The Books of My Life: The Vimy Trap

 

Humans, as all social scientists should know by now, need myths and fairy tales to live by. Myths and fairy tales, particularly in their disneyfornicated form, help weak humans, both individually and socially, survive the struggle that is life just as religion has done for centuries. If history is a guide it is clear that most humans need myths and fairy tales, for example, that explain why, or so it is perceived, good things happen to bad people and bad collectivities in real life and vice versa, myths and fairy tales that generally deflect attention from the real factors that cause suffering in life such as class, status, gender, ethnicity, and unequal cultural capital, to note a few examples. They give humans a sense of purpose. They provide humans with meaning for their lives, and meanings to their lives within the collectivities they are part of. They provide the happy or stoic faces humans need to live by in order to survive in a world of chance, pain, tragedy, drama, and comedy.

Collective human myths and fairy tales, of course, are, generally speaking, deeply embedded within and deeply imbibed and imbibe from the universal waters of ethnocentrism. Australians, for example, think they are the bee's knees. Americans think they are the best thing since sliced bread. South Koreans think they are the real middle kingdom. One central form that ethnocentrism takes in modern and postmodern life is nationalist or civil or civic religion. Like myths and fairy tales in general, national myths and fairy tales socialise most humans in modern and postmodern societies and cultures into comic book like emotional and sentimental laden tall tales in which we are superior to them, in which we are innocent and good while they are devious and bad Boris's and Natasha's.They create civic rituals associated with these ethnocentric nationalist faiths, rituals that take place, for example, at monuments to those killed during one of humanity's many and seemingly never ending biggest cock on the block wars. Finally, these nationalist myths and fairy tales have symbolic and iconic hero figures that are akin to those in earlier stone age tales and in contemporary superhero comic books who have been transformed into the saints they never were and never could be in real life because they are human,

In their follow up to their excellent Warrior Nation Ian McKay and Jamie Swift explore, in their The Vimy Trap or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2016), one of these nationalist myths and fairy tales of late twentieth century and twenty-first century Anglo-Canadian life, the Vimy myth and fairy tale. McKay and Swift do an excellent job exploring the Vimy myth and fairy tale. They note that the myths and fairy tales associated with Vimy, namely that it created or helped create a Canadian identity (if one erases Quebec entirely, of course) which today dominates much of Anglo-Canadian civil religion has actually been contested in hot and cold culture wars between dominant, counter, and sub cultures since the Great War even beyond French Canadian culture. They show that the Vimy myth and fairy tale is the product of what is essentially a power grabbing advertising campaign by late 20th century Canadian elites with their Canada is a city on a hill public rhetoric in order to promote a variety of things including a common Canadian (translation Anglo-Canadian) identity and the need for Canadian militarism in alliance with that other city on a hill, imperial America. They note the similarities between the publicity and advertising campaigns that turned the limitedly effective Canadian Vimy battle and its close Australian cousin, the dismal failure at Gallipoli, into stirring mythic and fairy tale tales in which Canadians were made Canadian and Australians Australian. Even tragedy and meaningless wars, you see, can be turned into comic book superhuman triumphs in nationalist fairy tale myths. They explore the humans who the national faith turned into inhuman saintly hero icons and symbols such as Currie, the romanticised and sanitised Canadian grunt and villainous others, to wit those dreadful British officers who thought father knew best and the Hun, of nationalist manichean myths and fairy tales. And they explore the attempt of official and semi-official court polemicists--some of them academics--to demonise those on the "wrong side" of manichean myth and fairy tale "history" such as critics of these fairy tales and myths and pacifists, who pointed out again and again the surrealist absurdities and human rights violations association with almost all wars.

I highly recommend The Vimy Trap to anyone interested in cultural history, cultural anthropology, cultural sociology, ethnocentrism, and the human ability, or at least the ability of some powerful humans, to create hybrid fictional and factual discourses to live by. I particularly liked how McKay and Swift drew on Martin's Caedels's ideal types--militarists, crusaders, defencists, pacificists, and pacifists-- to explore the contradictions and complexities of this Canadian (and Western) culture war over war and its associated myths and legends. My only qualm about the book is that I wish McKay and Swift had explored in greater detail the role power and the media--mainstream media, after all, has been and is generally controlled by those embedded in the nationalist passion play--played and play in the construction of the mythic and fairy tale worlds most Anglo-Canadians live by today.

The Books of My Life: Our Lives

 

Canada, as Alvin Finkel shows in his superb political, economic, demographic, and cultural history of Canada since 1945 entitled Our Lives: Canada after 1945 (Toronto: Lorimer, 1997), changed dramatically after World War II, a war Canada entered eight days after the British declaration of war against Germany in 1939, flexing, if somewhat weakly, its political independence from the "mother" country. 

