Daft Punk
Why did the Daft Punk song _Get Lucky_ become a global hit in the summer of 2013? Was it really the intrinsic quality of the song? Or did clever marketing play a role? Check out this recent article in Businessweek.
It seems that me that our friends who work on the history of marketing should investigate how previous summer hits were marketed. To help them start their research, I’ve included a list of US summer hits going back to 1962.
Hat tip to the HBR blog.
I recently blogged about some research on whether the United States Supreme Court has become friendlier to Big Business in recent decades. I asked if anyone had done a similar analysis of Supreme Court of Canada rulings.
A reader of this blog kindly emailed me to tell me about Donald A. Songer, The Transformation of the Supreme Court of Canada (University of TorontoPress, 2008). Songer runs the numbers on SCC rulings in recent decades to see how business has fared.
That’s the title of a recent column by Harold James, a noted historian of international economic relations.
Sir Richard J. Evans, the distinguished Oxford historian, has published a great op-ed in The Guardian about the controversy over Education Secretary Michael Gove’s plans for a re-write of the history curriculum used in schools in England. Shortly after coming into office, Gove complained that the curriculum wasn’t patriotic enough. In 2012, he announced plans for a new history curriculum that would be both more intellectual rigorous (i.e., more memorization of dates) and more patriotic. The 2012 draft curriculum was criticized by teachers, who said that it was too ambitious given the limited amount of time schools devote to history. They wondered how children were going to master all of this material when they are simultaneously being asked to do more in other subjects. For instance, Gove has announced that children will now have to know their twelve times tables instead of just their ten times tables. The curriculum was also condemned by most academic historians, who objected to its attempt to promote a right-wing variant of British patriotism.
Michael Gove
Evans informs us that Gove has listened to these critics and has dramatically changed the proposed curriculum. Children, especially the very young ones, will be expected to learn fewer dates than Gove originally envisioned. Moreover, as Evans writes, “the new curriculum has abandoned Gove’s original intention of using history teaching in our schools to impart a patriotic sense of national identity through the uncritical hero-worship of great men and women from the British past. Gone is the triumphalist celebration of victories such as the Spanish Armada or the Battle of Waterloo.”
“Scotland Forever!” Scots Cavalry Charge at the Battle of Waterloo
Evans is pleased that the proposed curriculum is moving in the right direction, yet he thinks there is still room for improvement. The text of the draft curriculum leads Evans to fear that children studying medieval British history will really end up studying the history of medieval England only. More importantly, while the draft curriculum wants to place British history in its global context, which is good, minimal coverage will be given to European history. Students may end up learning about the English Reformation without hearing much about Luther. That’s obviously a problem on a purely academic level. Moreover, Evans fears that the decision to minimize the material about continental Europe will reinforce the hostility of many Britons to the European Union.
Evans also has interesting things to say about multiculturalism, the controversy over the government’s plan to commemorate the First World War, and the refashioning of the British national identity in the wake of the 2012 London Olympics. His piece should be read anyone who cares about the role of history in a liberal democracy, even if they don’t live in Britain.
As someone who did a PhD thesis on a topic in nineteenth-century history, I note with sadness that much of the material that was dropped from Gove’s slimmed down history curriculum relates to the Victorian period. The draft curriculum published in 2012 would have asked students to learn about William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. They have been left on the cutting room floor, The Telegraph reports. Churchill and Henry VIII are still in, which will doubtless the accelerate the Tudorisation and Hitlerization of the knowledge base of British teenagers: history students in Britain arrive at university with a good knowledge of Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler and almost no familiarity with any other historical subjects.
Here is the programme of the conference. I’m looking forward to seeing my old colleague, Stephen Azzi, fellow Canadian history blogger Chris Dummitt, and all of the other presenters.
