Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Janovicek, Nancy

Antoon de Baets, Responsible History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).
In Responsible History, Antoon de Baets proposes a code of professional ethics for his-
torians with the hope of beginning an international discussion about the duties of
historians to the people they study – both living and dead. His previous research on
the censorship of historians made him recognize the need for a discussion among
professional historians about the tension between ethics, scholarly duty to present the
truth, and academic freedom. This project, he argues, is urgent in light of recent
examples of abuses of history and the rise in defamation cases against historians.
Responsible History is a timely reminder that ethical questions should raise questions
about duty, respect, and rights rather than the legal liability of research institutions.
The book also makes a strong case for the unique ethical issues that historians face.
De Baets is the founder of the Network of Concerned Historians, an
organization founded in 1995 to connect international human rights organizations
and the community of academic historians who advocate on behalf of historians
who face censorship or persecution. Responsible History draws on international human
rights law to examine ethical questions about the rights of the living and the dead,
and this framework is the foundation of his proposal for a code of ethics. The dis-
cussion of defamation cases against historians and the misuse and abuse of history
and memory is evidence that history is a deeply political project. As such, profes-
sional historians need a compass to guide them through the complex and conflicting
interests of those who seek to repress past injustices and the victims who have a right
to know what happened. Moreover, in post-dictatorial societies that rested on the
censoring of history, the credibility of the profession of history has been so severe-
ly undermined that a critical reflection on the morals and ethics of historians is
required to restore the role of historical research in promoting democracy and
human rights.
Understanding how history is misused is the necessary foundation for a
code of ethics. Part I examines irresponsible history and begins with a theorization
of the abuse and misuse of history. This discussion ranges from political abuses of
history to prop up authoritarian governments whose power rests on the persecution
of political opponents to plagiarism and the misrepresentation of evidence in aca-
demic work. Intent distinguishes between the abuse of history and careless research,
and in both cases, the context in which the history is produced is crucial to determin-
ing the degree of control that the historian had over research and the dissemination
of knowledge. The other chapters in this section explore the ethical use of dictators’
secret archives and the defamation cases against historians. Both chapters provide a
thoughtful discussion of why historians must consider the reputations of the dead
subjects of their research as well as that of their descendents. De Baets disagrees
with international law that states that the deceased do not have a reputation, and
makes a case for the need for the protection of posthumous reputations as a precon-
Left History 14.2 143
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dition to restoring the dignity the victims of genocides and deceased people who
have suffered human rights violations.
Part II explores historians’ duties and people’s right to history. Both rest
on the conception of intergenerational solidarity as a relationship between the past,
present, and future. Inspired by UNESCO’s Declaration on the Responsibilities of the
Present Generations towards Future Generations, de Baets argues that historians’ duties to
the dead rest on the rights of the living to mourn their ancestors and to know the
truth about the past. Yet de Baets cautions against obligatory memory that exalts the
status of victimhood. Instead historians’ duties to the dead should be based on
restoring and preserving their dignity. Commitment to the search for historical truth,
rather than a moral incentive, will best protect living people’s right to know what hap-
pened to members of their family or ethnic community. The book concludes with a
convincing argument for the need for an international code of ethics based on the
following values: “freedom and integrity (of historians), respect (for those surround-
ing them), and the careful and methodically executed search for truth.” (5). De Baets
pays attention to opponents of professional codes of ethics, and provides logical
arguments against them. He insists that an international professional code must be
a living document. It cannot provide answers to all ethical dilemmas, but it will pro-
vide guidance to help solve ethical problems. His proposal for an international code
of professional ethics is also available on the website of the Network of Concerned
Historians.
Responsible History is recommended reading for all historians because it com-
pels us to think about our role in society and the implications of our research. It
will, I hope, reinvigorate the discussion about history and ethics.
Nancy Janovicek
University of Calgary
Book Reviews144
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Antoon de Baets, Responsible History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).

Hamilton, Michelle A.