Between 1945 and 1997 (a second edition of Our Lives takes the story of post-war Canada up to 2012 and the prime ministership of Tory Stephen Harper) Canada, as Finkel nicely shows, briefly emerged from behind England's colonial shadow only to become an American economic, political, and cultural colony. He examines how Canada moved from a modified Keynesian economy to a neoliberal bah humbug one, though never one as bah humbugee as that of the United States. He explores the important role the New Democratic Party played in making Canada more of a welfare state and less bah humbugee than the US particularly during years of Liberal minority governments on the federal level. He investigates how English Canada developed a national literature that was read by many, at least in English Canada. There had been, of course, given the close relationship between Quebec nationalism and Quebec culture, a distinct culture in that province for some time.

He delves into how Canada cultivated an image as a kindler and gentler, compared to Imperial America, nation, an image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, a nation that was perceived, at least by some polemicists, as a golden mean between the US and Europe. He explores increasing tensions between Ottawa, the various provincial premiers, and the provinces. He examines the silent revolution in Quebec and its impacts on Quebec nationalism. He investigates the increasing power of economic elites after the oil crisis of the early 1970s, though the power of economic elites was never absent even during the Keynesian years when Keynesianism dominated mainstream economic thinking among American, Canadian, and European economic "managers" before the oil crisis. He focuses on the demographics of post-World War II Canada. Perhaps more than anything else, however, Finkel does a superb job of showing the realities of poverty and inequality--class based, gender based, ethnic based--lurking beneath Canada's carefully curated and ultimately gilded public relations image the nation presented to the world, something that makes Canada very much like other core nations around the globe unexceptional. Canadian deceptionalism in the end is no more nor less deceptional and delusional than that of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark...

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a readable, reliable, and wide ranging if selective history of post-World War II Canada. 

The Books of My Life: Warrior Nation

I came of intellectual age during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. I came of age, in other words, in an era in which reasonable and rational skepticism about what "authorities" said became more common and prominent than it had been in the 1950s, an era, at least on the surface, of enforced conformity. It was my friend John Cirillo (sic) who taught me of the need to be skeptical of what politicians said about things such as civil rights, about the war in Vietnam, and about the Watergate burglary. It was thanks to John that I came to realise that a lot of what demagogues, be they politicians or capitalist flim flam men, said, at least in public, was, empirically speaking, little more than--pardon my English--mythhistorical bullshite. 

I wasn't until I went to university that I learned that any analysis worth its salt had to be both critical and skeptical and grounded in the empirical record. At university I was treated to a more empirically and fact based history of the United States, Canada, Australia, and the world than I got in junior and senior high school. It was also at university I realised that much of what I was taught about American history and geography in junior and senior high, such, as, for instance, that it was evil Spain that forced America to go to war in the late nineteenth century to protect American honour and Cuban womanhood, was in large measure myth and, in large measure, bullshite propagated and perpetrated by demagogues allied with imperialist politicians and associated with the yellow journalism of the Hearst newspaper conglomerate. 

As a consequence of my university education it became apparent to me that while many believed that it was, for example, the economy or money that made the world go around, it was really ideology, ways of seeing or perceiving, ways of seeing, that underlay and undergirded notions that it was money made the world go around that really made the world go around. I learned, in other words, that it was socially and and culturally constructed ideologies that mediated "realities" for most humans and which created "reality" for most humans. 

At first, as I recall, I thought higher education might be the much needed cure for mythhistorical bulllshite. It soon became clear to me, however, that the bullshite people are socialised into and enculturated into and indoctrinated with makes the human world go around and that it was difficult if not impossible to counter what humans take on faith because they generally don't recognise that what they have faith in is created through a process of fetishisation, a process in which the parochial and particular are transformed into the universal. 

It is, of course, through socialisation and enculturation that common identities, including a common national identity, and a common culture, including a common national culture, are manufactured and continually remanufactured. As Emile Durkheim noted in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), culture creates and recreates, with the help of notions of fictive kinship and a common set of myths, symbol, icons, rituals, a common identity and a common sense of community whether on the tribal, clan, or national level. 

