Glasstry news

Fred Thorpe, who had a long career with the historical services of Parks Canada and the National Museums of Canada, died recently in Ottawa .  I like how his published obituary gave, among the usual details, a nice precis of his historical research His doctoral thesis at the University of Ottawa , which in turn formed the basis of a monograph on French metropolitan fortification in Newfoundland and Cape Breton [...] argued that the great expense of these works was warranted because they defended the cod fisheries from interlopers (read British) and richly supplied the home market with a major source of protein, to say nothing of supporting the country's dependence on valuable international trades in codfish. This obituary information is considerably more accurate than what you would learn from the current text of the Canadian Encyclopedia 's entry on Louisbourg, which directly contradicts Thorpe's (and my) findings, though.it remains credited to me. I confess I also remembe...

I should work up one or two substantial pieces about George Brown before his 200th birthday November 29, but other things interfere.  More correspondence, instead, and another aspect of Victorian moral principles. Apparently this letter exists in George Brown's handwriting, but there is no confirmation it was actually sent,  The intended recipient is thought to have been Malcolm Cameron of Sarnia, lawyer, temperance advocate, Clear Grit radical turned political independent, and a frequent rival of Brown's.  It is published in Careless, Brown of the Globe Vol 1.  Thanks again to Russ Chamberlayne. 27th February, 1857 Globe Office Toronto My dear Sir: It is said here that your mercantile affairs are irretrievably embarrassed, and that you are quite disheartened about it. I yet trust the case may be exaggerated, but fear there is some truth in it. You may doubt it, but I assure you nothing that has happened in a very long time has grieved me more and I have been think...

Did you know this is Canada History Week?  Me either.  Now I do . Historica Canada has some new videos and other info  on the theme Science, Creativity, and Innovation.

A trend in historical writing?  Two of the nominees for the $78,000 Cundill Prize in History this year were cultural histories that combined a biography of a novelist with an exploration of the historical milieu in which they wrote. The winner, announced in Montreal the other night, was Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff for her book, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World . Neither Conrad nor anyone else was thinking about climate change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when he wrote his most acclaimed novels. But many of the issues he tackled have endured. Conrad, as Jasanoff tells it, was a witness and a participant in globalization. He was a migrant, during a time of mass migration, when a hundred million people were on the move, but before there were closed borders and even official passports. And he witnessed the pushback to globalization, with the emergence of border controls and rising xenophobia, terrorism and the fear of the other. This, just as East Euro...

Ryerson One of my favourite George Brown anecdotes is one I previously published on this blog more than a decade ago:  a revealing moment in the history of Victorian morality: On his sixty-fifth birthday, 8 March 1868, Egerton Ryerson, the founder of Ontario's education system and a man of deep Christian faith, contemplated his mortality. He decided that before his inevitable end he should settle his relationships with all the people he had been in dispute with. At the top of that list was editor and politician George Brown, who, he reflected, was the only person with whom he had had really personal disagreements So he wrote to Brown that day and said, "I wish to assure you of my hearty forgiveness of the personal wrongs I think you have done me in the past�."\ Brown replied the same day. "I am entirely unconscious of any �personal wrong� ever done you by me, and have no thought of receiving forgiveness at your hands." Brown lived another twelve years, Ryerson f...

I deny not that in this protracted contest words were spoken and lines were penned that had been better clothed in more courteous guise.  But when men go to war they are apt to take their gloves off, and assuredly if one side struck hard blows the other was not slow in returning them.... It is the incumbent duty of the reform party, dictated as well by their most cherished principles as by justice, and good policy, that a full share of parliamentary representation according to their numbers, and generous consideration in all public matters, should be awarded to the catholic minority [in Ontario]... This the reform party has done voluntarily, gladly, without condition, although a vast proponderance of the catholic electors will in all probability cast their votes in the coming contest against our candidates and for our opponents.   (George Brown, letter to the Roman Catholic Committee, March 1871, arguing why Catholics should support the Reformers rather than the Conservat...

...if their sensibilities are so nice that what does not suit them must be held as insulting -- they must just be insulted accordingly....   The Globe, Tuesday April 2, 1850 Not much into trigger warnings, the old Globe .

I'm glad the war is over.  Meaning no disrespect, but I found the Remembrance Day that marked the end of four years of the First World War centenary a bit of a relief. Canada's centenary observances since 2014 have been impressive and often moving, and they probably reached wider than I might have guessed four years ago. But I think we are getting ready to let the First World War pass into history, to become like the Napoleonic Wars or some other distant conflict: interesting, full of drama and event and historical significance, but capable of being considered a bit less personally now. The First World War did leave an enormous shadow over the 20th century. And new media and the digitalization of old sources have recently made it possible for almost anyone to immerse themselves in the specific details of the life and service of practically any soldier of the Great War, and even his or her family and community too. But it should be growing remote. The Civil War remains a live is...