UCL Institute of the Americas, 51 Gordon Square, London, WC1H OPN
11.00am WELCOME – Tony McCulloch (UCL Institute of the Americas)
11.15-12.30pm KEYNOTE LECTURE (ROOM 103, 1st floor)
Hector Mackenzie, Department of Foreign Affairs, Ottawa, and Carleton
University “Historians and Mackenzie King”
12.30-1.30pm LUNCH (AMERICAS ROOM)
1.30-3.30pm MACKENZIE KING – THE ENIGMA, Chair: Phil Buckner
(University of New Brunswick)
Julie Gilmour, University of Toronto “Mackenzie King, Empire and his adventures in Asia, 1908-1909”
Jatinder Mann, King’s College London “Mackenzie King and Canadian immigration policy”
Anna Girling, University of Edinburgh “Sheep and dogs and the “Scotch psychic sense: Mackenzie King’s genealogical excursions”
Christopher Dummitt, Trent University “Mackenzie King’s dirty secrets and the making of a prurient democracy”
4.00-5.30pm MACKENZIE KING – THE STATESMAN, Chair: J J Jockel (St
Lawrence University)
Matthew Trudgen, Dartmouth College “Dealing with the Americans: Mackenzie King and continental defence, 1938-1943”
David Haglund, Queen’s University “Mackenzie King and the MacCormac thesis”
Stephen Azzi (and Norman Hillmer), Carleton University “The cautious transformer: Mackenzie King as political leader”
Today, I’m working on a co-authored paper that will compare how the Canadian and Australian systems of federalism have historically dealt with the issue of the monarchy. Canada and Australia are unique in the Commonwealth in that they are both federations and monarchies. In fact, they are compound monarchies. Despite the similarities, these two federations have developed very different approaches to changing the rules governing the royal succession: in Australia, the state governments have been involved in the process via a first ministers’ conference and the passage of resolutions in the state parliaments. In Canada, the federal government has legislated unilaterally without even consulting the provinces. Our paper seeks to explain this historical pattern by looking at the constitutional histories of the two countries.
Our paper is historical, not legal, as we are legal laymen. However, it is informed by the on-going debate about the constitutionality of Canada’s Succession to The Throne Act, 2013. This statute is designed to make it possible for the Duchess of Cambridge’s eldest child, irrespective of gender, to inherit the Canadian Crown. Equivalent laws have either been passed or are in process in other former “White Dominions” of the British Empire. As you may know, the constitutionality of the Canadian law is currently being challenged in Canada’s courts. In my personal view, this piece of legislation, which purports to change the rules governing the inheritance of the Canadian crown, constitutes a substantive change to the Canadian constitution about which the provincial governments should have been consulted. [My co-author, who is a specialist in Australian political history, is agnostic on the issue of whether the 2013 Canadian statute is unconstitutional]. The Canadian federal government’s decision to change the rules of succession without the involvement of the provinces is incompatible with the explicit meaning of Section 41 of the Constitution Act, 1982, as a distinguished Australia legal academic has pointed out.
The exclusion of Canada’s provinces from the revision of Canada’s rules of succession is particularly anomalous because they have, in general, greater powers than those the states in Australia’s relatively centralized version of federalism enjoy. Moreover, one of Canada’s provinces is recognized as a “nation,” a status claimed by no Australian state. My own personal view, which won’t appear in our academic paper, is that if Australia’s sub-national units, the states, have the right to have a say in the alteration of the rules of the royal succession, surely Canada’s provinces should also have been participants in the process.
Actually, that the thesis not of the editor of the Washington Post but of an op-ed by Paul Pirie that appeared in that paper yesterday (3 July). Mr. Pirie, a Canadian and self-described “former historian” who argues that it was mistake for the Thirteen Colonies to have rebelled against British rule. He cites a variety of statistics demonstrating the success of Canada and Australia as societies and economies as proof that the Thirteen Colonies should have remained in the British Empire and evolved towards Dominion status. (Of course, it’s not clear that the British would have invented Dominion status save for the fear of a repeat of the American Revolution). Pirie also overlooks that fact that some US states did eliminate slavery at the time of the American Revolution– the New England states certainly acted before Upper Canada took its first step towards the gradual elimination of slavery.
As you would expect, Pirie’s well-timed and provocative piece has generated plenty of controversy on the blogosphere. See here, here, and here. US conservatives have attacked the piece and have accused Pirie of being disloyal to the United States.
Pirie’s argument is broadly similar to one I made a few years ago in ‘Canadian Progress and the British Connection: Why Canadian Historians Seeking the Middle Ground Should Give 2 1/2 Cheers for the British Empire’. In Contesting Clio’s Craft: new Directions and Debates in Canadian History. Ed. by Chris Dummitt and Michael Dawson (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009). It would have been nice had he mentioned my piece, but I know that space is at a premium in a newspaper piece.
I still have no idea who Paul Pirie is. There is a comedian of the same name in the UK but that’s clearly not the same individual.
Anyway, Happy Independence Day to my American readers.
P.S. Over at the Junto blog, Ken Owen explains why as a Brit he is well situated to teach the American Revolution to US college students.
In the last couple of weeks, the US legal blogosphere has been filled with discussion about whether the current Supreme Court is more or less pro-business than its predecessors. (See here, here, and here). (The current Chief Justice is a Republican appointee, as are six of the other nine justices). Although “culture-wars” court cases such as DOMA tend to get the most media attention, the cases dealing with economic issues are arguably much more important in shaping everyday life.
The debate about the pro-business bias of SCOTUS has been kicked off by a recent academic paper that crunches the numbers to track the Court’s fluctuating attitude toward Big Business.
