Glasstry news

Asked about his membership in his high school "ralph club," this guy Brett Kavanaugh admitted it referred to vomiting , but said for him it was because he had a sensitive stomach easily upset by spicy foods. So every beer drinker in North America in the last fifty years knows he is a liar. Perjurer too, I guess.  (If you didn't already.)

War is over at Canada's History  The October-November issue weighs the context and consequences of the First World War 1914-18 to mark the centenary of its ending on 11 November 1918. Tim Cook considers the war's legacies.  Ian Coutts looks at the life and death of the ill-fated George Price, the last Canadian soldier killed. Marianne Helm reports on a project that takes all those black-and-white images of the war and colourizes them  ( see separate post ). Kristine Alexander and Ashley Henrickson consider the children of that war. And John Lorinc reintroduces us to war's deadly aftermath, the great flu epidemic of 1918-19.  Plus an array of sidebars by magazine staff:  tactics, shell-shock, propaganda, heroism, entertainment. Genealogist Paul Jones suggests accessible sources for personal histories of the war.  My own column reflects on the commemoration of the war in Canada the last four years and wonders if we are now beginning to let that war slide into...

To mark the end of the First World War, Dundurn Press is bringing out They Fought in Colour , produced by the Vimy Foundation with image colourizing specialist Mark Truelove.  It's a book of 150 colourized images of First World War scenes in Canada and on the Western Front, along with interpretive essays by Margaret Atwood, Tim Cook, Serge Joyal, R.H. Thomson and others. Back to life? A colourized image of the First World War The colourizing of classic movies did not go over well a decade or two ago. Directors and film critics mostly hated to see Casablanca or Citizen Kane turned into Technicolour. For movies, the trend seems to have faded away.  But in this month's Canada's History , which reproduces a selection of images, Truelove and Vimy Foundation executive director Jeremy Diamond (a friend of mine for years, I should say, and I write for Canada's History too, full disclosure) argue for the relevance and utility of colorizing historical images for new audiences. C...

I'm not an aficionado of the Toronto International Film Festival much, but the other day we did get to a showing of Edge of the Knife , or Sgaaway K'uuna , the first feature film made entirely in the Haida language. It is co-directed by Gwaii Edenshaw, who is Haida, and Helen Haig-Brown, who is Tsilhquo'tin, and they had the assistance of the film team that made the terrific Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.  There must be a good chance it will be seen this winter in major cities and specialty cinema venues. Edge of the Knife and Atanarjuat are powerful demonstrations why cultural appropriation is a problem.  Oh, says defenders of the practice, a good novelist (or film-maker) will grasp the truth of the culture, because that is what artists do, that is how an artist works. Watch  Edge of the Knife or (even more so) Atanarjuat and you quickly become sure no Euro-Canadian would have made it.  Worth the price for that alone. Edge of the Knife  presents a traditio...

The Champlain Society has announced the 2018 winner of the Chalmers Award -- for the best book in Ontario history of 2017 -- has been awarded to Georgian Bay: Discovering A Unique North American Ecosystem , edited by Nick Eyles and published for the Georgian Bay Land Trust by Fitzhenry and Whiteside. Eyles is a professor of geology at the University of Toronto and an experienced writer on geological topics. Contributors to the book include ecologists, earth scientists, archaeologists, ornithologists, local community leaders, and others.

Woods emerging from the fog The still emerging new star of Canadian grand tour cycling, Michael Woods, won the 17th (of 21) stages at the Veulta a Espana, powering up a monstrous hill in the Basque Country with three other climbers and pulling ahead of them at the finish. His win came on a bleak fog-shrouded peak, looking like Ryder Hesjedal's memorable day at the Tormalet in the Pyrenees many years ago. Vuelta coverage is subscription-only, and I've been following it only remotely , but it seems to have been a pretty satisfying race. Simon Yates who collapsed spectacularly in the last stages of the Giro d'Italia and let Chris Froome seize another win, is leading the Vuelta now, with two big climbs remaining ahead of him. Update, September 19 :  Yates endured to victory -- another British champion but a break in the grand-tour domination by the British Sky team. Image: Cycling News

Historiann does not post much anymore at her blog, more's the pity, but Professor Ann M. Little, her alter ego, is interviewed in a recent Borealia post, talking about her recent book The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright and, among other things, the challenges of writing book length biographies about people who never left any first person testimonies. Interviewer Keith Grant asks her about the title.  She says: I think it�s a useful way of thinking about people in the eighteenth century in general, because most people were born into a situation and station in life and they didn�t have all that many choices to make about how they made a living or how they prayed. But I also think it�s an especially useful metaphor for understanding girls� and women�s lives in all of these cultures�among Protestant British subjects, among the Wabanaki people, and among Catholic French Canadians, women at every level of these communities had fewer choices and options than their male peers. E...

Alan B. McCullough wrote to me in response to my posting here of Thursday, September 6, " History of Treaties and Pipelines ."  It's an important matter he raises, so let me quote him in full and then respond (at some length, I warn you): I don�t want to let your statement that ��the treaties that were negotiated face-to-face with Indigenous leaders were always framed as sharing agreements not surrenders (no matter what the written text filed in Ottawa says)� pass without comment. You obviously know what the written text of the treaties say but let me quote an example. Treaty Six, signed at Forts Pitt and Carlton reads   �The Plain and Wood Cree Tribes of Indians, and all other the Indians inhabiting the district hereinafter described and defined, do hereby cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada, for Her Majesty the Queen and Her successors forever, all their rights, titles and privileges, whatsoever, to the lands included withi...

UBC Press has a slew of studies on indigenous matters, not only on West Coast topics. Many of them look like law, politics, or cultural anthropology more than history, so while there are things I would read there, I'm not listing them all. In (what looks to me like) Canadian history for Fall 2018, there is a good range of noteworthy titles on indigenous as well as non-indigenous matters. The woman's suffage project led by Veronica Strong-Boag has produced a couple of books for this catalogue. Strong-Boag herself has written  The Last Suffragist Standing: The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson , a suffrage pioneer who was later a B.C MLA and Vancouver city councillor.  And in the Women�s Suffrage and the Struggle for Democracy series, Tarah Brookfield is bringing out  Our Voices Must Be Heard: Women and the Vote in Ontario . On a different rights issues, Jennifer Tunnicliffe's  Resisting Rights Canada and the International Bill of Rights, 1947�76 , looks a...

After the Federal Court's decision to stop construction of the TransMountain pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Coast, there is one lesson that ought to be seized upon.  Settling indigenous land and self-government issues is simply the best way to pursue economic growth, infrastructure development, and industrial megaprojects in Canada. Premier Ra chel Notle y expresses a view that seems to be a consensus from the Fraser Institute to 24 Sussex: consultation with First Nations about land and self-government is something to be endured when Canada has a pipeline or other project it wants to build on contested territory, not something to be undertaken in good faith as a moral or legal or historical obligation. Meaningful consultation with parties affected by the pipeline should accommodate their concerns, not give them veto power over the project, she said. �I reject a scenario that has us talking until everybody says �yes.� That�s not how it can work.� Sorry, it's true that the...