Who killed Canadian history? A view from the trenches

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 80, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 269-302

  Mckillop, A B ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0000229882     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: 17101093     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR.80.2.269     Document Type: Review

References (110)

1. See, for example, E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Victor Golancz 1978)
2. and Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (London: New Left Books 1980)
3. The epigraphs with which this article begins are from Philip Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, edited and with an introduction by Jonathan B. Imber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990), 368-9
4. Charles Taylor, 'Globalization and the Future of Canada,' Queen's Quarterly 105, 3 (1998): 339-40
5. and Michel-Rolph Touillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press 1995), 27
6. J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins 1998)
7. See also Bob Davis, Whatever Happened to High School History? Burying the Political Memory of Youth. Ontario: 1945-1995 (Toronto: James Lorimer 1995)
8. J.R. Miller, 'The Invisible Historian,' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société historique du Canada, NS 8 (1998): 1-18
9. The Canada Quiz: What Canadians Do and Don't Know about Their Country (Toronto: The Dominion Institute 1997)
10. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History?, 73, 153
11. For the original source of Granatstein's view of Belleville housemaids, see Christopher Moore, 'The Organized Man,' The Beaver 71 (April-May 1991): 59
12. Marilyn J. Barber, 'Below Stairs: The Domestic Servant,' Material History Bulletin 19 (spring 1984): 37-46
13. For a scholarly article of the 'housemaid's knee' sort, but which is anything but local or inconsequential in historical significance, see Phillip R. Schofield, 'Peasants and the Manor Court: Gossip and Litigation in a Suffolk Village at the Close of the Thirteenth Century,' Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 3-42
14. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), 12
15. David Bercuson, Robert Bothwell, and J.L. Granatstein, Petrified Campus: The Crisis in Canada's Universities (Toronto: Random House Canada 1997), 166-167
16. See A.B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791 - 1951 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 532-533
17. See Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1986), 307-12. Such studies are often undertaken by historians of ethnicity
18. Doug Owram, ed., Canadian History: A Reader's Guide, 2: Confederation to the Present (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994)
19. The weaknesses and Whiggishness of such an approach has long been observed. See Terry Copp, 'The Whig Interpretation of Canadian History,' Canadian Dimension 6 (April/May 1969): 23-4, 33
20. also Daniel Francis, National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press 1997)
21. See Donald Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1984)
22. Bruce Elliott, Irish Migrants to the Canadas: A New Approach (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1988)
23. Franca Iacovetta, 'Such Hardworking People': Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1992)
24. Paul Voisey, Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1988)
25. David Gagan, Hopeful Travellers: Families, Land, and Social Change in Mid-Victorian Peel Country, Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1981)
26. Donald Avery, 'Dangerous Foreigners': European Immigrant Workers and Labour Radicalism in Canada, 1896-1932 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1979)
27. and his Reluctant Hosts: Canada's Response to Immigrant Workers, 1896-1994 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1995)
28. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society: The Analysis of the Western System of Power (London: Quartet Books 1973)
29. J.L. Granatstein, The Ottawa Men: The Civil Service Mandarins, 1935-1957 (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1982)
30. Sandra Gwyn, 'The Rise of the Mandarins,' Saturday Night (June 1982)
31. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society, 187-8
32. See Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: New Left Books 1980)
33. Tony Bennett and others, eds., Culture, Ideology and Social Process (London: Batsford Academic and Educational 1980)
34. T.J. Jackson Lears, 'The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,' American Historical Review 90 (June 1985): 567-93
35. For discussion of the writings of these national historians, see Berger, Writing of Canadian History
36. J.L. Granatstein, The Politics of Survival: The Conservative Party of Canada, 1939-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1967)
37. Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1938 (Toronto: Lester 1982)
