The British government has apologized to the children who were sent to live in the Dominions before 1967. The lion’s share of these children were sent to Canada, where they were known as “Home Children.” Some of these children were adopted into loving homes, while others suffered terrible abuse.
Canada’s government has announced that it will not be giving an apology to the Home Children. I agree with this decision. In many ways, the Home Children were the beneficiaries of the racism of the erstwhile Dominion of Canada. In the Dominion’s racial pecking order, Britons were at the top and were given privileged access. Would-be Chinese migrants, on the other hand, were discouraged. Canada recently apologized to the Chinese for the head tax and the subsequent policy of total exclusion. Surely it would be inconsistent to apologies to the whites who were the beneficiaries of the racist policies.
The Ottawa Citizen recently carried a story of uncharacteristically good quality on the Home Children. Even though the CanWest newspaper chain is bankrupt, this story was lengthy and based on extensive research.
Sunday Edition, a CBC Radio 1 program hosted by Michael Enright, had two interviews yesterday that I found really interesting.
The first interview was with University of Toronto philosopher Joseph Heath, the author of Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism. Heath’s book is quite enjoyable to read because he expertly demolishes many of the economic myths dear to the political right as well as the economic myths of the left. This book will convince you that there is plenty of economic illiteracy at both ends of the political spectrum. Another positive feature of this book is that it is written by a non-economist who understand what the economists are saying and can translate it into plain English.
The second interview that caught my attention was with Jennifer Burns, a historian at the University of Virginia. Jennifer recently published Goddess of the Market, a new study of the influence of Ayn Rand on American conservativism. The interview reveals that Burns is a fair-minded scholar who is willing to point out both Rand’s good points and her many flaws.
You can download the program here. I also found some neat interviews with Heath and Burns on YouTube. I’m sharing them here:
A Conservative MP had denounced Louis Riel, the leader of the 1885 rising in western Canada, as a villain. I don’t that this MP will sway how any serious historian regards Riel, but it’s kinda interesting that the Reformers Conservatives no longer regard Riel as the first of a long series of western protest leaders. Preston Manning once tried to depict Riel as sort of an ancestor of the Reform party and all the other Prairie populist movements upset with Ottawa. I guess that since the conservatives are now in power in Ottawa, they no longer identify with the opposition and regional discontent. I guess they identify more with Macdonald.
Peter Goldring MP compares the efforts of rehabilitate Riel to the right-wing nationalists in Japan who have succesful lobbied to remove/tone down all references to Japan’s Second World War atrocities from that country’s school textbooks. This is a bizarre comparison: one of the things that separates Western countries from Japan is a willingness to acknowledge historical injustices perpetrated by the national government. Nowadays, American schoolkids hear a lot about slavery, Australians hear about the stolen generation, and German kids hear about the Holocaust. Canadian students ought to learn about the suffering of First Nations people.
You can read Mr Goldring’s anti-Riel diatribe here.
This is from the Vancouver Olympics official website. The numbers should update automatically. The figures are for gold, silver, bronze total. My only criticism of the site is that it doesn’t break down the national medal totals in per capita terms. The United States has twice as many medals as Norway, but its population is vastly larger.
The last Canadian to enlist in the First World War had died at his home in the United States. It is a good time to reflect on the ways in which Canada has changed in the last 90 years. I would suggest that Mr Babcock’s story shows that the changes have, generally speaking, been for the better. Canada went from being a loyal dependency of the British Empire to an independent, prosperous, pacific, and multicultural country.
Now all we need to do to make the transition complete is to abolish the monarchy, the last symbolic vestige of our connection to the Empire for which Mr Babcock and so many other English-speaking Canadians were willing to fight.
# 1 Liechtenstein: 266.928 per 1 million people
# 2 Norway: 57.2611 per 1 million people
# 3 Finland: 27.1874 per 1 million people
# 4 Austria: 19.7923 per 1 million people
# 5 Switzerland: 13.7535 per 1 million people
# 6 Sweden: 11.9973 per 1 million people
# 7 Luxembourg: 4.2683 per 1 million people
# 8 Netherlands: 4.20552 per 1 million people
# 9 Canada: 2.92638 per 1 million people
# 10 Estonia: 2.25056 per 1 million people
Historian Matt Hayday has some thoughts about international coverage of the Olympics in a blog post called “The Empires Snide Back“. You can read about one economist’s predictions re medal counts here.