175
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
Canadians and their Pasts 
Michelle A. Hamilton, Director of Public History, The University Western Ontario
http://www.canadiansandtheirpasts.ca/
Begun in 2006, this Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
supported project explores how Canadians engage with their own past and the his-
tory of Canada in their everyday life. The genesis of this project stemmed from
the investigators’ shared sense that the public’s interest and stake in the past was
growing, an issue they felt needed examination in order to evaluate the recent
debates about the importance of an overarching national narrative. Principal
Investigator Jocelyn Létourneau (Laval) and co-investigators Margaret Conrad
(University of New Brunswick), Gerry Friesen (Manitoba), Del Muise (Carleton),
David Northrup (York), and Kadriye Ercikan and Peter Seixas (University of
British Columbia) were also inspired by previous projects in other countries which
found that public and academic understandings of the past vary greatly. With
numerous other individual and institutional partners, the project team aimed to
assess systematically Canadians’ historical consciousness.1
Modelled after previous projects carried out in the United States,
Australia and Europe, the Canadian team planned to contact several thousand
Canadians over the telephone.2 Through 2007 and 2008, Jolicoeur and Associés
of Montreal and the Institute for Social Research at York University implemented
these extensive surveys consisting of approximately seventy questions. Each of
five regions – British Columbia, the prairies, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada
– were allocated an equal 400 surveys. Parks Canada ordered another 1000 urban
interviews in Toronto, Calgary, Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver. In order to
explore potential regional and ethnic differences in the understanding and use of
the past, an extra 100 surveys were conducted each with New Brunswick Acadians,
First Nations in the Saskatoon area, and with recent immigrants in the greater
Toronto region of Peel.3 In addition to the over 3000 Canadians who answered
the surveys via telephone, several institutional partners conducted more targeted
focus groups which further broadened the regional, ethnic and occupational diver-
sity of the respondents.
As Létourneau writes, one should not mistake ignorance of the past for
indifference to the past.4 Thus, unlike polls issued by the Dominion Institute, the
survey and associated projects did not aim to test Canadians’ knowledge of the
past, but their level and type of engagement with it. While many questions were
borrowed from previous surveys, the team created others that asked about region-
al and ethnic pasts, or the ‘limited identities’ pertinent to the Canadian experience.
The survey itself is divided into six parts that ask a range of questions about
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Hamilton176
respondents’ activities related to the past, how those activities help them under-
stand the past, how they assess the trustworthiness of sources of historical infor-
mation, which geographical regions are important to them, and how the past and
the present are connected. Based on the findings of the American survey, the
Canadian team broadly defined activities related to the past to encompass the more
traditionally acceptable visits to museums and historic sites, and potentially more
debatable activities such as playing video games and making home movies and
cookbooks.5
The results hold few surprises for those familiar with the previous sur-
veys. In the section for activities that related to the past, looking at old photo-
graphs ranked first at 82%, watching historical movies second at 77%, and 74%
said they were preserving heirlooms for family members or friends. Fewer respon-
dents stated they were preparing a family scrapbook or history (57%), sought out
sites important to their own past (56%), read historical books (54%), or visited a
historic site (50%) or a museum (44%) in the last year. 60% of those surveyed had
participated in an average of four to eight activities. As in previous surveys, the
common thread of many of the activities reported appears to be the importance
of family, chosen by two thirds of respondents as the “most important” compared
to religious, ethnic, regional or national stories. Even when visiting museums and
other historical places, many Canadians, both new immigrants and those with
roots generations old, were more likely to make connections to a broader collec-
tive or national past if there was a personal tie. When asked to elaborate on this
emphasis on family, many explained it in relation to understanding their own iden-
tity. The project team calls this personal or ‘usable’ past “autobiographical mem-
ory.” Assessing regional identities, residents of Newfoundland and Labrador were
most likely to have selected their provincial past as “very important” (73%) fol-
lowed by Quebecers at 47%. The national average was a lesser 36%. An almost
equal percentage chose the national past (44%) and an ethnic or cultural past
(40%) as “very important.” While this first finding is higher than that found in the
American survey, only 8% of respondents said that Canada’s past was the “most
important” to them. The team has found limited identities “alive and well in
Canada.” Asked to rank the trustworthiness of sources of historical information,
museums rated first, followed, in order, by fact-based books, family stories, school
teachers, historic sites and the internet.6
Like elsewhere, school teachers will be horrified but museums will be
pleased with this ranking. Museums will also be able to use the findings of the
project to assist in the development of exhibits that are relevant to their commu-
nities, a must in these times of limited funding. Museums have always conducted
visitor studies in order to improve their relevance, although never in such a sys-
tematic or broad-based way. Ethnographic museums will be pleased to see that
First Nations are as likely as non-Native Canadians to visit exhibitions – something
that could not have been said twenty, or perhaps even ten years, ago – though dis-
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Review Essay 177
appointed that they distrust the information. Since the 1992 joint task force report
of the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Museums Association, many
curators have followed its ethical proscriptions and created collaborative new
exhibits to present Indigenous perspectives.