38. Elliott, Irish Migrants to the Canadas
39. See English Local History at Leicester, 1948-1979: A Bibliography of Writings by Members of the Department of English Local History, University of Leicester, compiled by Alan Everitt and Margery Tranter (Leicester: Department of History, University of Leicester 1981)
40. See Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-1989 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1990)
41. See Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press 1997)
42. See also Kenneth McNaught, 'E.P. Thompson vs Harold Logan: Writing about Labour and the Left in the 1970s,' Canadian Historical Review 62 (1981): 141-68
43. Gregory S. Kealey, 'Labour and Working-Class History in Canada: Prospects in the 1980s,' Labour/Le Travailleur 7 (spring 1981): 67-94
44. Peter C. Newman, Company of Adventurers (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada 1985)
45. See the exchange between Jennifer Brown and Peter C. Newman in Canadian Historical Review 67, 4 (1986): 562-78
46. See Christopher Hitchens, 'Goodbye to All That: Why Americans Are Not Taught History,' Harper's Magazine, Nov. 1998, 37-43, 46-7
47. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998), xix
48. See also William H. McNeill, 'Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,' American Historical Review 91 (Dec. 1986): 1-10
49. Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind (Boston: Beacon Press 1996), 97, 148. A related matter is the problem of identifying and articulating any 'tradition' in history that is separate from the mental apparatus of the historian concerned with it
50. See Stephen P. Turner, 'Whose Tradition about Tradition?' Theory, Culture, & Society 7 (1990): 175-85
51. See Burke, The French Historical Revolution
52. See Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press 1997)
53. See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988)
54. Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines (London: Open University Press 1989)
55. Robert F. Berkhofer Jr, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1995), 59-60
56. See John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms: The Global Market as an Ethical System (Toronto: Garamond Press 1998)
57. S.E.D. Shortt, The Search for an Ideal: Six Intellectuals and Their Convictions in an Age of Transition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976)
58. Jürgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society: Student Protest, Society and Politics, translated by Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press 1970)
59. Sabine Von Dirke, 'All Power to the Imagination': The West German Counterculture from the Student Movement to the Greens (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1997)
60. Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana 1987), 11-12
61. John Lechte, Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Structuralism to Postmodernity (London: Routledge 1994), 106. Derrida did not move to France until 1959
62. See Arthur Lower, 'The Case against Immigration,' in Welf H. Heick, ed., History and Myth: Arthur Lower and the Making of Canadian Nationalism (Vancouver: UBC Press 1975), 250-63
63. Margaret Conrad, Alvin Finkel, and Cornelius Jaenen, A History of the Canadian Peoples 1: Beginnings to 1867 (Toronto: Copp Clark 1993)
64. and Alvin Finkel and Margaret Conrad with Veronica Strong-Boag, A History of the Canadian Peoples, 2: 1867 to the Present (Toronto: Copp Clark 1993)
65. J.M. Bumsted, The Peoples of Canada: A Pre-Confederation History (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1992)
66. and The Peoples of Canada: A Post-Confederation History (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1992)
67. For recent assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of these and other efforts at national synthesis, see Gerald Friesen, Christian Laville, Gail Cuthbert Brant, Kathryn McPherson, Brian Young, and Jamie Disbrow, 'New Wine or Just New Bottles? A Round Table on Recent Texts in Canadian History,' Journal of Canadian Studies 30 (winter 1995-6): 175-201
68. Janet Guildford and Michael Earle, 'On Choosing a Textbook: Recent Canadian History Surveys and Readers,' Acadiensis 27 (autumn 1997): 133-44
69. Over the past few years its Journal, which selects the best papers available from its annual conference, has published contributions from more than one of Granatstein's own doctoral students. See L. Richard Lund, '"Fishing for Stamps": The Origins and Development of Unemployment Insurance for Canada's Commercial Fisheries, 1941-71,' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société historique du Canada, NS 6 (1996): 179-208
70. Daniel Robinson, 'The Rise of Market Research Surveys in Canada, 1929-1941,' Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/ Revue de la Société historique du Canada, NS 8 (1998): 187-211
71. Phillip A. Buckner, '"Limited Identities" and Canadian Historical Scholarship: An Atlantic Provinces Perspective,' Acadiensis 26 (winter 1991-2): 177-98
