Glasstry news

Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa, historian of Poland, speaks out again against Poland's criminalisation of  objective scholarship on Holocaust questions. McMaster historian Ian McKay and Jamie Swift comment on the odd story of the residents of Vimy Ridge Avenue who petitioned in 1928 to change the street's name to Glenhurst Avenue

The grave marker of Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville , now in the Museum of the City of Havana on Plaza de la Catedral. 

Hey, he brings in the votes, doesn't he? In the Globe and Mail , columnist Adam Radwanski examines how easily and routinely political parties in Canada are corrupted by the millions of dollars and thousands of people their leadership processes require  (italic added): Parties do not typically have exhaustive formal vetting processes to determine who is allowed to run for their leadership. In theory, the leadership races themselves are supposed to serve as informal vetting, with candidates' liabilities brought into the open as they take aim at each other. In practice, parties often have low enough membership rolls heading into their contests that an available path to victory is the one Mr. Brown followed in 2015: Flood the party with new members , at your disposal if you make the right deals with the right organizers, and don't worry too much about persuading stalwarts looking critically at each candidate before deciding how to mark their ballots. Regardless of how the job ...

I see that this week's featured biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography online is of Frederick Banting, who died 21 February in 1941. It is by Michael Bliss  -- who continues his long record as a productive, publishing historian despite being dead for most of a year.

"King of Canada. Mummy, must I?" David Johnson, the author of Battle Royal ,  a new study of monarchical versus republican ideas in Canada, describes himself as a "pragmatic monarchist," but he writes as a sentimental one too. His book is full of lush descriptions of the pageantry of royal weddings, coronations, and tours. At one point he uses the odious Edward VIII as an example of the "modern, philanthropic monarchy" (he does later acknowledge the Nazi associations). He lavishes chapters on the intricacies of "crown privilege," because the subject can be made to inflate the power and importance of the royalty -- though really crown privilege is just executive privilege, and the issues are essentially the same in republics and monarchies. He argues monarchy is better because the Queen is a bigger celebrity than any governor general -- though on that metric Canadians ought to prefer foreign Olympians over our own, too. He consistently takes mona...

My theory is that blogs mostly evolve their mandate; it's hard to assign them one. If I understand the origins of the website Active History, it hoped to link historians to public policy questions and provide useful historical perspectives on current events when needed. I'd say the mandate it has evolved is a bit different than that. Not that that is a bad thing. But sometimes AH really hits the original target.  Blake Brown's essay on the history of jury selection in Canada was powerfully enlightening to me in the wake of the Gerald Stanley/Colton Boushie trial last week, and ought to be useful to future policymakers too. I found myself troubled by another legal, or legalistic, aspect of that trial. If we are going to get, someday, to a real nation-to-nation relationship between Canada and First Nations, then there is going to be a First Nations judicial system in some form yet to be imagined, let along implemented. And then, when a Canadian man shoots a Cree man, how wil...

President Ramaphosa I was delighted to observe the richly deserved removal from office of South African President Jacob Zuma, but a little puzzled by how the presidency seemed to be completely in the gift of the African National Congress party, as if he were merely a party executive and not the President of the nation and people of South Africa. South Africa has a particular variant of parliamentary democracy, in which the national legislature elects a president from among its own members.  The president thereupon must resign from the legislature and becomes an executive president, with both real and ceremonial powers. It's the election of president directly by the legislature that gives the majority party the freedom to name and remove presidents without much regard to opposition parties or the will of the population.  The apartheid struggle, and the ANC's large majorities since, have conditioned it to blur party, state, and nation, in this and other matters. I take note most...

My Spanish is limited. I had never realized that the Spanish word for historian is historiador , historiadora .  I liked the term immediately for its echoes of toreador and luchador.  That historical work is and should be a struggle -- and with faintly heroic overtones -- seems true to my life. In Havana Vieja, the Office of the Historiador is everywhere. For about forty years, the City Historian, Eusebio Leal Spengler , has also been the principal entrepreneur in preserving, restoring, and putting to productive use the built environment of the district. The City Historian's holding company owns many of the buildings in the old city. It generates revenue from rents and tourism businesses, and recycles it into more of the preservation activities that are evident throughout the area.  Last week that all seemed a heroic achievement to me. The staff of the Historiador even sweeps the streets -- as the logo at right shows -- and hey, getting rid of the trash is also a good hi...