As the results of the Canadians and their Pasts survey mimicked those
found elsewhere, perhaps the more interesting and useful outcomes will be the
specialized side projects, many of which are ongoing. Informed by the Australian
survey, the Canadian team decided to include interviews with those who commu-
nicate history to the public in museums, schools and in other ways. The
Newfoundland Historical Society and the Association of Heritage Industries of
Newfoundland and Labrador have begun to discuss the role of the past with her-
itage workers and memory-keepers in the province. The Canadian Museums
Association initiated similar conversations among museum workers and volun-
teers, teachers and students, and members of historical societies across Canada.
One of these sets of focus groups occurred in conjunction with an exhibit at the
Peel Heritage Complex in Brampton entitled “Connections,” which discussed how
recent immigrants to the area engage in both their own historical traditions and
those of Canada. Other museums targeting visitors to their exhibitions include
the Musée acadien at the Université de Moncton and the Musée de la civilisation
in Quebec City, which formulated questionnaires for children who toured their
respective exhibits on Acadian, and Quebec and First Nations history. School age
children have also participated in similar surveys administered by the Institut d’é-
tudes acadiennes, and with teach e rs and parents at Historica Fa i rs. Th e
Benchmarks of Historical Thinking project centred at the University of British
Columbia (UBC) studies and promotes ways of teaching history that go beyond
simple memorization of facts and events. In partnership with the Centre for
Historical Consciousness at UBC, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs explored stu-
dents’ understanding of Aboriginal-government relations in the province, and cre-
ated an online digital collection of primary sources related to land claims in BC.7
For professional historians who remain unconvinced about the value of
public or active history, the results of the Pasts project could increase their disdain.
One problem may be that while the public does not perceive any differences
between ‘history’ and the ‘past,’ professional historians in the academy and in the
public history field do. The survey itself both deliberately conflated the two terms,
and tested whether the public responded differently to their use. The investigators
anticipated criticism of their conflation of the ‘past’ (what actually happened) and
‘history’ (how people interpret the past now), but like the American project, the
Canadian team chose to use the two words interchangeably in order to avoid any
negative associations respondents might have with the word ‘history.’ In asking
their questions, the surveyors alternated the two terms but found no differences in
the public responses based on which one they used.8
Academic historians will be encouraged, if surprised, that the survey
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Hamilton178
revealed that the public understands that there are many interpretations of the
past, a message that professors struggle to impart to their undergraduate students.