It is collective national identity that is the focus of Ian McKay's and Jamie Swift's superb Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), McKay and Swift take an ideal type approach to the history of Canadian identity and the culture wars over Canadian identity ever since Canada achieved "independence" from Great Britain in 1867. Despite dominion status and Canadian confederation in 1867, English Canadian culture, English Canadian identity, and English Canadian nationhood, McKay and Swift argue, remained closely tied to imperial British identity and culture. Nicely utilising an approach that melds biography with broader historical and cultural contexts McKay and Swift note that the British imperialist, writer, politician, and Governor-General of Canada John Buchan and the Canadian born adventurer William Stairs, who thought of himself as British and Canadian even when in the employ of the genocidal Leopold II of Belgium, were, embedded in an ethnocentric Victorian and Edwardian British imperial culture that celebrated adventure, exploration, British imperialism and the British White man's burden. This Victorian and Edwardian British culture socialised youth into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of imperialism, adventure, and exploration through material culture like the The Boy's Own Annual. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian White or Northern European sense of racial superiority. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of Christian superiority. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture that preached the superiority of British civilisation. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of manhood tied to gentlemanly sports and gentlemanly explorations of the world's various dark continents. Sports, adventuring, colonisation, and war, many were taught and came to believe, made the man, made the real man. 

This British imperial Canadian culture, as McKay and Swift point out, continues to be significant in English Canada, particularly among Canada's Anglo-Saxons. It was not the only Canadian identity culture, however. In the wake of World War II, a war during which Canadians became more conscious of their own identity and their own culture, an identity and culture that was distinct, at least ideologically, from that of Great Britain. As a result a somewhat new Canadian culture arose and became dominant. This new Canadian culture, McKay and Swift argue, was intimately tied to multiculturalism, to pluralism, to peacekeeping, to diplomacy, and to war, the last, at, least rhetorically, as a final option. This new Canadian identity and culture was homologous with the replacement of Great Britain as the dominant global great power by the United States, by increasing economic and cultural ties between Canada and United States, and by Canada's increasing ties to an increasingly interconnected world. 

McKay and Swift explore this Canadian peacekeeper cosmopolitan culture, one which, as McKay and Swift note, was similar to the Canadian British imperial identity in a number of ways, by exploring the careers of two famous post-World War Two Canadians, soldier Tommy Burns and, who imbibed both the imperial and the more cosmopolitan culture, and Lester Pearson, prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968. Pearson actually embodies, as McKay and Swift point up, the contradictions of Canadian post-World War II foreign policy. On the one hand, he was a partisan of Team Imperial America and played an important if ultimately limited and junior role in the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or NATO, an adjunct of American imperial power. On the other hand, he was a cosmopolitan mediator and peacemaker who played a significant role in the birth of the United Nations or the UN. Pearson's peacemaking credentials stemmed from his role in ending the Suez Crisis, for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. That "crisis" saw Great Britain, France, and Israel attack Egypt in 1956 in order to take control of the Suez Canal. Pearson's mediation played a major role in the British, French, and Israeli withdrawal from Egypt and from the canal. It would be Pearson's mediation of this conflict that would turn him into saintly hero number one in the pantheon associated with the image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, an image that would also gain some traction abroad. Despite this saintly image, however, Pearson was no Olof Palme, who was clearly far more non-partisan and non-aligned in the Cold War world than Pearson.

A third Canadian identity culture, according to McKay and Swift, arose around the same time as a revived liberalism with its fetishisation of the Market and the increasing dominance of neoliberalism in the English speaking world in the 1980s. This identity, according to McKay and Swift, is actually a latter day and technologically updated version, with a few new wrinkles thrown in for good measure, of the British Imperial identity culture. In Team Warrior Canada the United States has replaced Great Britain as the dominant power in the Anglosphere alliance of the US and its junior varsity partners the UK, Canada, and, increasingly, I might add, Australia, which recently agreed to allow an expansion of American military bases established in the 1960s and 1990s and the expansion of the number of American military bases on Australian soil.

There is currently, McKay and Swift argue, a culture war between these last two ideal identity types. Since the 1980s and particularly during the prime ministership of Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015, team warrior nation Canada, with its polemical and apologetic politicians, economic elites, and allied academics, has attempted to rebrand Canada from the peacekeeper nation of a partly imagined Pearson to the warrior nation of Harper. Using strategies similar to those of the Tories in England, the Republicans in the United States, and the Coalition in Australia, warrior nation Canada has attempted to transform Canada from a peacekeeper nation, a nation engaged in UN peacekeeping missions in places like the Middle East, to a Canada that is a warrior nation with strong ties to an increasingly Anglified  and American led NATO whose mission has increasingly become that of preserving and protecting the Anglosphere global order with its unstated mandate of making sure that petroleum flows from the peripheral and semi-peripheral world into the core nation world. They have done this using the tried and true methods right wing demagogues have long used to expand their power and authority; they have played on the fears and anxieties of the masses by emphasising the need for law and order in an increasingly dangerous world both at home and abroad. To combat domestic and foreign dangers team warrior nation Canada has promoted, through their partially government funded think tanks, their partially publicly funded military science programmes in Canadian universities, particularly at the University of Calgary (where Harper took degrees), their academic allies, their veterans sent into schools, and by increasing the links between the Canadian military and Canadian sports, particularly the national sport of Canada, a sport that is central to the Canadian civic faith, hockey, to promote increases in Canadian defence spending and increases in the number of Canadian military personnel. 

