Glasstry news

The Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences has announced the finalists for its Canada Prize , given annually to scholarly works about Canada that were aided by the Aid to Scholarly Publishing Program. A good representation of historians this year, and four out of five from McGill-Queen's Press. Christopher Dummitt, Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King's Secret Life (McGill-Queen�s University Press) E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917   (McGill-Queen�s University Press) Adam Montgomery, T he Invisible Injured: Psychological Trauma in the Canadian Military from the First World War to Afghanistan (McGill-Queen�s University Press) Cheryl Suzack, Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law (University of Toronto Press) Donald G. Wetherell, Wildlife, Land, and People: A Century of Change in Prairie Canada   (McGill-Queen�s University Press) I hear rumours about the shortlist for the J.W. Dafoe Prize f...

Sharon Bala's novel The Boat People (defended by singer and TV host Mozhdah Jamalzadah) was the first book eliminated from this year's Canada Reads competition on CBC Radio. Bala quickly pointed out how steep the odds were against her and her book. Canada Reads has had something close to gender parity in its authors and advocates: this year 2 books out of 5 by women, and 3 women advocates out of 5. Yet Bala found that no book by a woman and defended by a woman has ever won Canada Reads. But ... what else would you expect from Canada Reads?  Frankly, I would as soon watch "The Bachelor" or "The Apprentice."  They are all platforms for shouty, bullying, aggressive, vulgar performances -- no wonder men are likely to win! But Canada Reads is supposed to be about books and reading. I guess I still dream of the CBC encourage listeners to treat Canadian books and writing with taste and judgment, instead of pumping out the demeaning drivel to which Canada Reads su...

Christopher Dummitt's Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King's Secret Life is among the nominees for the 2018 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing .  The other nominees, including three strong women contenders, are: Carol Off,  All We Leave Behind: A Reporter�s Journey into the Lives of Others Sandra Perron, Out Standing in the Field: A Memoir by Canada�s First Female Infantry Officer Ted Rowe,  Robert Bond: The Greatest Newfoundlander Tanya Talaga,  Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City It's not entirely clear just what the Cohen means by "political writing," beyond the idea that anything may be political and it's up to juries to find the boundaries.  So this year's nominees are as eclectic as ever -- and not such a bad thing, since it seems like a quality list. I'm sorry I hadn't previously know about the Robert Bond biography , the other historical work (if we can set booundaries for that!) on the li...

Canadian food history continues to thrive. Melissa McAfee, archivist at the University of Guelph, and local publisher Rocks Mills Press have combined to publish The Canadian Receipt Book containing over 500 Valuable Receipts for the Farmer and the Housewife ,  based on a book first published in 1867 and held in the university archives. It promises advice from deworming the bronchial passages of a cow to the proper use of "cocoaine" to making a nice lemon pudding.

The Champlain Society , a member-supported organization that for more than a century has been publishing scrupulously edited Canadian historical documents in handsome editions, has also been expanding into new ventures, not least of which is " Witness to Yesterday ," a podcast series that has been running for some months on the society website, and on iTunes and other podcast sources. It's hosted by Patrice Dutil, Greg Marchildon, and Kenna Turcotte, and while the focus of each episode is a particular historical document, they tend to talk about just about any CanHist topic that takes their fancy: the Canadian Irish, the diary of Lucy Morrison, the birth of the NHL, the religious use of peyote in Canada.  And more. If you need something new in your earbuds....

Sidewalk Labs is a division of the Google empire which has recently entered into a development agreement with Toronto. Sidewalk gets to create a "digital city" in part of Toronto's port lands, and Toronto gets... well, the future, I guess. There has been some pushback .  In what is possibly an unrelated step, Sidewalk has just released a fun digitized map of Toronto . Nearly 40,000 historical photos from the City of Toronto archives of buildings and landmarks, from the 1880s to the recent present, can now be explored by roaming over the map Sidewalk provides. Sidewalk stresses the images belong to the Archives and were digitized and coded by the Archives; Sidewalk just geocoded them to their locations.  This is either pretty cool or a bit disquieting, or some of both. Sidewalk says: What does this tool have to do with Sidewalk Toronto? The Old Toronto tool is not directly connected with the ongoing project plans for Sidewalk Toronto, but it does rely on some of the same t...

