Glasstry news

It's a movie A friend suggests that since I'm not a fan of movies about historical events, I will like this essay by British historian Anthony Beevor,  Beevor, with a new book to promote, seeks to shock, I think, by dissing canonical films like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List For a long time now, my wife has refused to watch a war movie with me. This is because I cannot stop grinding my teeth with annoyance at major historical mistakes, or harrumphing over errors of period detail. Actually Beevor's essay makes me grind my teeth, and for the same reason I sometimes claim to dislike dramas about history.  He insists they have to be true -- and the filmmakers insist they are true.  Neither side seems willing to admit that a drama is a drama.  It doesn't have to be literally true; it just has to work as a drama. So Beevor shouts at Saving Private Ryan (okay, he likes the opening slaughter) for not including the British role in D-Day and for offering a melodr...

The Canadian Historical Association, meeting in Saskatchewan, has voted to remove the name of John A. Macdonald from its premiere prize, the one for the year's best work in Canadian history.  In the name of the good cause of reconciliation, though removal of names and statues was not one of the long list of projects the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has put forward as useful steps toward that goal. Naming this prize for Macdonald has always seemed a bit odd, since he was not a scholar or a historian and did not donate the prize himself.  So there may have been a more appropriate name to be found all along, and indeed the CHA will now simply call it the CHA Prize. But removing the old name punitively....  Well meant, but not wise, I'd say. [Hat tip to Allen Levine for the link.]

Veteran political consultant and commentator Robin Sears is shocked to learn that selection processes for MPs in Canadian political parties are dodgy things: [Disgraced former leader Patrick Brown] is also right to say that political parties have demonstrated they cannot be trusted today to run their own nominations processes with rules they themselves set, and ones they clearly sometimes ignore � like paying for someone else�s party membership. Astonishing it nonetheless is, to have a conservative politician call for state intervention in the private affairs of a political party. Brown said that reflecting on the messy nominations processes he witnessed, he has concluded that, � � it is time for Elections Ontario to manage this part of our democratic process.� (!) The news that people buy and sell party memberships by the bushel whenever a constituency nomination or a party leadership strikes Sears like a thunderclap, according to his telling of it.  It is as if he has never seen...

Could this be dodgy? It's hard to follow a race that takes five hours a day in the snippets of a minute or two that is all most North Americans can glean about the Giro d'Italia, now in its final week. I found myself watching one bit of slightly more extended coverage in which the commentary was in Basque. But what what one can see, it has been a lively tour, notably for the remarkable prowess of Simon Yates, a Brit riding for an Australian team.  Coming in, the question seemed to be whether Chris Froome could win a third consecutive Grand Tour (after winning the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana last year). Instead Froome has looked pretty mortal, and Yates has looked superhuman, pulling away from the pack on the steepest hills and "putting time into" everyone. This is pro cycling. I cannot help remembering Floyd Landis, an American rider in the post-Armstrong years, who one day made a phenomenal ride, putting himself ten minutes ahead of everyone and pretty mu...

I receive a little notice from Google: As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to help meet these regulations. The notice lets visitors know about Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies on your blog, including Google Analytics and AdSense cookies. As a courtesy! As a courtesy ?  Well, readers in the European Community, including Britain so far, have the legal right to be informed if any cookies or data analytics are applied to them as a result of opening this website. I personally use no cookies and undertake no privacy-testing gathering of data on readers in Europe or anywhere else. But Google does. If you access this blog (or any other Google can see) via its blogspot.fr (France) or blogspot.de (Germany) sites rather than blogspot.ca or blogspot.com, the Google-created notice about cookies should be visible already.  If you use the North American entry points, the notice will not be be visible -- but Google will still be gathering data.  I don't e...

