Glasstry news

Blogging has been a little intermittent in January, for rather boring reasons.  It's about to get slower.  The blogger is going south for a couple of weeks and expects not to blog at all or very little. Back in mid-February.

Patrick Brown had an undistinguished tenure as federal MP, but his success in raising funds and selling memberships allowed him to become Ontario leader of the Conservative Party in one of those vote-buying orgies called leadership conventions. Now that he has been brought down by allegations of sexual harassment, the buzz seems to be that nobody actually liked him much anyway and the party might do better with someone else leading it in the June 2018 election. But the extra-parliamentary party executive has decided to go ahead with another leadership convention, against the will of the caucus of MPPs -- you know, the elected and accountable representatives of the people. Who will buy the most votes this time?  A rare glimmer of wisdom  has come from one backroom Conservative, Thom Bennett of Ottawa:   �I am at a total loss as to what the thinking could be that our executive would tell our elected MPPs � those soldiers who are putting their name in front of the elect...

Chris Raible recently shared a link to this Guardian story arguing that historians need to step up and explain things to the rest of the world: Social scientists find themselves publicly confronting the social dynamics and technological disruptions that have led to our changing politics and society. But historians are almost entirely absent from this conversation [...] This irrelevance is largely self-inflicted. Too many historians still think that engaging with the public means they�re compromising the integrity of the discipline. I guess, yeah, maybe. I was struck recently by the wide press coverage of Sharon Bala's first novel The Boat People , a drawn-from-the-headlines imagining of the experience of those who occasionally arrive off Canadian shores in some rusty ship crowded with escaped migrants of some disfavoured refugee community.  What really struck me was how much reviewers and interviewees wanted the novel to be reportage, to be history, want it to explain what was go...

David Johnson is a professor of political science at Cape Breton University and not the former governor general of Canada (who has a "t" in his surname).  So Johnson-no-t's book Battle Royal: Monarchists v Republicans and the Crown of Canada just out from Dundurn Press, is not quite as controversial at it might have been. According to the jacket blurbs , Canada has "a strong republican movement" and "an equally vibrant monarchist movement," and Johnson promises a dispassionate analysis that he intends to be helpful to all. Pub date is Feb 13, but ther's a launch in Sydney today that includes a monarchist vs republican debate and local CBC liver coverage.  Thought control centre of the universe, indeed!

Gettin' topical in the February-March  Canada's History . The possible death of NAFTA provoked my column "Passing the Bucks."  Based on a reading of Smart Globalization and a conversation with one of its editor-contributors, Dimitry Anastakis (Andrew Smith being the other), the column considers whether the era of "hyperglobalization" we have seen in recent decades may be collapsing under its own weight. A spectacular cover (I'd show it, but it ain't up at the website yet), "Vinland Vikings: the Mysterious Norse Settlement Found," leads to a sober and persuasive essay about Norse visits to the Gulf of St. Lawrence region, contributed by Birgitta Wallace, the fruit of a lifetime's scholarship on the subject. Plus Second World War letters, praise for Saskatoon, polio in the Arctic. And much more, including (why have a blog if you cannot plug your friends once in a while?) an enthusiastic review of Anne McDonald's Miss Confederation ,...

Went last week to hear City of Toronto Archivist Carol Radford-Grant give the Howland Lecture for the York Historical Society on the subject of archives and the digital realm. It seemed no big news that the city archives has 12,000 Twitter followers. Doesn't everybody have thousands of Twitter followers? But Radford-Grant pointed out that is more people than visit the archives -- a beautiful modern, accessible facility on Spadina Road below Casa Loma -- in a year. And keep that quill pen sharp, too. Even more striking was her evidence of how archives are responding to that kind of user data. The city's digitization efforts emphasize picture and map collections, because the online appetite for images is huge. Mere text documents, well, they don't have the same kind of takeup. Inevitably their place in the archival hierarchy at a public institution has to decline.  The handfuls of researchers who come in to spend long stretches of time working through collections of serial do...

If you are in Toronto and interested:  Peter Russell, the author of last year's constitutional history (and constitutional proposal)  Canada's Odyssey: A Country Built on Incomplete Conquests , is speaking on next Friday evening, January 12 , 19th at the Yorkminster Park Baptist Church community hall in North Toronto .Free admission, all welcome, it says here. Update, Jan 12 : Sorry, was in such a hurry to post this in time that I failed to notice it's next week.  Thanks to Allan Williams for the correction.