The strategies team warrior Canada have used in their attempts to rebrand Canada from a peacekeeper nation to a warrior are, of course, right out of the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, and anti-anarchist playbook that helped make America a conformist imperial warrior nation. They have demonised domestic critics. They have demonised enemy others. They have sacralised the Canadian military culture. They have marginalised critics by making it impossible for them to condemn military actions by claiming that any such criticism profanes the sacred service Canadian soldiers do. They have condemned and marginalised critics by claiming that they are utopians who don't understand that we live in a dog eat dog social darwinist world. They have claimed that Canada was made by war and by its warriors, starting at places like Vimy Ridge in France where Canadian troops, or so say the warrior historians, fought as Canadians for the first time. They have claimed that it was and is Canada's warriors who protect the true north's proud and free liberties and freedoms. They have claimed that Canada's warriors are chilvalrous white knights whose much needed mission is to protect the rights of all and particularly the rights of put upon women all across the globe, save in places, of course, like Saudi Arabia, a nation that violates civil and human rights, and particularly the rights of women regularly, because the Saudis are Canada's and America's oil buds and central to Canadian and American Middle Eastern policies and strategies.

As was the case with the similar strategies used in the US by people like A. Mitchell Palmer and Joseph McCarthy, the ideologies of team warrior Canada are, as McKay and Swift note, rent through with contradictions, some of which reek with the stench of the newspeak of George Orwell's 1984 and the surrealistic absurdities of Doctor Strangelove and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The government and its military, for instance, which is supposed to preserve and protect human rights, violates them en masse during wartime though you wouldn't know it given their governmental and media newspeak about humanitarian surgical strikes, smart bombs, and collateral damage. The government and its military, which claims to be promoting human rights and stabilising and improving the lives of those who it invades, seems to be more the destroyer of worlds than the builder of "civilised" little neo-West simulations all across the globe. What it does make the world safe for, of course, is American style exploitative corporate capitalism. The government and its military wax romantically about protecting women from misogynist fundamentalist sects, assuming, of course, that their presence in places like Afghanistan actually did improve the position of women before they cut and ran leaving women to their  fates in a post war Afghanistan run by the Taliban, the very enemy they fought and claimed victory over in a seeming repeat of what happened when the US cut and ran in South Vietnam in the 1970s. The government, its military, and its increasingly militarised police forces that are supposed to be preserving and protecting freedoms and liberties at home, has created a 1984 like surveillance state that violates civil liberties on a regular basis both at home and abroad. The government and military that whinges and whines about the welfare state actually eats at the teat of the big welfare state wanting even further redistribution of taxpayers monies from the civilian population to the military (all wrapped up, of course, in a bow of tax cuts for the rich). The government and the peace is our profession military claims that the only way to bring about peace is through never ending wars against an evil abstract enemy. It is hard not to notice that this imagined Canada of warrior princes fighting for Western truth, Western justice, Western manliness, and thimbleberry pie seems to comes right out of a fictive manichean comic book world that is not that different from the tall tales in The Boy's Own Annual. Plus good doubleplus good.

Who will triumph in this identity war between the two identity groups? Stay tuned. In the meantime those of you interested in cultural history, the history of identity, and the militarisation of Canadian, America, and, by extension, Australia society should check out this superb book.

 

The Books of My Life: Who Killed Canadian History?

Though a number of commentators have traced the history of the history wars back to the mid- to late 1960s and made the sixties either the hero or villain of the piece, depending on the ideological perspective of the polemicist or apologist writing the tale of the history war, battles over history--who tells it, how it is told, and the stories it tells--go back much further in human history than the 1960s. Polemics and apologetics, in fact, have been a central part of the writing of history for as long as there has been "history".

The historically oriented books of the Tanakh, for instance, and particularly the historically oriented books of the Torah, tell the inherently polemical and apologetic story of god's chosen people and their trials and travails as they tried to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh at Mount Sinai, the site of the covenant in the Yahwist and Priestly versions of the tale of the chosen people in the Torah, or Mount Horeb, the site of the covenant in Elohist and Deuteronomist retellings of the sacred story. Israel's prophets, the nevi'im offered polemical and apologetic commentary, a kind of midrash before midrash, on these sacred texts pointing out the failures of the chosen to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh or Elohim and the punishment the lord or god brought to bear on his chosen as a consequence of their failures to live up to the covenant. Ancient Egyptian texts polemicised about the greatness of their civilisation, a greatness that demanded that battles lost to the Hittites be rewritten as victories. The "histories" of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans are filled with examples of polemics and apologetics over hubris, barbarians, Socrates, Alkibiades, particular emperors, such as Nero or Justinian, or particular empresses, such as Theodora.