They should also be pleased that public enthusiasm for historical pursuits is so
high, but one can imagine traditional academics shuddering at the inclusion of
scrapbooking or looking at old photographs as part of history; they may quite sim-
ply dismiss it as more evidence for David Lowenthal’s disdainful division between
‘history’ and ‘heritage.’ The public’s historical pursuits revealed in the Canadian
survey share many elements of Lowenthal’s ‘heritage,’ such as a strong interest in
family, feelings of nostalgia, and the use of presentist understandings to explain
the past. This criticism was levelled at the earlier American survey, and will con-
tinue to be a problem for many.9
In his book Possessed by the Past, Lowenthal recommended that history and
heritage be kept separate. For those committed to public or active history, this is
not possible, but it is not clear how they should utilize the information from the
Canadian survey. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, the two creators of the
American survey did not agree on how to proceed with their findings. Rosenzweig
placed the onus on professionals to better listen to and respect more the public’s
historical interests and understandings, while Thelen optimistically suggested that
there was some common ground on which professionals and the public could
come together.10 Conrad, one of the Canadian co-investigators, advises a dialogue
between professional historians and the public in order to solve controversies such
as the 2007 dispute over the Bomber Command interpretative panel at the
Canadian War Museum. Borrowing a term from Thelen, she hopes for a partici-
patory historical culture.11 Létourneau questions whether a return to a national
narrative as the “most important” narrative is desirable. However the discipline of
history develops, she believes it necessary that it be one “that creates a sense of
belonging, common goals, a shareable temporality and referential diachrony, in the
absence of which the present, not being anchored, will be buffeted by all identity
tempests it foretells.”12 But how does one actually bridge the gap between histo-
ry and heritage, the professionals and the public? Should all public or active histo-
rians start with the personal or the familial to get at larger or national stories or is
this a limited approach?  How can, or should, the public’s use of a “mythistory,” a
term used elsewhere by Létourneau, be counteracted?13 As of yet, the Canadians
and their Pasts survey does not suggest how we can bridge the gap, one of their
main goals, but as the results of the partner projects continue to be digested and
published, hopefully models to emulate will emerge.
NOTES
1 Lon Dubinsky and Del Muise, “Partnering with the Past: The Canadians and
Their Pasts Project,” Muse (Jan/Feb 2008): 32; Margaret Conrad, Jocelyn
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Review Essay 179
Létourneau and David Northrup, “Canadians and their Pasts: An Exploration in
Historical Consciousness,” The Public Historian 31, 1 (2009): 16-17; Del Muise,
“Canadians and their Pasts,” Acadiensis 37, 1 (2008): 93-4. Individual and institu-
tional partnership comes from Athabasca University; the Association of Heritage
Industries, Newfoundland and Labrador; the Newfoundland Historical Society;
the Musée acadien and L’institut d’études acadiennes at the Université de
Moncton; Memorial University; the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City; the
Association for Canadian Studies; the Canadian Museums Association; the
Historica Foundation; the Canada West Foundation; the Kamloops-Thompson
Regional Historica Fair Committee; the Peel Heritage Complex; the Manitoba
Museum; Parks Canada; Thompson Rivers University; and the Union of British
Columbia Indian Chiefs.
2 For the US survey, see Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the
Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1998) and  http://chnm.gmu.edu/survey/. A roundtable assessing the
survey was published by The Public Historian 22, 1 (2000): 13-44. In 2003,
Australian Cultural History published the results of the Australian survey. The
European survey is detailed in Magne Angvik and Bodo Von Borries, eds., Youth
and History: A Comparative European Survey on Historical Consciousness and Political
Attitudes among Adolescents (Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung, 1997).
3 For a fuller account of the survey logistics, see Conrad, Létourneau and
Northrup, “Canadians and their Pasts,” 24-7 and Gerald Friesen, Del Muise and
David Northrup, “Variations on the Theme of Remembering: A National Survey
of How Canadians Use the Past,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 20,
1 (2009): 223-7.
4 Jocelyn Létourneau, “History in Post-Historical Times,” Canadian Issues/Thémes
canadiens (October 2008): 70. This was also a major finding of the US survey.
5 The full survey can be found at
http://www.canadiansandtheirpasts.ca/pasts_survey.pdf.
6 Conrad, Létourneau and Northrup, “Canadians and their Pasts,” 27-32;
Friesen, Muise and Northrup, “Variations on the Theme of Remembering,” 230,
235.