I am very supportive of the new website ActiveHistory.ca. The point of ActiveHistory.ca is to link academic historians to the world of public policy by showing how historians’ research can be useful. Recent papers on their website include: Paul Axelrod, Universities and the Great Depression: Then and Now? and Yves Montenay, Pourquoi le Vietnam s’en tire et Cuba s’enfonce.
ActiveHistory’s Ian Milligan has published an interesting post on the mismatch between the types of history professional historians are interested in supplying and the types of history “the public” wishes to consume. There is some evidence to support Milligan’s thesis that there is a mismatch. Military history dominates the History Channel and the history shelves of the chain bookstores with which I am familiar (Chapters, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones), yet most history departments lack specialists in military history. This is true even in the United States, which is a superpower with soldiers in more than 100 countries! See here. (I suspect that the decision of university departments to avoid teaching of military history is pleasing to army officers, since it results in a public less capable of scrutinizing their actions and budgets). I agree with much of what Milligan is saying.
Chapters Book Store in Toronto
However, I would question some of the other claims Milligan makes in his post. Milligan begins his post by complaining that it was hard for ActiveHistory.ca to find historians capable of commenting on the recent financial crisis. He writes: “There simply aren’t many Canadian historians who study the economy anymore. This was put fairly starkly to me in a conversation with a senior historian at York University, as we went through the list of faculty that Active History might contact. There certainly were a few – and many of them are very accomplished (and busy) scholars – but you could almost count them on one hand.”
First, I would ask Milligan whether he contacted historians outside of Canada. This would make sense, given that we are talking about an international financial crisis. A specialist in Canadian economic history would be well equipped to talk about how Canadian governments have responded to past international financial crises, but to find out why financial crisis happen in the first place, it might make sense to speak to an international scholar. Moreover, we need to keep in mind that not all academics who study the past are located in history departments. There are great historians located in sociology departments, political science faculties, business schools, and women’s studies centres. Kenneth Rogoff, a co-author of This Time It is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is based in an economics department. Niall Ferguson, whose PhD is in history, is now cross appointed between the history department at Harvard and the Stern School of Business in New York. Last summer, Ferguson had a very public and very nasty feud with Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman about the economist prospects of the United States that was, in part, a debate about how we should interpret the Great Depression. See Ferguson’s “History Lessons for Economists in Thrall to Keynes” and Krugman’s response on his New York Times blog. The debate between Krugman and Ferguson was very nasty (it prompted one of these scholars “to deploy the nuclear weapon of American academic arguments — an accusation of racism“), but it was also an argument about different theories of economic history, so I don’t think it is fair for Milligan to say that nobody in the academy is qualified to talk about the Great Depression in historical terms!
Closer to home, the staff of ActiveHistory might have considered contacting Joe Martin, a business historian based in the Rotman School of Business at University of Toronto. Martin was interviewed on BNN on the 80th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash about possible historical parallels with the present-day. In his interview, Martin stressed that protectionism in the United States and other countries conspired to turn a recession in the Great Depression. Martin also alluded to the fact Ben Bernanke, the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is an expert on the Great Depression. (See Bernanke’s 2000 book on this topic).
Here is another problem with Milligan’s post. In discussing the mismatch between public and academic history, Milligan uses the term “public” in the singular, which is a problem for several reasons. Historical reading preferences are different in Quebec than in English-speaking Canada (you see little military history in bookstores in Quebec and lots of books on some aspect of the “national question”). I suspect that there are other, albeit more subtle, differences in the history book markets between English-speaking countries (e.g., the UK, Canada, USA). Let’s not forget that many people get their information about the past from historical novels rather than historical non-fiction. (There may be a gender difference in buying habits here– ask Amazon for the hard data).