Polemics and apologetics didn't end with the advent of professionalised history and professional historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both can still be found on the surfaces and in the deep structures of contemporary historical writing despite claims by many professional historians that history has become, with them, empirical and objective or, at least, dispassionate. Professional historians of American Christianity, for instance, wrote empirically grounded histories of particular Christian denominations grounded in primary source material that were undergirded with polemical and apologetic assumptions and presumptions that Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, and even more particularly American Protestant Christianity, was god's one true religion and that the denomination they wrote their histories on and about was god's true Christianity. 

Professional historians have, over the years, fought a variety of polemical and apologetic battles. They have battled over whether history should be--note the normative phrasing here--narrative in form, whether it ought to be methodologically sensitive incorporating quantitative methods into what has largely been a qualitatively oriented discipline, and whether historians should be theoretically literate. Many professional historians, for instance, reacted negatively to Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States when it was published in 1913 finding it too theoretically oriented and too reductionist. One invariably wonders if some of this unease with Beard's book was due to the fact that Beard's book de-mythologised an American sacred text and, in the process, demythologised American sacred history. Some have reacted negatively to the theoretical and methodological approach of the French Annales school of history, a historical school that goes back at least to the late 1920s. Several of the Annales historians argue that history should be quantitative, qualitative, and theoretical, contending that history must be understood as made or caused by both long term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, such as the great power struggles that led up to the Great War, great power struggles that go back hundreds of years, and short term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic events. such as the assassination of an Austrian-Hungarian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. Many historians find the Annales approach too theoretical, far too focused on economic events, far too quantitative in orientation, and too far removed from the traditional great events and great men approach, arguably a somewhat secularised version of the Christian lives of saints and the mode of history writing that has dominated history in both its "amateur" and "professional" forms for some time.

Others, a minority of historians like myself, a historian deeply impacted by cultural anthropology and sociology, have long found the Annales approach to history quite compelling. In fact I would argue that the Annales approach to human history best helps us understand and comprehend the culture wars and the battles over history that have often reared their heads throughout human history and have been particularly prominent since the 1960s. When we apply the Annales approach to the culture wars it is clear that the culture wars and the culture wars over history have been going on in the West, as I noted earlier, for centuries, the longue duree, and we can see that the culture wars are also stimulated simultaneously by specific events, such as the impact of renewed social and cultural history on the historical profession after the 1960s. Recently, there has been a lot of ink spilled over the history battles that erupted out of the countercultural 1960s. At the heart of these battles over history are the same questions that have troubled historians for years. Should history be mythic-empirical? Should it be objective-empirical? Should it be hermeneutic-empirical? Should it be narrative in form or quantitatively grounded? 

One of the most prominent polemicists and apologists fighting the post-1960s culture war over Canadian history has been the retired York University historian, former member of the Royal Military College Board of Governors, former Chair of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century, and former head of the Canadian War Museum J.L. Granatstein (sometimes aided and abetted in his culture war by fellow historian David Bercuson and others of a cult of militarism that seems aristocratic in nature). Granatstein, who has written extensively on the Canadian military and Canadian foreign policy has engaged in polemics and apologetics on at least two different levels. On one polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has advocated for the transformation of Canada from a peacekeeper nation to, what Ian McKay and Jamie Strong call, in a nice turn of phrase, a warrior nation in order to protect Canada's interests. That this Canadian warrior nation is likely to be little more than a player sitting on the American junior varsity imperial bench along with England and Australia seems to be acceptable to Granatstein. How a Canadian nation that is small in population and next door to the, by far, dominant superpower of the post-Cold War world, an imperial power that dominates Canada economically, politically, and culturally and hence doomed to be, in the foreseeable future, a junior partner on the American imperial team is going to protect its "national interests" (read elite interests) which are intimately tied to American interests (read elite interests) is beyond me, however. Perhaps they don't have a problem with Canada taking care of the gatorade and the dirty laundry for the Team America.