7 See the Pasts website http://www.canadiansandtheirpasts.ca/community.html
for a full list of and links to the satellite projects.
8 Conrad, Létourneau and Northrup, “Canadians and their Pasts,” 20, 26n32;
Friesen, Muise and Northrup, “Variations on the Theme of Remembering,”
224n8; Muise, “Canadians and their Pasts,” 96.
9 See, for example, Michael Kammen, “Carl Becker Redivivus: Or is Everyone
Really a Historian,” History and Theory: Studies in the Philosophy of History 39, 2
(2000): 233.
10  Roy Rosenzweig, “Everyone a Historian,” and David Thelen, “A
Participatory Historical Culture,” in Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in
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Hamilton180
American Life, 177-207.
11 Margaret Conrad, “Towards a Participatory Historical Culture: Some Personal
Thoughts,” Canadian Issues/Thémes canadiens (October 2008): 66-69.
12 Létourneau, “History in Post-Historical Times,” 72.
13 Jocelyn Létourneau, “Remembering Our Past: An Examination of the
Historical Memory of Young Québécois,” in To the Past: History Education, Public
Memory, and Citizenship in Canada, ed. Ruth Sandwell (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2006), 71.
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Canadians and their Pasts

Bangarth, Stephanie

Left History 15.1182
sisters. Asked on her application to Columbia why she wanted to study history,
she replied “I want Women’s History to be legitimate, to be part of every curricu-
lum on every level, and I want people to be able to take PhDs in the subject and
not have to say they are doing something else.”(29) The uphill battles that this goal
entailed occupied much of her academic career, first getting off to a good start in
graduate school, where she “could not accept the content of the curriculum, the
worldview I was being taught.” (29) As she explains when describing her culture-
shock on first encountering women in the academic world, “In one of the best
graduate schools in the country, I was presented with a history of the past in which
women did not seem to exist, except for a few rulers…” (29)
The book is divided into three sections, “Redefining the Profession of
History”, “Doing History” and “Living in History.” Each of them charts the dif-
ferent ways in which Lerner blended theory and practice in her work as a histori-
an and social activist, whether in her work with African American women and
Women’s History in New York, reforming history curricula in the various univer-
sities where she held positions, developing workshops for “deviant-out-groups”,
contemplating the challenges and possibilities of ‘holistic history’ or of women in
world history, or working with historians to lobby for women academic’s inclusion
in national history conferences, in university faculties and in the editorial boards of
scholarly journals (all of which took years of more and less bitter struggle). And
all the while she was working to promote change in a variety of academic and grass
roots communities, she was writing and teaching a history in which women were
integral.
I would strongly recommend this as an informative and inspiring read,
not only for those interested in Gerda Lerner and Women’s History, but for any-
one interested in the myriad ways that historians can play a vital and positive role
in the world.
Ruth Sandwell
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Ivana Caccia, Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
Over the course of the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the major pol-
icy issues that confronted the Canadian state was certainly the issue of citizenship.
The most recent manifestation of citizenship policy is the creation of a new
Canadian citizenship guide, “Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of
Citizenship”, published in March of 2010. The guide was notable for what it omit-
ted as much as for what information was included for prospective citizens to
“know.”
Preparing prospective Canadian citizens now mainly involves a certain
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Book Reviews 183
amount of reading and studying, passing a citizenship exam, some English or
French language proficiency, as well as fulfilling certain residency and other
requirements and attendance at a citizenship ceremony. While Canadian policy-
makers do express some degree of consternation over citizenship today, the early
years of citizenship policy-making during the Second World War period chal-
lenged Canadian politicians and policy-makers alike. In her study of this period,
Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime, Ivana Caccia takes the reader on an in-
depth journey through the day-to-day workings of the Nationalities Branch of the
Department of National War Services. Her intent is to highlight the public
debates over cultural diversity, and how best to manage it, that were fostered by
the participation of 20 percent of the country’s population of non-British and
non-French cultural origins in wartime service and national affairs. Caccia focus-
es her analysis on Tracy Philipps, a British transplant to Canada who was appoint-
ed as European Advisor to the Nationalities Branch from 1940-1944. Other per-
sonalities appear in her account, such as Philipps’ friend and assistant, Vladimir J.
