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Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada
Abstract
The writing of Canadian history during the past twenty-five years has been characterized by an intense degree of specialization which has replaced older Canadian historians’ concern for explaining the nature of the country. A declining sense of Canada as a national entity underlies much of our current political and constitutional malaise. The Liberal nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s was an inadequate replacement for the more deeply-rooted vision of the country that a well-developed sense of history might offer. Without becoming nationalist mythologizers, and remembering the need to understand the country in its pluralism and diversity, Canadian historians might usefully remind themselves that their subject, after all, is Canada.
... The debate between national and regional historians gained momentum in the 1990s as P.A. Buckner has shown in an article in Acadiensis in 2000. In the debate, the national historians accused the regional historians and social historians of contributing to the destruction of the Canadian state by enhancing provincial demands or by outrageously specializing the general field of Canadian historiography as women's history, labor history, urban history, and aboriginal history (Bliss, 1991;Granatstein, 1998). Some have called for the pendulum to swing back by arguing for the need to understand and interpret the whole, in other words "the national experience" rather than regional or sector-based fragments (Owran, 1997). ...
Geographical scales, Canadian studies, cultural regions, regional historiography,identity.
... 3. Granatstein (1998) and Bliss (1991-92), for example, have criticized recent developments in Canadian history and dismissed the history of sexuality as unimportant. ...
This article examines the ways that historians write about sexuality. It finds that Quebec historians, like their English-Canadian counterparts, have embraced attempts to integrate the history of sexuality and national history. Unlike those English-Canadian historians who write about sexuality to disrupt traditional national narratives, however, Quebec historians write about it in ways that tend to reinforce traditional assumptions about national history. Pointing to the risks that can arise when the history of sexuality is harnessed too closely to national history, the author argues that the history of sexuality in Quebec has come to reflect the priorities of national history in ways that have deprived it of the influence it has earned elsewhere, and stripped it of the ability to challenge the dominance of national history.
Cet article examine comment les historiens parlent de la sexualité. Il avance que les historiens québécois, tout comme leurs homologues canadiens-anglais, ont essayé d'intégrer l'histoire de la sexualité dans l'histoire nationale. Mais, à la différence des historiens canadiens-anglais qui discutent de la sexualité pour perturber le récit national traditionnel, les historiens québécois en discutent de manière à renforcer les hypothèses traditionnelles sur l'histoire nationale. En soulignant les risques que pose l'association étroite de l'histoire de la sexualité et de l'histoire nationale, l'auteur avance que l'histoire de la sexualité au Québec a fini par refléter les priorités de l'histoire nationale d'une manière qui l'a privée de l'influence qu'elle a obtenue ailleurs et lui a enlevé la capacité de questionner la dominance de l'histoire nationale.
... This is what alienated Canadian historians such as Bliss, McNaught, and Jack Granatstein, committed as they were to a national historiography that might highlight accomplishment and advance as expressed in a singular progressive state. 16 Metaphorically, 1968 did nothing if not interrogate/destabilize this national, collective, accomplishment. It pivoted against the flattening, homogenizing reduction of history to a study of power's achievements. ...
... According to Bliss, historians had dedicated themselves to exploring the "limited identities" of region, class, gender and ethnicity and were, therefore, party to the gradual fragmenting of any collective sense of national community. 39 Another outspoken member of the so-called Toronto school of historians, J.L. Granatstein, put it more bluntly. Historians of the 1970s and 1980s, he charged, had spent most of their time researching and teaching students about pork-packing, Marxist labour organizers, prisons and insane asylums, parish politics, and what he derisively described as "the history of housemaid's knee in Belleville in the 1890s." ...
Over the last two decades, traditionally minded historians have argued that the rise of social and cultural history has fragmented Canadian history and caused the decline of Canadian political history. Despite these claims, current Canadian political history is proving to be a dynamic field that embraces the methodological and theoretical innovations of social and cultural history by incorporating gender, class, race and ethnicity as categories of analysis to create a “new political history.” However, the “new political history” in Canada has neglected to integrate the history of ideas. Studying the history of ideas in Canadian political history could expand the discipline beyond the current trends that include highly individualised political biography and studies emphasising politics, the state and ideology within Ian McKay's potentially reductive liberal order framework. Supplementing the “new political history” with the history of ideas, influenced by the work of Michael Freeden, would allow innovative analyses of institutional and popular politics to accompany the voices of elite political figures.
