{"id":6365,"date":"2016-11-02T15:02:45","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:02:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=6365"},"modified":"2019-06-04T22:23:42","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T22:23:42","slug":"1-4-the-current-state-of-historical-writing-in-canada","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/chapter\/1-4-the-current-state-of-historical-writing-in-canada\/","title":{"raw":"1.4 The Current State of Historical Writing in Canada","rendered":"1.4 The Current State of Historical Writing in Canada"},"content":{"raw":"It's one thing to know about some of the key events in Canada's history;\u00a0it's another to know a thing or two about how our history\u00a0came to be written.\r\n\r\nPart of the challenge is\u00a0defining what constitutes history. For example, it is often said\u00a0that Canada is a young country without much history. A response to that claim is that Canada is actually a few years older than the modern states of Italy and Germany. Doing so, however,\u00a0is to fall into the trap of thinking that a constitution defines a country and its history. Others point out that the existence of\u00a0New France stretches back to the early 1600s (which makes Canada quite a bit older still) and before that there was not much going on in the way of settlement. But that perspective writes off entirely the Aboriginal, pre-contact experience. In response, some people argue that the history of Canada is\u00a0limited to the\u00a0literate societies in Canada, and before\u00a0the arrival of Europeans there existed\u00a0only\u00a0illiterate societies. In other words, they argue that\u00a0no written record = no history.\r\n\r\nThis viewpoint is not defensible.\u00a0In Britain, historians of ancient times don\u2019t fold up their tents when they get into the pre-Roman past. If they did, nothing would have been studied about Stonehenge, for example.\u00a0The lands that have become Canada are littered with burial mounds, old fortifications, petroglyphs and pictographs, ancient foot trails, bison pounds, and fishing weirs. Intertidal fishtraps in Comox Bay on Vancouver Island have been carbon-dated to at least 800 years before the present; their scale and design are both staggering and beautiful. Oral traditions, moreover, punch a hole through that artificial barrier erected between the colonialist past and that of pre-contact times. This territory that we call Canada has so much history that the greatest challenge is how to organize it and understand it.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1309\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"An<\/a> Figure 1.13 Fishing weirs like this one from the Cowichan River (ca. 1866) were built by Aboriginal peoples across Canada long before contact. Wood, a readily available building material in northern North America, was used far more widely than stone, but it leaves less evidence behind. [Long Description]<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n

Careless and Wrong: Nationalist Histories<\/h2>\r\nWhat most people think of as the \"proper subject of history\" is the story of regimes. And certainly it is easy -- and meaningful -- to think of historical periods associated with different political organisms. Whether it is New France, Nova Scotia, or Wendake (the Huron\u00a0Confederacy), each administrative era imposes certain structures on its people and their lives. Harbours get built, systems of land ownership (individual, family, collective) are recognized and sometimes imposed, alliances with neighbours are forged and broken. The little things -- the things that mark the course of a lifetime -- are also associated with regimes. Think of practices associated with reaching adulthood, marriage, burial, and mourning. Spiritual and religious authority has to reside somewhere, even if it is in a common set of non-institutionalized beliefs. And when regimes change, all those practices can be lost.\u00a0Or, conversely, their preservation becomes a fundamental creed of the survivor population. In any event, history's focus on governments, empires, and nation states has a long pedigree.\r\n\r\nIn Canada the business of establishing a legitimate country with something like a national identity depended on the writing of national histories. The 20th century witnessed a parade of classically trained historians based in the oldest anglophone universities (University of Toronto, McGill, Queen's), developing powerful narratives of the epic\u00a0of New France, the Conquest, the Loyalists, the rise\u00a0of liberal-democratic processes, and the achievement\u00a0of Confederation. George M. Wrong (1860-1948), Donald Creighton (1902-1979), and J.M.S. Careless (1919-2009) were key figures in this phase of Canadian historiography, and all were based in the Department of History at the University of Toronto.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1266\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"225\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 1.14 George MacKinnon Wrong.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThis National\u00a0School<\/strong>\u00a0approach\u00a0was essentially small-c conservative in its ideology, Anglican in its creed, and mostly capital-C Conservative in its politics. \u00a0There were regular challenges from the Left, particularly in the 1930s, but few other historians enjoyed as much influence.\u00a0Certainly feminist challenges were almost impossible with\u00a0the absence of women in any university history departments. The situation was even more parlous for non-Whites, non-Christians, and non-nationalists. The National School only began to face serious challenges in the 1960s, by which time\u00a0there was growing dissatisfaction with it in academic circles.\r\n