72. John A. Dickinson, 'Canadian Historians: Agents of Unity or Disunity,' Journal of Canadian Studies 31 (summer 1996):148-53
73. and Ruth Roach Pierson, 'Colonization and Canadian Women's History,' Journal of Women's History' 4 (fall 1992): 134-56
74. For a thoughtful dissenting view of the same phenomenon, see Michael Bliss, 'Privatizing the Mind: The Sundering of Canadian History, the Sundering of Canada,' Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (1991-2): 5-17
75. For a striking illustration of the extent to which the methodological and epistemological ground has shifted under the historical profession, compare Robert F. Berkhofer Jr, A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York: The Free Press 1969)
76. to his Beyond the Great Story
77. or compare Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old: Critical Essays and Reappraisals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1987)
78. to Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press 1997)
79. See also Frank Füredi, Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age (London: Pluto Press 1992)
80. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton 1994)
81. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz 1965)
82. The Recent Publications Relating to Canada section of the Canadian Historical Review 78 (1997) listed twenty-one books published on the history of the Maritime provinces alone in 1997. The same volume listed publication of twenty-eight books on political history and forty-three on foreign relations and military affairs for the period since 1867. National History does not appear to be as dead as Dr. Granatstein seems to believe. See Desmond Morton, 'Canadian History Alive and Well,' Montreal Gazette, 24 May 1998
83. and Morton, 'Fashionable history,' Ottawa Citizen, 31 Oct. 1998), B7
84. Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996)
85. Cynthia R. Comacchio, Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving Ontario's Mothers and Children (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 1993)
86. Charlene Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike (Vancouver: UBC Press 1998)
87. See John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge 1989)
88. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press 1990)
89. William Acheson, 'Doctoral Theses and the Discipline of History in Canada, 1967 and 1985,' Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers/Communications historique (1986): 1-10
90. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class , 12
91. See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (London: Fontana Press 1993)
92. Keith Windshuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press 1996), 12, 178
93. Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press 1986)
94. Jean Vanier, Becoming Human (Toronto: Anansi 1998), 45
95. There are of course several notable exceptions, for example John English, The Decline of Politics: The Conservatives and the Party System, 1901-1920, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993)
96. S.J.R. Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791-1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990)
97. Reg Whitaker, The Government Party: Organizing and Financing the Liberal Party of Canada, 1930-1958 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1977). Such works are well known by many non-political historians and are frequently used in their courses
98. A.R.M. Lower, A Pattern for History (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1978)
99. Donald Creighton, The Forked Road: Canada, 1939-1957 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 1976)
100. Robert Bothwell, John English, and Ian Drummond, Canada since 1945: Power, Politics, and Provincialism, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1989)
101. S.R. Mealing, 'On the Concept of Social Class and the Interpretation of Canadian History,' Canadian Historical Review 46, 3 (1965): 201-18
102. John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1965)
103. For citation of the pertinent articles in Canadian labour historiography, see Craig Heron, 'Working-Class History,' in Owram, ed., Canadian History: A Reader's Guide 2: 87
104. Ramsay Cook, Canada and the French Canadian Question (Toronto: Macmillan 1966)
105. J.M. Careless, 'Limited Identities in Canada,' Canadian Historical Review 50 (March 1969): 1-10
106. Ellen L. Hazard, quoted in Nick Salvatore, We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber (New York: Times Books 1996). Hazard's poignant words serve as the epigraph to Salvatore's moving book
107. See Adrian Hastings, 'The Nation and Nationalism,' chapter 1 of his The Construction of Nationhood, 1-34
108. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1991)
109. Gary Taylor, Cultural Selection (New York: Basic Books 1996)
110. For a glimmer of the direction in which Canadians might move as they seek to reinvent the nation-state, see Taylor, 'Globalization and the Future of Canada,' 331-42