On another polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has waded into the polemics and apologetics surrounding the rise of a "new" Canadian history, a "new" Canadian history dominated, he claims, by social and cultural history and by quantitative and hermeneutic methodologies and approaches. In his provocatively titled monograph Who Killed Canadian History (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1999 and Toronto: Harper Perennial, revised and expanded edition, 2007) Granatstein argues, much as did Australian historian Keith Windschuttle before him in his equally provocatively titled The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Sydney: Macleay, 1994), that the counterculture of the 1960s gave rise to a social and cultural history that is killing, murdering, and savaging traditional and national Canadian (or in Windschuttle's case Australian) traditional great man and great events political history. The social and cultural historians who came of age in the economic, political, cultural, and demographic ferment of the 1960s in Western Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, have, Granatstein argues, replaced the history of the state, politics, foreign policy, and wars with the history of common men, women, and ethnics, a history that is, Granatstein claims, far too focused on historical trivialities, something that has often been a problem in a discipline that has often avoided and demonised theory and methodology and hence, questions related to historical significance. 

Granatstein also argues that this "new" once countercultural and now dominant history has negatively impacted Canada beyond the academy. These "new" histories, Granatstein argues, have linked up with progressive educational reforms afoot throughout Canada in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, educational reforms that emphasised the need for education for individual and identity group self esteem. This has resulted, Granatstein argues, in a history that celebrates the achievements of identity groups like women and selective ethnic groups. Combined with the limited mandates for history courses in Canada's primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions, the "new" histories and the "new" historians, Granatstein contends, are undermining Canadian national identity, something that is essential if the Canadian nation is, claims Granatstein, to survive and thrive as a common culture.

Granatstein's argument that the lack of a common history resulting from acids associated with the "new" social and cultural histories along with post-World War II battles between the Canadian federal government and the provinces over power and authority (as I write Alberta is set to institute a policy which would allow the political elites of that province to effectively check what comes out of Ottawa and check any challenges to that power in the courts), is grounded, whether consciously or unconsciously, in theoretical perspectives that go back at least to the European Enlightenment and the Romantic era and to the Enlightenment philosophe and romantic social and cultural theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the founding father of sociology and ethnology, Emile Durkheim. Rousseau and Durkheim, more analytically, argued, as does Granatstein and others before and after him, that for a nation to effectively function as a nation and survive as a nation, it must have a common culture and a common set of values and norms. There is, of course, a lot of truth to this perspective though this approach raises a question Granatstein barely if at all addresses, namely whether Canada with its two and perhaps now three, four, five, or ten solitudes, has ever been a single nation and has ever had a common national culture, questions that can equally be posed about the United States with its at least two founding solitudes, that of the North and that of the South.

There are a number of other empirical, methodological, and theoretical issues one could bring to bear on Granatstein's polemic against the "new" social history and cultural history and their postmodernist impact on modernist history. Granatstein, for instance, does not, in his rather too broad brushstrokes, distinguish between various types of academics inside Canada's ivory towers. As numerous surveys have shown over the years, those who teach in the professions, in the hard sciences, and in the applied sciences are not the same culturally as those who teach in the social sciences and humanities. Those who teach in the social sciences and humanities are closer to the caricatures and stereotypes Granatstein plays in in Who Killed Canadian History. Additionally, Granatstein ignores, to some extent, the impact the old analogue media and the new digital media have had on academic history textbooks. When I was an undergraduate, for instance, I had to read thirteen books for an introductory class on Greek history, texts that would not be considered textbooks today. Today a teacher is lucky if she or he can get her or his students to read the one brief textbook generally assigned for introductory courses today. Publishers, of course, have tried to sex up textbooks to get professors to assign them for classes and that, they hope, will move students to read them. They have added a host of colour photos, a host of topical elements, a host of anecdotal introductions that mimic film and television narratives, and a host of graphs, maps, and charts that they hope will stimulate and generate student engagement with the textbook. I have, however, have seen no evidence that this publishing strategy is working. What this strategy has done is to raise the cost of textbooks to astronomical levels, price levels that not all students can afford.

Some of the elements added to modern postmodern textbooks, of course, are related to gender, ethnicity, and class, all phenomena that have been prominent and significant factors in the making of history over the centuries and all things the "new" historians focus on and should--yes I am going normative here--focus on. Granatstein and his colleagues have qualms about this increasing focus on gender, ethnicity, and class, because, as I noted, they think they are pushing much needed political, diplomatic, legal, and military history out of history textbooks and out of history classes alienating students from history courses in the process. According to Granatstein students are still interested in these "traditional" subareas of the historical profession. He cites somewhat anecdotal data--student interest and attendance in courses in these areas--to make his case. But is this really the case? Is this anecdotal evidence sufficient to prove the point? Shouldn't historians (not to mention publishers) be engaging in ethnography to find out what really interests students? Beyond these, hasn't the old great men and great events history proven to be as if not more "boring" to many contemporary history students?

