Just a Minute

This blog has been far too silent lately. I've realized how hard it is to actually write a book and write a blog. So the book writing is going well, if slowly. The blog....well, here's a post.

Historica Canada today released a request for proposals for two new Heritage Minutes. These will deal with the First World War, in time for the centennial of its beginning next year.

I won't dwell here on the 100-500 thousand dollar estimated value (not sure if this is for each or together).

But I will say that many historians will be pleased with the themes. Historica notes that we already have three heritage minutes on the war, commemorating Vimy Ridge, John McRae and Valour Road. Now the list of possible topics includes:

-   unique acts of bravery 
-    war’s impact at home
-    the role of women
-    multiculturalism in the military
-    founding of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry & the Royal 22nd Regiment 
-    conscription 
-    resistance to the war
-    Impact on Canadian identity
-    war art

Not a bad sample, I think. But surely someone will complain.

And while we're on the subject of Heritage Minutes, here's my vote for the Heritage Minute to be made in 2030:

Magna Carta: A Tradition of Our Own

My guess is that many Canadians now know almost nothing about the Magna Carta - even many of the chattering classes. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so. 

It's one of the things that makes the attempts of Len Rodness to bring a copy of the Magna Carta to Canada so interesting. (see this article in the Star about it.)What would we make of it now? 

The Magna Carta was the agreement signed by England's King John 1 in 1215 with the barons of his realm who rose up in rebellion and essentially forced him to sign an agreement limiting his powers. The medieval terms of the agreement were fairly narrow, but in later years it came to be part of an invented tradition of democracy in Britain, each generation using it to expand the democratic powers of parliament, a document that became powerful precisely because of its history and because it showed a very long standing tradition of limiting royal power (however limited the initial premise).

In bygone generations, English Canadians would have understood the Magna Carta as part of the British parliamentary legacy - part of the British tradition of liberty and fair play (with all of its omissions that often weren't acknowledged) that Canada inherited. In the 1950s when Liberals were busy demolishing the British symbols in Canada, much to the delight of French Canadian nationalists, and increasingly as many English Canadians didn't especially notice or bother about it, Eugene Forsey railed in indignation when Arthur Lower complained about how English Canadians took such things like the Magna Cart as a 'tradition not thine own.' 

This, to Forsey, was nonsense. It was his tradition. It was the tradition of Canada.

What would we think now?

Personally, I first heard of it when I was a young voracious reader of about eleven, poring through the historical novels of Sharon Kay Penman. Good reading still, though I can't find an image from the edition I read.

The Real McCoy

Who was Elijah McCoy? Until recently I hadn’t a clue. Probably I’m not alone.

When the good people of the 4thLine Theatre invited me to see a production of their latest play, ‘The Real McCoy, I soon found out. The play is a loosely historical and biographical story of McCoy, a black inventor, born in Upper Canada but who moved to the United States, and made a life for himself as an inventor of many things, notably a special cup that allowed steam engines to run for longer periods of time without having to be stopped every so often to be re-lubricated. If this sounds small, imagine a train trip (as the play asks you to do) interrupted every fifteen minutes by stops to re-lubricate the engines – the stops lasting longer than the journey. Sounds like commuter hell.

I confess that I don’t know how much of the production is historically accurate. McCoy doesn’t get an entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. He shows up only briefly in Robin Winks’ history of the blacks in Canada, as one amongst many Canadian blacks who drifted south to the United States in search of opportunity in the latter years of the nineteenth century. I haven’t done an extensive search, but it seems hard to find a good deal of material on him. What’s more, the writer of the play, Andrew Moodie, admits in the program that he has taken some liberties. He wanted to get at the human story of the man’s life. In this, he more than succeeded.

This blog isn’t usually the place to find a theatre review, so I won’t go on at length of the merits of the production (there are many).

As a work of history, the play is fascinating. Written and first produced in 2006, the play makes some interesting choices. The most noticeable is to make the endemic racism of McCoy’s life only one part of the production. An intelligent and ambitious man like McCoy would have had to face racism on a continuous and ongoing basis. It would have stunted his career, blighted many of his hopes. All of this is in the play, but the play is also much more than this. In many respects it succeeds at telling a deep and universal human story – at drawing anyone in.

I found myself chuckling at a moment early in the play when the young McCoy tries to smash a puzzle his father has given him – frustrated that he can’t get it right. One of my own sons does this on an almost daily basis, especially when hungry or tired. Lego is just too much. In the play McCoy’s father shushes his anger, consoles him and says ‘Anger blinds you. You can’t see when you’re angry.’ The situation is particular; its application is universal.

As I sat in the outdoor theatre in a crowd consisting entirely of white folks, watching this play put on by African Canadian actors, in rural Ontario, it reminded me that the inclusive history that many academics practice is part of something bigger. A historical play, whatever the liberties taken, is still a history lesson – and a much more pleasant one than I could deliver in a lecture hall. 

Open Access, History by Committee and other failed utopias

It’s not entirely a beginning; in fact, it might be the end.