Go to their site to embiggen this Historian Donald Wright draws our attention to a new map of what we call Canada, one that contains only indigenous place names. As he says, " it changes how one 'sees' and 'reads' Canada." �Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada� was commissioned  by the Canadian-American Center (Stephen Hornsby, director) at the University of Maine, and designed  and created by cartographer Margaret Wickens Pearce, with permissions from First Nations throughout. It is accessible (free to look at, small fee to purchase in hard form) from their site here . As they say: The map does not depict all of the Indigenous place names of Canada, nor are all Indigenous Nations and communities represented. Beyond the map�s names are thousands upon thousands more, an ever growing and expanding atlas of intimate, geographical knowledge and experience. The intention of the map is to create respect for Indigenous homelands and sovereignties, and a fe...

I'm half starting to wish I had never started noting the deaths of Canadian historians. There are too many, and lately I seem to know too many of them. Case in point: Blair Neatby, historian of politics, Saskatchewan, French-English relations, and much else, whom I did not know well but never met without pleasure, who died in Ottawa March 11.  I talked to him once for a Beaver column about the Saskatchewan politician and '50s Minister of Agriculture Jimmy Gardiner: Mackenzie King biographer Blair Neatby once interviewed Gardiner at his Lemberg farm. (�He was very down to earth and unpretentious, a genuine farmer.�) Neatby recalls a politician unintimidated by bureaucrats. Neatby�s uncle was a civil servant and deputy minister of agriculture and when Gardiner did not like his advice, he would simply say, �Remember, Ken, I�m the minister.� That attitude shaped Gardiner�s reservations about the Canadian Wheat Board, which he saw as bureaucratic and beyond the control by farm...

Fresh from Halifax, where she witnessed the fulfillment of the long campaign to see an non-royal, non-British woman on some Canadian money, Merna Forster of heroincs.ca sends news of a recent poll by Ipsos (commissioned by Historica) about Canadians' lack of knowledge of women's history: Canadians are largely unfamiliar with the achievements of notable women throughout Canadian history. As a measure of that lack of awareness, only a minority of respondents say they could identify the achievements of such accomplished Canadian women as artist Emily Carr (37%), author Lucy Maud Montgomery (27%), and suffragette Nellie McClung (16%). I'm delighted to see Viola Desmond on the ten, and full of admiration for the campaign that put her there. And this is one of a long line of polls on historical knowledge, started by Historica's ancestor The Dominion Institute, which have often been fun and provocative. But on any subject in Canadian history anyone can run a poll to prove th...

Regarding the Conservative party leadership "race" in Ontario, let me just note that the party reports having 190,000 members, but only 74,000 of them seem to have had valid mailing addresses, and only 64,000 or so voted.  (And the "winner" trailed in both the popular vote and the vote-by-constituency.)  How many of the rest of the 190,000 "members," one wonders, were essentially avatars, memberships that had been created by the party leadership but had not yet been assigned to real people when the leadership contest suddenly emerged?  It doesn't seem to matter; no one is investigating it.