Speaking of university textbooks, I perused several introductory texts on Canadian history chosen somewhat randomly while reading through Who Killed Canadian History in order to test them against Granatstein's hypotheses. What I have found suggests that Granatstein overstates his case about the decline of traditional history and its replacement by trivial history and vanity history, both things that history has long been anyway and something that should not be surprising given that Granatstein is, after all, engaging in polemics and apologetics. In the 529 page Canada: Unity in Disunity by Paul Cornell, Jean Hamelin, Fernand Ouellet, and Marcel Trudel, a textbook that early on tried to deal with the realities of Canadian multiculturalism and pluralism, there are 19 references to John Macdonald, 10 pages on World War I, and 21 pages on World War II. In the 537 page second edition of the introductory textbook Destinies: Canadian History Since Confederation written by R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald Smith and  published in 1996, three years before the first edition of Who Killed Canadian History,  23 pages are devoted to the Great War while there are 50 references to John Macdonald. The 568 page 2003 edition of the single volume Canada: a National History by Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, both of whom Granatstein brands as killers of Canadian history, devotes 19 pages to World War II, including brief sections on the air and sea war between 1939 and 1944, while Pierre Trudeau garners 5 references and the Charter 1. By way of comparison, the 567 page Nation: Canada Since Confederation, the 1990 textbook written by Granatstein himself along with Irving Abella, T.W. Acheson, David Bercuson, R. Craig Brown, and H. Blair Neatby, a textbook that is no longer in print, devotes 67 pages to the period from 1911 to 1919,  54 pages to the period from 1939 to 1957, references Macdonald 10 times, Trudeau 21 times, and the Charter once. While Nation has chapters on industrialisation, labour radicalism, and immigration, the bulk of the textbook is devoted to political history raising the question of how serious "traditional" historians like Granatstein are in advocating for an integrated political and social and cultural history in introductory classes and texts, particularly since the Francis, Jones, and Smith and Conrad and Finkel do integrate "traditional" and "new" histories.

I found Who Killed Canadian History in both of its editions--they do differ from each other as the revised and expanded edition adds a couple of chapters and some parts of the text have been deleted and other material added to the text in the second edition--an interesting if not fully compelling polemic on how Canadian history and history in general should be done. I agree with some aspects of Who Killed Canadian History, such as the need for politics to be a central part of introductory courses and introductory textbooks on Canadian history. But so should historical approaches that emphasise economics, culture (gender, ethnicity, class), demography, and geography, all significant and important forces that impact human beings and the worlds humans have created and all of which are essential frames through which we can understand the human species from prehistory to today. As for who might be interested in Grantstein's polemic, it is likely to be of interest to those interested in polemics and apologetics over how to do history and to those interested in cultural divisions within the humanities and the social sciences in contemporary Canadian universities, itself an iteration of the broader Western culture wars that have long impacted human history and human culture, particularly in the core nation world.

  

The Books of My Life: A History of the Canadian Peoples

Writing a history of anything, including a history of a modern nation state that arose after the eighteenth century like Canada, is always a tricky task. In order to write such a history the professional historian has to decide what is significant or important in order to keep his or her history from becoming a simple and simplistic litany of necessarily selected historical events, selected historical events that are unfortunately not always recognised as selected, which may or may not be important. Significance, in turn, means, or should mean, that the historian and social science seek out important causes and effects that are thought to impact human life, particularly those economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic factors that impact human life and the things that humans have constructed over the course of human existence.

History as a professional practise, a professional practise formalised and bureaucratised in the core Western world, has, since its beginnings and particularly since the Enlightenment,  been interested in determining causes and effects, in determining what caused some phenomenon and what caused some humans to act in the way that they did. The earliest modern historians tended to focus on great men and the great events, particularly political events that they were thought to be causal factors in the drama and melodrama of life. Many nineteenth and early and mid-twentieth century historians (and their contemporary mythistorical heirs) tended to see these great men, great men who were generally turned by historians into unalloyed saints and sinners, as makers of history and tended, since modern history was deeply embedded within and impacted by the nationalism that arose particularly in the nineteenth century, to see the nation-state as the obvious and proper focus of their studies. Many nineteenth and twentieth century historians (and their contemporary heirs) tended to see the nation-states they studied and focused on in fetishistic, universalistic, or transcendental terms and tended to see the nation-states of which they were citizens in chosen, holy, and messianic terms, as the essence of all that was good and superior in the modern world, in other words.

