Glasstry news

Blogging has been a little intermittent in January, for rather boring reasons.  It's about to get slower.  The blogger is going south for a couple of weeks and expects not to blog at all or very little. Back in mid-February.

Patrick Brown had an undistinguished tenure as federal MP, but his success in raising funds and selling memberships allowed him to become Ontario leader of the Conservative Party in one of those vote-buying orgies called leadership conventions. Now that he has been brought down by allegations of sexual harassment, the buzz seems to be that nobody actually liked him much anyway and the party might do better with someone else leading it in the June 2018 election. But the extra-parliamentary party executive has decided to go ahead with another leadership convention, against the will of the caucus of MPPs -- you know, the elected and accountable representatives of the people. Who will buy the most votes this time?  A rare glimmer of wisdom  has come from one backroom Conservative, Thom Bennett of Ottawa:   �I am at a total loss as to what the thinking could be that our executive would tell our elected MPPs � those soldiers who are putting their name in front of the elect...

Chris Raible recently shared a link to this Guardian story arguing that historians need to step up and explain things to the rest of the world: Social scientists find themselves publicly confronting the social dynamics and technological disruptions that have led to our changing politics and society. But historians are almost entirely absent from this conversation [...] This irrelevance is largely self-inflicted. Too many historians still think that engaging with the public means they�re compromising the integrity of the discipline. I guess, yeah, maybe. I was struck recently by the wide press coverage of Sharon Bala's first novel The Boat People , a drawn-from-the-headlines imagining of the experience of those who occasionally arrive off Canadian shores in some rusty ship crowded with escaped migrants of some disfavoured refugee community.  What really struck me was how much reviewers and interviewees wanted the novel to be reportage, to be history, want it to explain what was go...

David Johnson is a professor of political science at Cape Breton University and not the former governor general of Canada (who has a "t" in his surname).  So Johnson-no-t's book Battle Royal: Monarchists v Republicans and the Crown of Canada just out from Dundurn Press, is not quite as controversial at it might have been. According to the jacket blurbs , Canada has "a strong republican movement" and "an equally vibrant monarchist movement," and Johnson promises a dispassionate analysis that he intends to be helpful to all. Pub date is Feb 13, but ther's a launch in Sydney today that includes a monarchist vs republican debate and local CBC liver coverage.  Thought control centre of the universe, indeed!

Gettin' topical in the February-March  Canada's History . The possible death of NAFTA provoked my column "Passing the Bucks."  Based on a reading of Smart Globalization and a conversation with one of its editor-contributors, Dimitry Anastakis (Andrew Smith being the other), the column considers whether the era of "hyperglobalization" we have seen in recent decades may be collapsing under its own weight. A spectacular cover (I'd show it, but it ain't up at the website yet), "Vinland Vikings: the Mysterious Norse Settlement Found," leads to a sober and persuasive essay about Norse visits to the Gulf of St. Lawrence region, contributed by Birgitta Wallace, the fruit of a lifetime's scholarship on the subject. Plus Second World War letters, praise for Saskatoon, polio in the Arctic. And much more, including (why have a blog if you cannot plug your friends once in a while?) an enthusiastic review of Anne McDonald's Miss Confederation ,...

Went last week to hear City of Toronto Archivist Carol Radford-Grant give the Howland Lecture for the York Historical Society on the subject of archives and the digital realm. It seemed no big news that the city archives has 12,000 Twitter followers. Doesn't everybody have thousands of Twitter followers? But Radford-Grant pointed out that is more people than visit the archives -- a beautiful modern, accessible facility on Spadina Road below Casa Loma -- in a year. And keep that quill pen sharp, too. Even more striking was her evidence of how archives are responding to that kind of user data. The city's digitization efforts emphasize picture and map collections, because the online appetite for images is huge. Mere text documents, well, they don't have the same kind of takeup. Inevitably their place in the archival hierarchy at a public institution has to decline.  The handfuls of researchers who come in to spend long stretches of time working through collections of serial do...