Moreover, no country’s public is monolithic. University-educated people will have difference preferences with regard to history than non-university educated people: some, but not all, ordinary people equate history with the study of their immediate localities or the histories of professional sports teams. Many members of the learned professions are interested in learning something about their professions: Canadian historian Christopher Moore has published an official history of one of Canada’s biggest law firm.
Government agencies consume various types of historical knowledge (e.g., First Nations land claims research or studies on the Shiite-Sunni division in Iraq). The British website on which ActiveHistory is based (History and Policy) presents historical research on topics such as “How (not) to cut government spending and reduce public sector debt” by Glen O’Hara which are unlikely to interest the masses but which are bound to be very interesting to the key decision-makers who really matter in semi-democratic countries such as Britain or the United States or Canada (senior civil servants, central bankers, cabinet ministers).
Typical event sponsored by the Office of the Historian, United States Department of State
One mismatch between supply and demand which Milligan does not address relates to the countries chosen for study. If you at the American Historical Association data on the job market for history PhDs in the United States, you will see that there is a disparity between the types of history PhDs being produced and the national specialists that history departments need. When history departments advertise for specialists in the history of distant regions such as East Asia or Africa, there get few CVs because relatively few historians do doctorates on such countries. At the same time, there is a glut of history PhDs who have specialised in the history of the United States: the new number of new doctorates in American history produced each year is vastly greater than the number of jobs advertised in that field.
It also appears that historians in some nations are more likely to study foreign countries than the histories of their own backyards. Consider a recent book by Richard J. Evans, a specialist in German history based at Cambridge University. In Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent, Evans shows that the curriculum of British history departments in far more international than the curriculum of history department in many European countries. In Poland or Italy, an undergraduate student in history will learn a great deal about their respective national historians and very little about the histories of foreign nations. British university departments are strong in British history, but they have plenty of specialists in the histories of other countries (Alas, as Mark Mazower notes in his review of Evans, the curriculum is still pretty Euro-centric, an impression supported by this data on PhD thesis topics).
Historians in Canadian history departments need to give some thought as to whether or not we have achieved the right balance between Canadian history and the pasts of other countries in the undergraduate curriculum. I love the study of Canada, but I feel that I wouldn’t be able to understand Canada’s past without a good grounding in the histories of the United States and Britain. Moreover, I wish that I had learned more about the histories of non-Western countries as an undergraduate. I’m ashamed to say that my only undergraduate exposure to the history of East Asia was a seminar on 20th-century Chinese history. Canadian history departments focus on the teaching of Canadian history because the secondary curriculum is heavy on Canadian history and the major function of a Canadian history department is to teach future high school teachers. (In Canada, all history teachers must have a BA in history). Needless to say, as a Canadian historian living in a world of finite resources I can’t be an entirely disinterested observer of the debate about how we balance the teaching of Canadians, Western, and non-Western histories (!), but it is a debate well worth having.
P.S. If you are interested in the feud between Krugman and Ferguson, check out this video:
Next year, I will be teaching a course called HIST-3226EL Tycoons: the Making of North American Capitalism
The course is based on a history-through-biography approach to teaching. Each lecture will focus on the life and times of a particular businessperson. Their biographies will be used to show how North American capitalism evolved in a particular epoch. Important course themes include: Canadian-American relations; the rise of Big Business in the 19th century; the explosive growth of capital markets; the place of ethnic and racial minorities in capitalism; great financial disasters; the impact of break-neck technological innovation on the economy and on society; businesses that made money from warfare; the role of business in political conflict; successful businessmen who were members of persecuted racial and religious minorities; the differences between Canadian and American political and economic culture.
Below, I have posted the list of lectures. With the exception of 10 September, every lecture is about the life and times of a particular individual. Some of these individuals are famous, but in other cases they are obscure ( I have put explanatory hyperlinks in for such cases). Anyway, I am interested in what readers of this blog think about this list of lecture topics. Is there someone really important that I need to talk about who is missing from the list? I would really appreciate your feedback at this point, as I am planning to write the actual lectures in the summer of 2010. There are only so many lectures in the course and I had to make some painful choices (for instance, I’ve had to drop the idea of doing a lecture on Andrew Mellon. I also dropped my lecture on the Black businessman A.G. Gaston).