The writing of Canadian social welfare history is examined in three stages. Until circa 1970, the literature tends to portray sympathetically social welfare's underlying motives. The next stage, or a "new social history" (ca. 1970-81), is more critical, with a particular frame of reference on socioeconomic class relations. A more diverse third stage (post-ca. 1980) expands the number and variety of topics beyond first- and second-stage writing and challenges many previous assumptions, especially regarding power and human agency. Future avenues of research also are considered, particularly the need to emphasize diversity, and a Canadian identity, more explicitly as historical phenomena
Carl Becker's classic 1931 address ``Everyman his own historian''holds lessons for historians of science today. Like the professional historians he spoke to, we are content to displaythe Ivory-Tower Syndrome, writing scholarly treatises only forone another, disdaining both the general reader and our naturalreadership, scientists. Following his rhetoric, I argue thatscientists are well aware of their own historicity, and wouldbe interested in lively and balanced histories of science. It isironic that the very professionalism that ought to equip us towrite such histories has imposed on us a powerful taboo that rendersus unable to do so.
We who count ourselves sophisticated in describing the effects ofsocial forces upon past scientists have been remarkably unconsciousof the ways our own practices are being shaped by our need (and perhapsmore importantly, the needs of our teachers' teachers) to distinguish ourselves from scientists who write history. Our fear of presentism ingeneral and Whig history in particular is really a taboo, that is, anexcessive avoidance enforced by social pressure. It succeeds at makingour work distinct from histories written by scientists, but at the awful cost of blotting out the great fact of scientific progress.Scientists may be misguided in expecting us to celebrate great men,but they are right to demand from historians an analysis of the processof testing and improvement that is central to science. If progress in general is a problematic term, we could label the process ``emendation.''
This paper examines the debate over the teaching of Canadian history that has been in progress in Canada since the early 1990s. It considers four criticisms: schools do not teach enough Canadian history and students, therefore, do not know it; the history that is taught is no longer sufficiently national; social history has destroyed the old nation-building narrative and dwells on the negative rather than the positive aspects of Canada's past; and child-centred teaching and other pedagogical fashions have led teachers to devalue factual knowledge. Finally, it examines the proposals that have been advanced for the reform of history teaching in Canada.
Feminist historians have increasingly stressed the importance of transnational examinations of women's history, particular the unequal colonial relations of power transversing nation states, though they are also wary of overarching ‘metanarratives’ which obscure the local and particular in women's lives. Does the concept of ‘nation’ still provide a useful lens through which we can view women's lives? Moreover, have we been able to escape the use of metanarratives in our attempts to place ‘gender’ at the center of history? This paper examines the concept of nation within Canadian feminist history, indicating how it has changed over time, and how contentious and complex the category has been. Not only have feminist protested the idea of a homogeneous (masculine) nation, but the concept of one nation has also been problematic for regional, minority, linguistic and colonized groups, some of whom embrace their own national(ist) histories. My aim is to contextualized our debates about archiving women's history by offering both critical and sympathetic views of our use of the category ‘nation’ as it intersects with women's history. Sorting through these complexities might help us rethink how we archive, write, and interpret the past and perhaps how our definitions of feminism should become as inclusive as possible.
The note describes the structure of the Canadian Families Project, its goals, the Canadian census sources the Project is incorporating into its data base, and the goals of the Project in light of previous work on the history of the family in Canada and internationally. The Project is collaborative, but it is also intended to be relational, in the sense that each subtheme researchers are exploring—space, class, gender, discourse, and others — feeds back into all others.
This paper examines how knowledge about racism has been represented in high school Canadian history textbooks authorized by the Province of Ontario during the 1960s and after the year 2000. I argue that even though historical racisms have increasingly made their way into Canadian history textbooks as valid and important topics of study, the idea of racism continues to be understood largely within a prejudice/discrimination framework that reduces racism to irrational and individualized problems of thought, behaviour, and assumption. Moreover, through multiple techniques of containment, racism is imagined to exist within temporal and spatial locations, events, or incidents that are represented as either foreign to Canada or aberrations within Canada. The combined effect is to depict the space of Canada as one largely antithetical to racism.
This article uses border crossings by the author's family to illustrate the problems of historical narratives that do not consider who and what exists beyond national borders,as well as across conceptual boundaries of race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender,and sexuality. The national U.S. narrative rarely crosses the borders of what became three North American nations, or those between a pre-colonial North American past and a post-colonial national history, or profound social divisions. Histories that cross national and social boundaries clarify what Sarah Carter terms their "categories and terrains of exclusion." Fears triggered by the attacks of September 11, 2001, revealed changing constructions of the U.S.-Canadian border. Without stories that cross national and social divides, it is hard to recognize humanity across those borders or to imagine a connected future. Such histories must recognize analytic categories and narratives divided and erased by social and national borders, and the unequal power inscribed in androcentric, ethnocentric, and nationalist narratives.