Lee Epstein, William M. Landes, and Richard A. Posner. “Volume 97 Lead Piece: How Business Fares in the Supreme Court.” Minn. L. Rev. 97 (2013): 1431-1507.
This paper was based on the “Business Litigant Dataset, [which] consists of the 1759 cases that were orally argued in the Supreme Court’s 1946 through 2011.” They also used the Business versus Business database, which consists of 255 cases orally argued in front of SCOTUS in the same period.
The authors looked at all cases involving one or more businesses and coded the litigants. They examined the outcome of cases in which individuals fought corporations to look for patterns in the Court’s decision to “side with the little guy.” For lawsuits involving two corporations, they looked at the size of the corporations to see whether the Court favoured Big Business over Small(er) Business. After analysing cases back to 1946, they found that the Roberts Court has been the most business-friendly and that Roberts and colleague Samuel Alito the two most business-friendly justices. (Roberts’s father was a corporate executive).
My question for my readers is: has anybody done a similar analysis of the decisions of either the Supreme Court of Canada or the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council?
I’m a business historian so this is obviously something I should know about. However, I’m not a legal historian and am therefore unfamiliar with the secondary literature. [I’ve read Peter George and Philip Sworden. “The Courts and the Development of Trade in Upper Canada, 1830-1860.” The Business History Review (1986): 258-280 but don’t know of other sources]. I’d like to draw on the expertise of the readers of the Canadian legal history blog here.
That’s the title of a piece by Chris Champion in the current number of The Dorchester Review.
It’s a somewhat rambling essay, but Champion makes some interesting observations about the War of 1812, Confederation, and the links between the two. His apparent thesis is that the War of 1812 somehow drove Confederation or was closely connected to it. Well, I suppose this is true in the sense that all important prior events exert an influence on subsequent events. One could argue the patriation of the Canadian constitution in 1982 was a by-product of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. However, pointing to the Wall Street Crash has limited value in explaining how and why the constitution was re-written in the early 1980s. The 1980 Quebec Referendum is rather more important in explaining the timing of patriation. Similarly, political deadlock in the Province of Canada, Upper Canadian agitation for Rep by Pop, and the Fenian Raids, all do far more to explain why Confederation came about in 1867 and the details of that constitutional settlement than the War of 1812.
Moreover, connecting the War of 1812 and Confederation overlooks the sheer extent to which the eastern sections of British North America had been transformed in the intervening period. (I will concede that everyday life in the Prairies in the 1860s was pretty similar to what it had been like in 1812). Upper Canada is 1812 was a sparsely settled frontier settlement. Whites still shared political control with Natives: the First Nations population of the Great Lakes region was important allies of the British Crown and had not yet been reduced from being warriors to wards. By the 1860s, the process of agricultural settlement in what is now Southern Ontario was largely complete. The frontier phase was complete and society was experiencing industrialization and urbanization. There were cross-border railways and big factories and a nascent stock exchange. In the previous half century, Upper Canada had been repopulated: the pre-1815 population of First Nations people and Yankee settlers had been overwhelmed by a wave of migrants from the British Isles. There were similarly dramatic changes in the other eastern British North American colonies, and the two British colonies on the Pacific Coast, Vancouver Island and British Columbia, had experienced even more change.
What the British North America of the 1860s had in common with the British North America of 1812 was that the political classes of the colonies professed hostility to the republic to their south and great devotion to the British Crown. They considered themselves to be British. Whether or not the average person in British North America bought into this ideology of Britishness is hard to say, since the archival record is incomplete and biased towards the upper classes, politicians, lawyers, etc. Public opinion polls did not begin to be taken until the 1930s, so we simply don’t know whether the average farmer, lumberjack, or small businessman agreed with colonial politicians who declared that the people of the colonies would be willing to make great sacrifices, even to the point of death, so that they could remain British subjects.
I suspect that most people in British North America in the 1860s, as in 1812, probably didn’t care that much whether lived under the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack. In the generation after the 1860s, large numbers of Canadians migrated to the United States in search of higher living standards, which suggests they were indifferent to the British connection. In much the same way, a significant number of Canadians in 1812 were either indifferent to news that the British and American governments were at war or welcomed the Americans as liberators. That Canadians were indifferent about their allegiance is not terribly surprising, since in the American Revolution a large section of the white population of the Thirteen Colonies were uninterested in the question of whether the colonies should be independent of Britain.
UBC Press has just published a new book by McMaster University’s Sara Bannerman on the history of Canadian copyright law. The history of IP in Canada is an under-studied topic, so it will be very interesting to read this book. This book will doubtless to be useful to people in a wide range of academic disciplines, which is one of the hallmarks of a first-class work of history.
There is a companion website but no book trailer on YouTube, at least not yet.
The Past Speaks 