As you can see, all of my lectures are about men. I’m a bit disappointed that I was unable to find a suitable businesswoman I could structure a lecture around. Keep in mind, that most of my lectures have to be based on scholarly works. Moreover, this is a history course and I would not feel comfortable delivering a lecture about a middle-aged person who is still active in business (e.g., Meg Whitman). There are lots of prominent businesswomen today, but much less in the way of secondary literature on businesswomen in the period covered by my course. So I would appreciate any suggestions readers could provide.
5 September Introduction
Joseph Schumpeter: Prophet of Innovation
10 September Colonial Origins of the North American Economies
12 September
Alexander Hamilton
17 September
John Molson
19 September Sir George Simpson
24 September Francis Cabot Lowell
26 September Isaac Franklin, Slave Merchant
1 October Cornelius Vanderbilt
3 October Luther Hamilton Holton
8 October Sir William Christopher Macdonald
10 October MID TERM
BOOK REVIEW DUE
15 October John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil
17 October Sir William Mackenzie: Railway King of Canada
22 October Study Week- No Class
24 October Study Week-No Class
29 October Erastus Wiman and Continental Union
31 October Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone Revolution
5 November Andrew Carnegie: the Gospel of Wealth
7 November Sir Joseph Flavelle: a Canadian Millionnaire
12 November Henry Ford vs. Alfred P. Sloan: a Study in Contrasts
14 November Chang Toy, Kingpin of Vancouver’s Chinatown
19 November Sam Bronfman and the House of Seagram
21 November Paul Desmarais and Power Corp.
26 November K.C. Irving and New Brunswick
ESSAY DUE
28 November Ron Joyce: Master of the Donut
3 December Sherman Fairchild and the Creation of Silicon Valley
5 December Exam Review
TEXTBOOK
Graham D. Taylor and Peter A. Baskerville, A Concise History of Business in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994). ISBN-10: 0-19-540978-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-540978-9
Check out this article by an English literature professor in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s all about the highly dysfunctional state of the academic job market in the USA, particularly in the humanities. Much of what the author has to say applies to history and the other social sciences, although the situation for us social scientists is somewhat less bleak because we have more options job outside of academe (e.g., think tanks, government).
This article has sparked a lively debate on the Chronicle’s website. There is a consensus that there are lots of unemployed and under-employed humanities PhDs out there. Alas, none of these people have asked why this problem has persisted for so many years. Why hasn’t the market cleared already? Fact: there are plenty of newly minted PhDs who would be willing to teach for much less than the average full professor. Fact: there are plenty of young people who want to study humanities at university but who find the costs difficult to manage (I teach some of these students) or who complain about large class sizes. So the question arises, why haven’t these two problems cancelled each other out already?
During the Great Depression, hunger was widespread. At the same time, foodstuffs were deliberately burnt is mass quantities. This bizarre situation is analogous to the current state of the academic job market in the humanities.
It is not all doom and gloom. In the program where I did my PhD, about half of the people who got doctorates between 1990 and 2007 eventually landed tenure-track jobs. I know that some of those who did not get tenure-track jobs did so by choice– or rather, they were unwilling to have commuting marriages or to relocate to universities in non-metropolitan areas. Check out this table— some of the information in it is woefully out of date, but it gives you a sense of what the debate is all about.
From the Irish Independent: “Vancouver, apparently, has been consistently rated “the world’s most liveable city”, an experiment in multiculturalism that has achieved improbable levels of harmony despite the fact that for 52 per cent of the population, English is not their first language. And Canada itself is currently in vogue as a cool, progressive country where they’re not big on nationalism or patriotic fervour. “We may not wave the flag like other countries, we are quietly proud,” said Kerrin Lee-Gartner, an Olympic gold medal winner in downhill skiing. And their opening ceremony was suitably classy. Or at least it managed to keep the ludicrousness to a minimum.”
The Past Speaks 