This year's Donald Creighton Lecture, the flagship annual lecture of the University of Toronto History Department, will be held on March 22.  The lecturer is Beverly Lemire of the University of Alberta on the subject, "Stitching the Global in an Age of Empires: Contact, Connection, and Translation in Needlework Arts, c. 1600-1880s." The lecture website notes: Lemire has had a trail-blazing career uncovering the deep forces intersecting the economy, fashion, gender and material culture. Her publications address British, European and Global issues. She is currently heading the SSHRC-funded collaborative project �Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America,�

Frederick Vaughan, longtime University of Guelph professor and prolific author, particularly on legal and constitutional questions, died recently . I have to say I was unpersuaded by almost everything Professor Vaughan wrote on Canadian constitutional history, and at least once wrote a (for me) pretty negative review  (scroll down in the link) of one of his books. Looking for the obit online today, I found a link to a review where Ged Martin reached conclusions  similar enough to mine, and felt fortified in my position.  But no doubt there are people who would disagree with all my work too. I once, not too long after my review appeared, sat down at a conference dinner and introduced myself to the person in the next seat -- and found it was Frederick Vaughan. There was a pause in which I wondered if he was about to denounce me, or worse, but someone else said something, and we enjoyed the meal without raising our differing views at all. So I'm quite prepared to endorse the...

Impressive collection of International Women's Day comics on the funnies page this morning. More coverage than the news pages, actually - for those who still see a newspaper.  I thought this one, from Rhymes with Orange , was the most history sensitive.  Sweet history:  Janis Thiessen's story of Moirs' Chocolate and the Pot of Gold , long manufactured by a mostly female workforce in Halifax, Nova Scotia  -- excerpted from Snacks: A Canadian Food History and featured some time ago at the Acadiensis blog but  missed by me until recently.  Bittersweet: Pot of Gold has become a Hershey's subsidiary brand and is no long made in Canada.

Toronto historian planning historian Richard White considers   An Enduring Wilderness by photographer Robert Burley, and how the parks and wild spaces Burley presents in his work are the products of a long history of deliberate planning initiatives. Like many Torontonians, I know these ravines as an occasional walker of their paths. But I know them also as a planning historian. And these ravine parks are unmistakably the product of planning, having been conceived by Metropolitan Toronto planners in the 1950s as the city expanded out into its rural hinterland. Their planning pedigree has long been obscured by the ineradicable urban myth (thankfully, not repeated by Wayne Reeves in his essay in the book) that they exist on account of Hurricane Hazel, the storm that inundated the Toronto region with nearly a foot of rain over two days in October 1954, to devastating effect. The storm certainly expedited implementation of the parks plan. It prompted the local conservation authority to...

The Atlantic   has a story by Laura Spinney on a mass anthropology study of the role of human sacrifice in human societies throughout history: Were human societies able to grow so large and complex because cruel practices like human sacrifice shored them up, or because human sacrifice was abandoned in favor of other forms of social glue�notably, major religions like Christianity? The study tries to get beyond merely anecdotal evidence by pooling historical data about large numbers of societies into substantial databases. It suggests the theory that human sacrifice can be a unifying force in societies of up to 100,000 people, but is actually socially disruptive in larger ones. I wonder if they are forcing the data a bit, but what really struck me was the definition and assertion about human sacrifice. Human sacrifice is defined as the ritualized, religiously motivated killing of a human being. It is no longer sanctioned by any state I don't know about the "no longer sanctioned...

The other day, the Charles Taylor Prize in Literary Nonfiction was awarded to journalist Tanya Talaga, for Seven Fallen Feathers , her study of seven indigenous youth who ended up dead after coming to Thunder Bay to continue their schooling. Talaga will be among the presenters at Writing True, the Creative Nonfiction Collective annual conference , being held in Toronto May 4 to 8.  Talaga will also be interviewing Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle during the conference.

Kinda heartwarming, actually, how loyal the aging separatists of the Bloc Quebecois are to deeply held Canadian values.  When 7 of the 10 Bloc MPs in Ottawa find their leader intolerable... it is the seven who have to leave the party, while the leader, who is not even a Member of Parliament and is leader only because her supporters bought more votes the last time the BQ held a sale of leadership, somehow remains leader. It couldn't happen in a working parliamentary democracy, but it's so deeply entrenched in the Canadian way of politics that even the politicians who want to leave Canada accept it without a moment's reflection, even if it means career suicide. Update:  Dale Smith consider the pervers e state of party leadership in Canada