 I’m talking about open access publishing. There’s been a fair bit of discussion of this on Canadian history blogs over the last week, mostly over the success of Ian Mosby’s article on nutritional research on aboriginal peoples that made such news but was (temporarily and soon again to be) locked behind a paywall and so inaccessible to many.

Is this a problem? Should we have to pay to read articles? Or should they just be free? Isn’t this research paid for by the taxpayers anyway? These are the kinds of questions, discussed in a much more sophisticated way of course, that have animated discussion on various blogs including those by Christopher Moore and Andrew Smith.

For many younger scholars, though not only them, open access seems like a great idea. It’s democratic. It’s of the times. What’s not to like? Now the Times Higher Education supplement informs us of a growing movement amongst publishers to move towards open access publishing for monographs (for the non-academics who read the blog, monograph is academese for book, usually a boring book). This plan would have scholars (or their institutions, funders, etc) pay lump sums to get their books published and be freely and openly accessible.

Hooray for democracy and open access to researchers! Or maybe not.

This move only furthers trends already firmly entrenched within the academic community to leave publishing decisions firmly in the hands of academics. That is, under these models it will even more be the case that it will be academics and academic bureaucrats making decisions about what matters in a book/article, about how these should be framed, what questions should be asked, how they should be written. This isn’t new. Today in academic journal publishing, the process is almost entirely done by academics, with articles being peer reviewed by other academics. There is an editor, an academic, who supposedly (and sometimes really does) edit the article. There is an editorial board (staffed by academics) who make large decisions about the journal and the articles to be published.

For monographs (or books - they really could be books although they rarely are now) the process is also increasingly only handled by academics and editors who don’t actually edit. The only editing most books receive is copy-editing - that is, the editing that tries to get rid of typos and grammatical errors. The assumption is (largely based on finances) that this is the only editing needed for monographs.

Open-access publishing will only further entrench this process. Academic publishing will be just that – academic publishing.

Given the recent problems in the wider world of Canadian publishing –  the consolidation amongst publishing houses, the declining interest in Canadian non-fiction titles – this should make us worried. (Remember even Stephen Harper’s soon (ever?) to be published history of Canadian hockey is signed to a US press.) Publishing with academic presses might soon be one of the only areas where we can publish non-fiction books on Canada that are serious. And if this process is not curated, not edited, only peer-reviewed, and then ultimately paid for only when you have an institutional affiliation or have been deemed acceptable by your scholarly peers in peer review, this will be alarming and harmful.

This is especially the case in Canadian history. Historians, after all, aren’t physicists. We don’t just do ‘pure’ history only to be discussed amongst ourselves. Some of what we do is pretty much only intelligible, or interesting, to other academics. But much of what we do is or should be geared toward the public, toward the people whose society we are studying. Historians tell stories.

The back-and-forth discussion between academics and the wider society, between academics and editors, between the interests of academics and the realities of what is interesting and compelling in the wider society is/was a good tension. It is/was useful. You wouldn’t want either side to fully win out. Like much that is useful in the intellectual world, it’s the conversation, the continuing dialogue and perhaps disagreement that matters.

Open-access publishing, especially if this moves to monographs, will be a disaster for historians unless there is a serious injection of funds to institutions and to wider funding bodies. This isn’t going to happen. Welcome to a future of history only by peer-review committee. We’ve tasted it before, always as one dish alongside others. When it comes to fill the whole plate, we may decide that we’d like a different flavour now and then. But it might be too late.

The Funny and Interesting and Dusty Bookcase

Another great example yesterday of why Brian Busby's blog The Dusty Bookcase is becoming something I look forward to read with each new post. This time it is a history of Canadian literature via the Bombardier's Guide to Canadian Authors published in National Lampoon (yes, Bombardier of the snowmobile, not the English ale, and yes National Lampoon of, you know, National Lampoon).

Reconstructed Parliamentary Debates Online

I learn from Kady O'Malley's CBC politics blog that more of the reconstructed debates of the House of Commons of the early Confederation years are now online. This is the project undertaken back before the 1967 centennial to reconstruct the debates of parliament from the reports of journalists in the period before official records began to be kept in 1875. The Library of Parliament now has up all of these early debates until 1873.

It's nice to have them there, and we can only hope that the others follow soon. It seems amazing that all of the debates for the whole of our history are not online.

Sadly amusing, too, to see in the first debate in parliament on 6 November 1867 that John A Macdonald is the first to speak and put forward a motion and that when he is seconded by Cartier, the reconstructed version of what happened reads like this:

Hon. Mr. Cartier seconded the motion, sup- porting it in a few remarks in French sub- stantially to the same effect as those of the Minister of Justice. 

I thought I'd check out the French language version and it reads like this:

L'hon. M. Cartier appuie la motion, faisant en francais quelques remarques dans le sens de celles du Ministre de la Justice. 

Really? Did none of the French language papers cover this debate? Could it not have been reconstructed, in the 1960s, from papers in both languages? Perhaps it couldn't, but then again, perhaps no one thought to try.

More Change at the DCB

With their great new website up and running, it looks like the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is set to make another change, though this one not so pleasant. John English, editor of the DCB since 2006, is resigning to take up a position as head of the new Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary and International History. See the details here.

Who will replace him? Big shoes to fill...