Generation Gap: The New Social History<\/h2>\r\nThe rise of the baby boom<\/strong> generation<\/strong> brought to universities huge numbers of young Canadians who were concerned with the histories of working people, non-Whites, and women. The topics\u00a0of race, class, and gender -- formerly untended -- scrambled to the top of the historian's agenda. The rise of multiculturalism<\/strong> -- as a fact and as an official policy -- facilitated further the growth of layered histories of ethnicities, each of which had a thing or two to say about gender and social class. As well, the Canadian regions and provinces found they had tales to tell that\u00a0were either subsumed within the larger national narrative or ran in very different, sometimes contrary, directions. National History School, by contrast, gave centre stage to the accomplishments of elite groups, political leaders, industrialists, and big media. Their representatives in the pages of history books were, of course, all but 100% males and equally white. Their representatives in the history departments of Canadian universities\u00a0tended to be drawn from the same demographic. Then the ground rather suddenly shifted.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2890\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 1.15 Simon Fraser University (top left), the University of Victoria (top right), the U.S. Civil Rights Movement (bottom left), and Florence Bird, Chair of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 1967-70 (bottom right).[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe baby boom generation witnessed the\u00a0creation of a new cadre of universities. In the western half of the country alone a half dozen appeared:\u00a0Simon Fraser University and the Universities of Victoria, Calgary, Lethbridge, Regina, and Winnipeg. Each of these became crucibles for new approaches to the field. The civil rights movement<\/strong> in the United States, protests against the war in Southeast Asia, the rise of second wave feminism<\/strong>, and the appearance of what became known as the New Left<\/strong> influenced campuses across North America and beyond. While the Quiet Revolution<\/strong> was underway in Quebec, English Canada was undergoing significant intellectual and cultural challenges as well.[footnote]On intellectual and cultural changes in English Canada in these years, see Jos\u00e9 Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English-Canada, 1945-71<\/em> (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006).[\/footnote] In the field of history all this played out in challenges to the National History School and took the form of the new social history<\/strong>. A rising generation of historians turned their back on themes like nation building, railways, and political biography, and produced scores of books on the history of labour, women, immigrant experiences, and Aboriginal peoples. New thematically oriented scholarly journals appeared, such as Labour\/Le Travail, Urban History Review, <\/em>and Histoire Sociale\/<\/em>Social History<\/em>, and these were joined by regional historical journals like Acadiensis <\/em>and BC Studies.<\/em>\r\n

History Wars<\/h2>\r\nThe old order of historians didn't stay quiet about these changes.\u00a0As the politics of identity gained ground, some scholars began to systematically criticize the fracturing of the historical vision of the country\u2019s past. Fragmentation of the story into smaller identities, they argued, didn\u2019t enhance opportunities to learn a broader range of histories, it undermined the ability of Canadians to learn a common, core story about themselves. By the 1990s the so-called history wars were fully underway. A leading figure in that conflict was Jack Granatstein<\/a>, a graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada\u00a0and a distinguished historian based at Toronto's York University. Foreign affairs historians like Granatstein were particularly disturbed by the rise of histories of sexualities, women's experiences, counter-nationalisms, First Nations, and many others -- all of which appeared to undermine the possibility of a shared national past. Granatstein sniffed at\u00a0social history as so much \"housemaid's knee in Belleville\"; \u00a0needless to say, social historians and feminists were outraged.\u00a0The CBC television series The Valour and the Horror<\/em><\/a> (1992), about three significant battles in World War II,\u00a0became a lightening rod for this debate, one that even found its way onto the floor of the Senate. Six years later Granatstein would publish Who Killed Canadian History?<\/em>, a polemical attack on the \"fragmenters\" within the academy. The provocative title of his book tells you a lot about how desperate the defenders of conventional approaches had become. What that cohort longed for was a singular story of \"our great nation,\" one that everyone -- more or less -- could agree to, one that new immigrants to Canada could learn as part of the fitting-in process.\r\n\r\nIndeed, the multitude of voices that were being heard and broadcast in the 1990s on the subject of Canadians\u2019 past was cacophonous. Early in this century, however, a growing trend toward interdisciplinary studies<\/strong> marked the\u00a0beginning of the process of synthesis. Ruth Sandwell<\/a>, a historian of education at the University of Toronto, has addressed the tensions between fragmentation and synthesis in the classroom. She has observed<\/a> that \u201chistory education in the schools has moved away from a much narrower vision of citizenship education as explicitly patriotic narrative.\u201d This opens up opportunities for historians to use their specialized knowledge -- even in the narrowest of subfields -- to contribute to undergraduate knowledge and social good by focusing on \u201ca disciplinary understanding of what history is<\/em> and what it does<\/em>.\u201d[footnote]R.W. Sandwell, \"Synthesis and Fragmentation: the Case of Historians as Undergraduate Teachers,\" Active History. <\/em>Accessed January 4, 2015, \u00a0http:\/\/activehistory.ca\/papers\/rsandwell\/.[\/footnote] Rather than build \"citizenship\" around a history of prime ministers and wars, the key is to \u201cconvey the kinds of historical understanding that scholars are suggesting 'the people' need in a pluralist democracy.\u201d University of Western Ontario history professor Alan MacEachern<\/a> takes this a step further, In his article, \"A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada\"<\/a>, he challenges historians to attempt synthesis\u00a0to develop a national history -- even if it comes from a fairly small fragment of the larger field. One of the most difficult\u00a0specialties\u00a0that nevertheless holds out much promise for a new perspective on the story of Canada would be a very broad history of childhood.[footnote]The work of Neil Sutherland on English-Canadian childhood is outstanding as is Robert McIntosh's, but a national synthesis is still needed.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nNothing, of course, stands still for long. The innovators of the 1960s and 1970s have themselves been eclipsed by new approaches. The most advanced and promising of these deal with environmental history<\/strong>. There is possibly\u00a0no avenue of historical enquiry that is quite so interdisciplinary. Environmental history was once mainly about animals and nature; now it is more concerned with what we think of<\/em> as nature and how that notion has changed historically. Where it was once informed heavily by geography, lately it has become more influenced by philosophy. One understanding of environmental history is provided by Jan Oosthoek, formerly a professor at Scotland's University of Stirling in What is Environmental History? [YouTube]<\/a>.\r\n\r\n\"bar<\/a>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KkFdDPBbn20#t=86\r\n
\r\n

Key Points<\/h2>\r\nEvery generation writes its own history, in part, because:\r\n