Cover story at Canada's History this month features Marilyn Dickson on Eileen Vollick, first woman to earn a pilot's licence in Canada: "I have never been afraid to go after anything I wanted and to stay until I got it," she wrote, so, "one day I ventured into the proprietor's den and asked him, 'Can a girl learn to fly?'" Also, Ray Argyle on Solomon Sanderson, the Cree chief who created the term "First Nations" -- in 1980. Cynthia Levine-Rasky on the Roma in Canada. And Peter Blow on a Canadian freedom fighter executed by the Spanish in 19th century Cuba. And much more. For my own column, I talked to Ian Milligan about Big Data and historians' plans to gain access to and control of what is being called "the infinite archives" -- the vast amounts of historical source material that lives online and only online.  Subscribe!

Thinking about writing a history of the Supreme Court of Canada? Or any of its judges?  Particularly about the recent decades when it became truly "supreme," began to control the docket of cases that came to it, and was empowered by the 1982 constitutional amendments to wield power as never before? You might have to wait. The Supreme Court recently put a fifty year embargo on the internal court documents and judges' communications that provide the kind of sources judicial historians require. Biographers and legal historians are pushing back , with the support of many retired judges: Jim Phillips, editor-in-chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, which has overseen the publication of several biographies of Supreme Court judges, also said he did not understand why the embargo had to be nearly so long. �I could see a rule that said �nothing that referred to a sitting judge.� But nothing like 50 years.� John English, a historian and author of a biography of P...

Would you vote for this guy? The Globe & Mail has been running a series on the suspected mass rigging of Ontario Conservative Party candidate nominations.  It makes you wonder how anyone could stomach being a political party member -- particularly in that party, but really in all of them. The previous leader of the Ontario conservatives, Patrick Brown, was a sort of Manchurian Candidate (without the foreign manipulation). Someone with an unimpressive track record turned into a party leader essentially by "organization": which seems to have meant mostly massive buying up of party memberships until the eventual leadership vote was a foregone conclusion. Brown and his party executive claimed to have built a membership base of 200,000 or more, and they spent more than a year creating an election platform through an extensive consultation he called the "People's Mandate Guarantee."  Except when he was forced out by a sex scandal, it turned out there were maybe ...

Visions of the North , the blog of Franklin scholar Russell Potter, recently noted its one-millionth visitor, and credited at least some of the uptick to interest generated by the AMC television drama "The Terror."  ("The Terror" doesn't appear to be on any channel we subscribe to). But Potter offers a list of the principal documentaries of the Franklin expedition, many of which are available in one format or another. Visions also notes with approval  the commitment "The Terror"' has made to actually having Inuit played by Inuit, and not just "generic" Inuit, but specific named actors. In other roles are an A list crowd of Brits: Jared Harris (Captain Crozier), Ciaran Hinds (Franklin), Tobias Menzies (James Fitzjames)

Canada's History has announced publication of  Treaties and the Treaty Relationship , a book length exploration of treaties, treaty issues, and the work of reconciliation, edited with Manitoba Treaties Commissioner Loretta Ross. The volume, which includes essays by, among others, Karine Duhamel, William Wicken, Wabi Benais Mistatim Equay (Cynthia Bird), Guuduniia LaBoucan, and Jaime Battiste, is a resource for educators, funded by a grant from the Government of Canada, and delivered to schools and universities across Canada.  It is also available online via the link above.

On his blog and at the remarkable online history review site The Ormsby Review , Daniel Francis considers the letters of Alan Collier, Ontario artist turned labourer in the relief camps established by British Columbia in the dirty thirties The camps were an attempt to deal with the challenge of unemployment and the social unrest the government feared would result. Tens of thousands of single men were travelling across the country looking for work and when work was not available, looking for relief. A large number congregated in Vancouver, which became known as �the Mecca of the Unemployed.� But the city was overburdened and could do very little for the men. Collier's letters from the camps are collected in Alan Caswell Collier, Relief Stiff: An Artist's Letters from Depression-Era British Columbia , edited by historian Peter Neary and newly published by UBC Press.

Advocates for the Comeau "free beer' case, recently thrown out unanimously by the Supreme Court of Canada, have complained that the judges "disparaged" history and offered a "bizarre" or "dumbfounding" take on Canadian history. At Borealia , historian and legal scholar Bradley Miller argues precisely the opposite : the courts took history and historical evidence and inquiry seriously in Comeau . In fact, historical analysis was central to the case against Comeau�s right to bring beer over the provincial boundary. We may not like the policy outcomes of the Supreme Court�s decision, but if unfettered free trade didn�t triumph, it�s not because the justices decided to ignore Canada�s past....  In fact, two very different versions of history emerged from two historians involved in the litigation. One of the two different versions Miller identifies is mine , as it happens, and that is the version of history Miller and the Supreme Court share. Andrew...