George Brown's advice about what the United States needs from us: ...when you get hold of a Yankee, drive it home to him; tell him his country is disgraced; wound his pride; tell him his pure institutions are a grand sham; send him home thoroughly ashamed of the black blot on his country's escutcheon. In steamboat, or railroad, or wherever you are, hunt up a Yankee and speak to him faithfully; there is no other man so sensitive as to what others think of him. This is actually from an anti-slavery speech Brown gave in 1852.  The disgrace was slavery, which would endure another dozen years. But in these times,  it has a contemporary ring, except maybe for the sensitive part.. H/t Russ Chamberlayne

It was not all memoir in the noms for the Hilary Weston Nonfiction Prize awarded by the Writers' Trust last night, but indeed not much history again, and Elizabeth Gray's memoir was indeed the winner. (It's the Charles Taylor Nonfiction Prize , I think, that has rewarded  historians in recent years: Richard Gwyn, Tim Cook, Ross King....) But writing about the Canadian past came up in the Vicky Metcalf Award -- given for a body of work in literature for children.  The winner was Christopher Paul Curtis , honoured for his admired and popular novels about the black experience in Canada in the nineteenth century. Curtis, in his acceptance speech, described his thirteen years on an autobody assembly line in Flint, Michigan, writing on his break periods  -- not a common historical or writerly apprenticeship any more, I guess. (My fave among the literary bunfights of fall, the Writers's Trust Awards. Writers getting honours and casth in a room full of writers, what's not ...

I think we will make what remains of November into George Brown Days around here.  Not that other coverage will cease but we'll try to have a little something, praising or critical, pretty regularly in the run up to his 200th birthday November 29. Let's start with Andrew Coyne's tribute to Brown from the spring of 2017: It was Brown who first championed, in the pages of the Globe , the idea of a federation of the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, conjoined since 1841 as the single, though decidedly not united, province of Canada, as the solution to the impasse and instability that had enveloped its politics. He it was who committed the reborn Reform party, cobbled together out of various political factions � moderate Reformers, Clear Grit radicals and Lower Canadian Rouges � to the same proposal, and it was his motion, and the report of the all-party committee he chaired, that led to the idea being adopted by Parliament in 1864.

Be glad that the confederation makers wisely made the upper house appointive (hence weak) and not elective.  It was a crucial blow for representative democracy. Both the Canadian and American Senates are wildly unrepresentative, but the American one holds vast and illegitimate authority.  17% of the population: 50% of the Senate. Remember the Dominion Elections Act of 1920? It may have been Robert Borden's  mea culpa for the atrocious gerrymandering of the wartime election of 1917. But it means that for almost a century Canadian elections have been run by an independent commission. Compare the horror show across the border. If it is still this close after two years of Trump in office, Trump is not an aberration or a fluke.  He's the true voice of a vast proportion of the American people.  Stay home.

Birthday boy Don Smith of Calgary reminds me: George Brown, journalist, controversialist, statesman, confederation-maker, is approaching his two-hundredth birthday, November 29, 2018. Brown does not have the press-agent John A. had for his 200th in 2015 -- but then John A has his own troubles these days. How to mark Brown's bicentennial? If you have a George Brown achievement, anecdote, quotation or image to share, I'd be glad to receive your suggestions. I'll try to add a few of my own between now and then.

Down the other night to the Gladstone Hotel -- inspiration for my favourite Paul Quarrington barroom rockers -- for the launch of Finding Mr Wong by my friend Susan Crean.  Mr Wong (1895-1971), born in Taishen, China, came alone to Canada around 1911, paid head tax, and became, eventually, live-in cook and houseman to Crean's grandparents in Toronto's Forest Hill, and one of the pillars of Crean's childhood experience of the world. Crean, whose long career in writing and activism gives honour to that often derided phrase social justice warrior, tries in this book to do justice to Wong and through him, all the isolated bachelor immigrants who constituted the houseboy population of Canada.  She takes to her childhood, to his retirement rooms in Toronto's Chinatown, to her own later visits to his home village, weaving a history of Canadian class and race and policy-making throughout. Our host at the Gladstone, Marc Glassman, is impresario of the Pages Unbound nonreading s...

Reading about the worldwide protest by Google employees by the misbehaviour of their bosses, I couldn't help thinking:  It's dramatic and colourful to whip up some Twitter protest in which staffers make a well publicized event for an hour or so.  But to really produce change in their workplaces, surely the serious way to organize is to Organize.  Google with a union (or Tesla, or name your new behemoth) would be something new (and old) in the world.  And you know, might actually lead to actually changes in working conditions, as opposes to a Twitter protest with a lot of likes.  I know everything is ranged against that, but these are smart ambitious, conscious people, and they already have one style of organization down.

Went down last night to the launch of Fort York Stories,  an anthology of articles from Fife & Drum, the half-newsletter, half-history journal that has been coming from the Friends of Fort York for 25 years. It 's edited by Adrian Gamble, a history Ph.D candidates at York University, and includes articles by, among others, me. The event made me glad again for the local historical societies I have joined over the years, for while I have never really worked in local history, what I pick up from the people who do very powerfully grounds me in the communities in which I live. Ground me in politics too:  Friends of Fort York have had a vital part in the revitalization of the Fort York neighbourhood, once a bleak post-industrial mess, now a densely populated highrise community beside the lake, for whom the Fort's green spaces and public facilities are back yard and living room for all the 750 sq foot dwellers.

Particularly during the fall book prize season, I like to note history prize winners. Since there were none among the Governor General's Awards winners announced yesterday, I thought I'd just pass them over. But Daniel Francis has a thoughtful response to the awards at his blog, specifically about the Non-Fiction prize: I cannot help noting that each of the five finalists for this year's award is a memoir. I am not sure what that says about non-fiction writing in the country, if anything...  Where were the historians, the biographers, the science writers, I wondered?...   ...Naturally, as a writer of history, I'd prefer to see some history titles in the mix. But I accept that these things go in cycles. Maybe next year. Read the whole thing , particularly for the salute to the winner, Darrel McLeod for Mamaskatch . Meanwhile, another source for prizeworthy history, the Cundill Prize for History, announced its final shortlist of three for this year's prize, the winne...