Lazenby’s superiors within the DIA also helped cover up the truth by discrediting the girls and their family members. The father of the girls was known to the DIA. He was one of many Indigenous parents across Canada who advocated for the proper education and treatment of their children. He had sent multiple petitions and letters of complaints to the DIA Upon hearing the news of Currie’s charges, Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott characterized the girl’s father as “a trouble maker.” Scott surmised that the father was causing trouble because of having “become embittered recently” when his other daughter died while running away from the school.

Wednesday, February 14, 2024

"A benignity of temper" -- Love in 1798


 












 - From Russ Chamberlayne, who reports this comes from a New Brunswick newspaper of 1798.  Happy Valentine's Day, unless you are observing Ash Wednesday and abstaining from all such things for the next forty days.

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

History of those lost to history

Can a dictionary of national biography include someone whose name is unknown, whose birthplace and deathplace are unknown, and of whom no actions or activities were ever recorded? There's no portrait either.

You wouldn't think so. It's certainly a bit of a stretch. But the Dictionary of Canadian Biography did it last week. It seems to break all the conventions of the biographical dictionary genre. 

But it works. Here's Harvey Amani Whitfield's biography of "Name Unrecorded."

Maybe there are some analogous cases. The DCB long ago published a biography of a ghost. That one worked too.

 
Follow @CmedMoore