Through the invisible bloggers' underground, I've been recommended a new blog on the history (and philosophy and science!) of wine. A Most Particular Taste  by Toronto wine writer St�phane Beauroy takes its title from a 1663 comment by Samuel Pepys, blogger avant la lettre, about a bottle   of Chateau Haut-Brion. Which reminds me that Pepys's diary is itself a blog , where you can read the current day's entries, all exhaustively annotated and commented on by a loving crew of Pepysians. The online diary has not stopped, as I reported long ago , but appears to be permanently cycling back to the beginning when it reaches the end.

If it's May, it's the Giro d'Italia. Started in Jerusalem this year, but now back in Italy.  They are going up Etna tomorrow, which ought to be ... steep.  Three Canadians riding this year: Michael Woods, who stepped forward in the Vuelta last year, is among the contenders. Guillaume Boivin from Quebec and the iron man Svein Tuft, doing his last Grand Tour at age 41, are the others.  Follow via Steephill  if you are not up for the expensive cable package.

Joe Martin and Christopher Kobrak have recently published From Wall Street to Bay Street , a comparative history of banking systems in Canada and the United States.  Starting from the observation that Canadian banks suffered nothing like the damage that hit American banks in the 2008 financial crisis, they offer a general reader's history of the banks back to the 18th century.  They like what they see in Canada The authors trace the roots of each country�s financial systems back to Alexander Hamilton and insightfully argue that while Canada has preserved a Hamiltonian financial tradition, the United States has favoured the populist Jacksonian tradition since the 1830s. The sporadic and inconsistent fashion in which the American system have changed over time is at odds with the evolutionary path taken by the Canadian system. Think on that next time you consider the whopping fees and enormous profits of whichever megabank has you in his clutches. Public Affairs Publishing in the...

My friends at The Champlain Society run a website crammed with findings, sources, readings, and podcasts about Canadian history. They have just done me the honour of inviting me to cross-post now and then from here to there. So every ten days or so, a post from this blog will go up on the Champlain Society site at well. And the first one selected from here is now there .  Go take a look, and browse around.

One special narrow-cast posting today. This is directed particularly at those who have joined today's Jane's Walk exploration "Walking the Literary Annex."   What follows is a listing of some further readings about the literary history of Toronto's Annex neighbourhood  -- particularly those I relied on and borrowed from while planning this walk. Greg Gatenby, Toronto: A Literary Guide  (Toronto:McArthur & Co, 1999).  Gatenby hunted out practically every writer who ever lived and worked in Toronto, then pinned down where they had lived at various times, then devised dozens of walks to lead devotees to them.  Only after I failed to persuade Greg to lead this walk did I take it on myself, and his book was invaluable (not for the first time). It is a work of inspired and passionate research, not only about the Annex. Jack Batten,  The Annex: The Story of A Toronto Neighbourhood .  (Boston Mills Press, 2004).  Journalist, novelist, and film and mus...

                                         Drifting up Kendal to the Turrets and gables, the looney apertures, the squiggles and      Arches and baleful asymmetric frontal glare of the houses he loves Toronto gothic Walking north in the fine rain, going home through the late afternoon      He comes to Sibelius Park. -- Dennis Lee, "Sibelius Park," 1968 This is Jane's Walk weekend in Toronto and many other cities: a few days of urban discoveries through city walks, inspired by urban theorist Jane Jacobs.  It is also the weekend the Nonfiction Writing Collective meets in Toronto, and it likes to wrap up its conference with a literary walk. So Sunday, May 6, "Everyone Walks on Brunswick Avenue Sooner or Later: An Annex Literary Walk" goes at 12.45 p.m from the St George subway stop, Bloor and St. George.  Since I could ...