Glasstry news

The Globe and Mail today has the death notice for McGill law professor and legal historian Blaine Baker, who died last month. I first encountered Blaine Baker's work through a lively "exchange" he and Paul Romney had in the 1980s, in Ontario History and other journals, The subject was the Upper Canadian "types riot" of 1836, and broadly the whole subject of legal and constitutional ideologies in Upper Canada during the early 19th century.  I was working on early 19th century lawyers at the time, a new field for me then, and found the whole debate pretty impressive about a whole field I'd never before contemplated. I got the impression from the articles that Blaine Baker (well, Romney too) was a fierce combattant in historical debates; it read like a rather personal exchange. Then I met him, indeed met him many times, mostly under the auspices of the Osgoode Society for Legal History, and was struck mostly by his courtesy, his supportive mentoring personali...

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography has recently released online its biography of Sir Henry Mill Pellatt , the Toronto businessman and society figure of the early 20th century, most famous for having built the folly-castle Casa Loma shortly before losing all his money and having to move to an apartment. Pellatt is a figure familiar in Toronto history and heritage, but I don't think there has been an authoritative biography of him before this. It is a long biography, with rich detail on the development of the Toronto business class in the late 19th century, as well as on Pellatt's extensive militia career and his relentless search for honours, titles, and prestige.  The biography is by David Roberts, longtime staff member of the DCB in Toronto, and it's a credit to him and to the DCB . The DCB also has published a nice tribute to the recently deceased Huguette Filteau , stalwart of the DCB 's Quebec City office for many years -- and widow (who knew?) of the late histo...

Fort York has guarded the Toronto shoreline since 1793, but landfill and development have steadily moved the shoreline away from it. In the twentieth century it stood surrounded by light industry and transit corridors that include an elevated freeway. All through the 20th century, groups of historically-minded Torontonians protected it from development threats. It has been a national historic site since 1923. By the end of the century, with rising property values and more intense planning projects throughout central Toronto, a strictly negative idea of merely holding back development to "save the fort" seemed mostly to emphasize the potential risk to it. Around that time, heritage activists and planners began a different initiative:  not so much resisting development as demonstrating how Fort York could be an asset to a reshaped waterfront and a re-imagined Toronto. They pitched the idea that Fort York and Garrison Common around it were a key cultural landmark in the city, as...

Archivist, Carleton University professor, and busy historian of Upper Canada/Canada West/Ontario, Keith Johnson died recently.  Full obituary here . His contributions to Canadian history include editing the Canadian Directory of Parliament and Affectionately Yours: The Letters of Sir John A. Macdonald and his Family and his books Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada and In Duty Bound: Men, Women and the State in Upper Canada . I remember Keith as an editor of Histoire sociale/Social History who used to invite me to write reviews on a nice range of scholarly books.  His survivors include Jill Vickers, a founder of feminist political science and former Carleton prof.

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...

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.

Francess Halpenny, surely the greatest Canadian scholarly editor of the second half of the twentieth century -- should we just say ever? -- died on Christmas Day 2017.  She was, among other things, general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography from 1969 to 1988, surely an unmatched tenure, so her contributions to Canadian history were very substantial in their own right. There was a death notice  in the Globe and Mail that gives a good sense of her as one of those who overcame the obstacles women faced in mid-twentieth century academia and went on to do many remarkable things. There's also a nice appreciation  in a piece about elder care by Sandra Martin, published just three days before Halpenny's death, though she was "sharp as ever" when it was drafted. I had the identical experience to Martin: met Halpenny briefly at a conference and never forgot it somehow. Martin: I met her in the mid-1970s at a conference I was covering as a callow editor for Quill ...