If you are in Toronto and interested:  Peter Russell, the author of last year's constitutional history (and constitutional proposal)  Canada's Odyssey: A Country Built on Incomplete Conquests , is speaking on next Friday evening, January 12 , 19th at the Yorkminster Park Baptist Church community hall in North Toronto .Free admission, all welcome, it says here. Update, Jan 12 : Sorry, was in such a hurry to post this in time that I failed to notice it's next week.  Thanks to Allan Williams for the correction.

For a couple of years before 2015, the John A. Macdonald birthday parties on January 11 were lively events. (Unless he was actually born January 10, which remains a possibility.) They were history nerdfests more than Macdonald hagiographies, with a certain amount of political contestation encouraged. By the 199th in 2014, it was getting a little too "official" and worshipful for my taste, and we passed on the 200th. Now any kind of Macdonald commemoration would be intensely controversial. Indeed the bicentenary attention may have helped provoked the reassessment -- another sign of the consequences of anniversaries on historical memory. Even the pub located in Macdonald's old office building in Kingston has changed its name .  The 203rd does not seem to be prominent in the Canadian calendar today This year the commemoration has apparently shifted from Canada to Highclere Castle in Britain, where they seem to be promoting the legend that the Canadian constitution was writ...

Book promotion is generally one of those businesses where no one knows anything, but I'm loving the promotional gimmick the University of Toronto historian Randell Hansen has found for his 2008 study of the allied bombing of Europe during the Second World War. He titled it Fire and Fury , and then waited ten years for an American journalist to publish a lurid account of the Trump White House with the same title.  Both books are going like gangbusters, apparently. Somehow I guess even Hansen's nomination for a nonfiction GG did not produce sales like this.

American babies are 76 per cent more likely to die before they turn a year old than babies in other rich countries, and American children who survive infancy are 57 per cent more likely to die before adulthood, according to a sobering new study published in the journal Health Affairs . American teens aged 15 to 19 are 82 times more likely than teens in other rich countries to die of a gun homicide. You have to say, the Republican agenda is working. Meanwhile, here in Canada, how is it that the operators of Tim Hortons franchises have a union -- the Great White North Franchisors Association -- to negotiate with the boss, but the workers cannot seem to have a union to negotiate with the franchisors? And if markets are supposed to work, how is it the franchise system establishes that the boss gets to set the prices while the franchisors have to pay the (rising) wage costs?  Is the role of retail franchising in creating poverty a bug in the system, or more of a feature? The $15 minim...

Just to say I was delighted to see Stephen A Otto among the latest Order of Canada honorees .  I suppose Stephen's field was "heritage," rather than "history" narrowly defined, but he has long been the guy I go to when there is something really obscure about Toronto history I want to know more about. In recent years he has been the leader and inspiration for the organization Friends of Fort York in Toronto and editor of Fife and Drum , its much-more-than-you-would-expect newsletter.  He has always been a spark for heritage preservation causes and civic improvement in southern Ontario. "Yes," said a mutual friend once when I told him I was doing some writing for Steven's newsletter, "he is a wonderful fellow. And terribly hard to say no to."  I'm glad the Order of Canada knew to say yes.

Francess Halpenny, surely the greatest Canadian scholarly editor of the second half of the twentieth century -- should we just say ever? -- died on Christmas Day 2017.  She was, among other things, general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography from 1969 to 1988, surely an unmatched tenure, so her contributions to Canadian history were very substantial in their own right. There was a death notice  in the Globe and Mail that gives a good sense of her as one of those who overcame the obstacles women faced in mid-twentieth century academia and went on to do many remarkable things. There's also a nice appreciation  in a piece about elder care by Sandra Martin, published just three days before Halpenny's death, though she was "sharp as ever" when it was drafted. I had the identical experience to Martin: met Halpenny briefly at a conference and never forgot it somehow. Martin: I met her in the mid-1970s at a conference I was covering as a callow editor for Quill ...