The problems with such an approach to history should be obvious but they aren't and they won't be to far too many, particularly to far too many amateurs who think that simply by being conscious they know how to do history and how to interpret historical events in the same way that preachers with no background in history, archaeology, and languages think they know and know how to interpret the Bible. First, there is the problem of causality, a problem that became particularly apparent after the rise of mid- and late nineteenth century social theory. Is history made by men or is it made by the forces, the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, within which humans are embedded and within which they act? The second problem has to do with class, gender, and "ethnicity". Is it only great men, great elite men, great Western elite men, who make history? The third problem is geographical and spatial since constructed national boundaries are incapable of acting as spatial barriers. Isn't history really regional and global? 

As post nineteenth century scholars have increasingly recognised, economic, political, cultural, and demographic factors, of course, are regional and often global and are ultimately tied to the economic form that dominates specific societies, specifically hunter-gatherer, small scale agriculture, large scale agriculture, modern, or postmodern. Birth rates, life expectancy rates, and the numbers of women and infants who die during childbirth, for instance, are impacted by economic, political, and cultural factors such as poverty, political policies related to poverty, and cultural notions surrounding poverty.

The late St. John's College and University of Manitoba American born historian J.M. Bumsted's A History of the Canadian Peoples (New York: Oxford University Press, third edition, 2007) navigates the labyrinthian maze between nineteenth and twentieth century great man and mythhistory history and mid- and late twentieth century social and cultural history. Bumsted's history is full of factual tales of Canada's great men and women from William Mackenzie King to Wilfred Laurier to Maurice Dupplesis to Pierre Trudeau and to Margaret Atwood. Bumsted doesn't stop with "traditional" great man history, however. A History of the Canadian People also explores the economic history of Canada from the fur and cod trading era to the industrial and postindustrial or postmodern era. It explores the political history of Canada from French and British colony to a federal Dominion where power is arrayed between the federal government in Ottawa and the various confederated provinces and territories of the nation and where Canadian political and economic power has been impacted by French, British, and American imperialism. It explores the history of Canadian literature, music, and art. It gives us a portrait of how Canada's demographics have changed across time and within space.

Bumsted's book offers a very good if far too brief excursion through Canadian history. Like most late twentieth and early twenty-first century textbooks its tale of Canadian history is rather like a jump cut in a Jean-Luc Goddard film jumping, as it repeatedly does, from politics to economics to culture and to demography in far too brief compass. That, however, is necessitated by the nature of mass education in Canadian society, the nature of the contemporary humanities and social sciences, and the fact that reality is more complicated than a simple fiction like narrative can convey. It is filled to the brim with excerpts from contemporary documents, sidebars about important historical figures and historical events, brief historiographies, brief recommendations for further reading, a lot of black and white and colour reproductions, which raise the cost of college textbooks to astronomic levels (a reflection of twenty-first century economic realities), and questions for students to ponder, should they choose to do so (I doubt if many do), after each chapter. If you are looking for a good, if far too brief introduction to Canadian history, a book written for a Canadian audience yet revealingly printed in the US (occasionally, apparently, imperialism reveals itself in print), you could do far worse than Bumsted's brief A History of the Canadian Peoples. For those looking for lengthier introductions to Canadian history I recommend  Bumsted's two volume The Peoples of Canada and R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald's Smith's Origins and Destinies.

The Books of My Life: North America

 

The edited collection North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, second edition, 2001) edited by Thomas McIlwraith and Edward Muller, is an exemplary geographical history of Canada and the United States. The book and its essays, written mostly by historical geographers with a historian and a sociologist thrown in, is a superb introduction to the economic, geographic, demographic, and, if to a much lesser extent, cultural and political histories of Canada and the United States from the colonial era to the early twenty-first century.

McIlwraith's and Muller's North America should be standard and fundamental reading in advanced introductory history, historical geography, historical sociology, and historical ethnography courses. Essays explore European imperialism and colonisation, adaptations to the environment and the remaking of the environment, the development of Canadian and American cities, the development of the Canadian and American wheat belts, corn belts, and cotton belts and the relation of these to labour needs and technological changes, and the development of industrial Canada and the United States, all essential information for the budding historian, historical geographer, historical sociologist, and ethnohistorian.

My only slight complaints about the book, beyond its limited attention to culture and politics, revolve around the fact that the historical geography of Canada is slighted in comparison to the historical geography of the United States as is explicit comparative analysis of both nation-states. I really would like to have seen more on the historical geography of the true North and the comparative history of these two British settler societies which share much not to mention more comparison with two other British settler societies, Australia and New Zealand, which also, for example, had frontiers, indigeneous peoples, gold rushes, industrialisation, modernity, and postmodernity. The one explicitly comparative essay in the book, Richard Harris's "Canadian Cities in a North American Context", is a superb exploration of the approaches to Canadian cities relative to US cities--the same, different, regionally similar, convergent. Such comparative analysis is essential if we are to understand the similarities and differences between modern and postmodern British settler societies. Highly recommended.