For many of us academics, doing community‐engaged research means coming to terms with the significant gaps in experience, privilege, and power, and overall access to knowledge. We are trained to learn through texts, not through direct experience. In some ways, we are even conditioned to tune out experience, or anecdote, to dilute personal subjectivities in favor of a critical analysis informed by a combination of methods and sources, and a reliance on text‐based forms of evidence. Whereas for most community members, evidence is experiential. This dynamic also underscores the tremendous power and responsibility we have as historians to shape identities and legacies through the stories we tell. In the end, I believe the risks are worth the rewards.
The central argument of this chapter is that facility with the past is critical to developing a full sense of who we are as human beings both individually and collectively, who the other people are who share the world with us, and how we might engage together in working toward the common good. Studying the past is both a humanizing and a civic mission and is critical to contemporary life. In the chapter we bring together examples from across the book to demonstrate how using the arts in history education furthers this mission and contributes to the five scholarly conversations that frame the book. We argue that engaging the arts in history class fosters: more complex understandings of history and the nature of truth; creative cross-disciplinary connections; understanding of the relationships between history and collective memory; the introduction of Indigenous perspectives; and the development of history education.
In 1929, the British Privy Council reversed an earlier ruling by Canada's Supreme Court that Canadian women did not, under the British North America Act, qualify as persons. Historians have long heralded this so-called ‘Persons Case’ as a turning point in the recognition of Canadian women's rights. However, little attention has been paid to the case's origins, which date back to the trial of an alleged prostitute in Calgary in 1917. That case successfully tested the right of women to hold high public office in Alberta – in this case, Calgary Police Magistrate Alice Jamieson – and began the subsequent twelve-year battle. However, this victory was achieved only at the expense of the rights of another woman: the alleged prostitute Lizzie Cyr. At best, then, the ‘Persons Case’ should be regarded as a tainted victory.
In 1997 the people of Newfoundland and Labrador officially commemorated the 500th anniversary of their discovery by European explorers. In 1999 the people of the tenth province will reflect upon their 50-year experience within the Canadian confederation. These two marker events provide a convenient paradigm in which to place the profound ironies that have characterized the Newfoundland and Labrador experience. Prominent home-grown scholars and writers such as David Pitt and Patrick O’Flaherty have commented upon this continuity in the Terra Nova record. This article contends that the counterpoint between the images of Jovial Outport and Gothic Tragedy may offer a clue to recapturing the narrative thread of the Newfoundland and Labrador story, an inportant theme as Canadian social and narrative history seeks new bearings in the aftermath of extreme deconstructionism and cultural relativism. As Canadians who still possess living memories of a pre-Confederation political existence the basic story-flow of the tenth province is significant for all who are interested in the larger story of Canada.
The lovely image at the beginning of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) introduces the narrative by evoking the classic image of the river of time. As the main character Morag’s search for personal independence moves forward by looking back in time, remembering and reconstructing her life, the story travels across the land and circles back from the Red River of her childhood to the narrative present’s “River of Now and Then” in Ontario. The cultural significance derived from the role of rivers in the colonization, settlement, and eventual creation of Canada, as depicted in Donald Creighton’s Seven Rivers that Made Canada, is captured in Morag’s analogy: “Land. A river. Log house nearly a century old, built by great pioneering couple, Simon and Sarah Cooper. History. Ancestors.”2
The authors argue that intellectual shifts and related ideological debates have set new pedagogical demands on history teachers and new programmatic demands on faculties of education. In an attempt to relate the relevance of generating historical thinking (motivating the students to think like historians) to transformative education, the authors outline an history inquiry model based on Dewey’s educational theory. In this model, content knowledge and mastery of the subject matter is as critical as an understanding of teaching and learning history. The paper addresses the challenges set by a dominant relativist self-referential slant, the teaching of history in a multicultural class, and the tendency, in particular in social studies classes, to fall into presentism.
Este artículo profundiza en los debates históricos y actuales en Canadá sobre la historia nacional y la enseñanza de la historia en el complicado escenario de trece jurisdicciones educativas de Canadá. En este trabajo se analizan los debates sobre los contenidos en la enseñanza de la historia y en los libros de texto, así como los enfoques en la escuela. Se analizan las formas en que un enfoque de pensamiento histórico está consolidándose en todo el país en el período actual, con una mayor atención a la investigación en la enseñanza de la historia y su difusión y su mayor presencia en los planes provinciales. Se considera el papel del gobierno federal en estos cambios, las organizaciones privadas sin fines de lucro, y los proyectos financiados por el gobierno nacional, tales como el Historical Thinking Project y The History Education Network.
This article examines the changes that have occurred in the structure of Canadian political history over the last century. With a focus on English-Canadian writers, and, in particular, those that have appeared in the pages of the Canadian Historical Review, the author contends that the shape, as much as the content, of political history has transformed over the last century. Recent political history is now more multi-dimensional in its structure than it was in the past when a more linear framework shaped most of the narratives.
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