Kaye, and Watson Kirkconnell, a university professor and linguist who introduced
English-speaking Canadians to the literature of “New Canadians” through his
translations, John Grierson of the Wartime Information Bureau, and Robert
England, an adult educator who would take the helm of the Nationalities Branch
from Philipps in 1944.
It is Philipps, however, who receives the star treatment in the book, as
Caccia claims to disprove N. F. Dreisziger’s assertion that very little debate
occurred in the period regarding immigrant integration. Where, according to the
author, Dreisziger relegates Philipps and the Nationalities Branch to minor play-
ers, Caccia’s intention is to highlight government agency and its inner workings.
Rather than being minor players, the Nationalities Branch, its staff, and its sup-
porters produced a “new discourse of national self-identification” (8) ultimately
leading to “the institution of Canadian citizenship.” (8)  To that end, Caccia pro-
vides a biographical sk etch of Tracy Philipps, outlines the Committee on
Cooperation in Canadian Citizenship, describes the inner workings of the
Nationalities Branch, and ultimately the waning of Philipps’ influence and that of
the Nationalities Branch (which was renamed the Citizenship Division in mid-
1944). Caccia presents Philipps as a man stymied by his stubborn belief in the
“Canadianization” of ethnic group by ethnic group, with considerable supervision
of such individuals and groups. With minimal understanding of the varied cultur-
al makeup of C a n a d a , Philipps promoted A n gl o - c o n fo rmity among new
Canadians, and engaged in ranking European nationalities according to their lev-
els of loyalty and of “foreignness.” While this approach went largely under the
radar of government officials in the early 1940s, it became a matter of great con-
cern later as Canadian politicians and bureaucrats began to conceive of the British-
American postwar new order.
Caccia’s research is extensive, her detailing of Philipps’ exhaustive efforts
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Left History 15.1184
to investigate new Canadians of European origin is impressive, and ultimately we
are better informed about the Nationalities Branch and its idiosyncratic staff. But
are we further ahead by knowing so much about Tracy Philipps?  Perhaps, but
Caccia’s work only proves is that there was debate about the presence of growing
numbers of non-British and non-French Canadians throughout the 1940s, not of
Tracy Philipps’ centrality in that debate. It might be very easy to accept such an
argument from within the pages of the book, but given the vast amount of
research available on the wartime period, and on issues of ‘race’, immigration, eth-
nicity, and public policy, Tracy Philipps’ context is decidedly thin. In that sense,
Dreisziger’s original assertion stands in the opinion of this reviewer. What is
remarkable is how Philipps managed to stay on for as long as he did, and Caccia
paints an interesting portrait of an almost Kafkaesque Nationalities Branch that
finally got the notice of those in charge who wished to clean house at the
Nationalities Branch by “Canadianizing” it. In an interesting (and fitting) twist,
Philipps becomes the “foreigner” as the former British-born head was replaced by
Canadian-born Robert England.
Stephanie Bangarth
King’s University College
Ryan Edwardson, Canuck Rock: A History of Canadian Popular Music
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
Ryan Edwardson sets out to tell the history of Canadian popular music from the
mid 1950s to the present. In this project he looks at the intersection of Canadian
nationalism and popular music. Canuck Rock is, essentially, two separate research
projects: the first provides a history of popular music in Canada from the 1950s
forward, the second looks at the establishment of Canadian Content Regulations
(“CanCon”) and their effect on popular music in Canada. Edwardson’s analysis of
CanCon regulations makes a valuable contribution to the study of popular music
in Canada, but the general history of popular music in Canada he provides lacks
perspective and focus.
The subtitle of the book, A History of Canadian Popular Music, is rather
misleading. Edwardson does point out, in passing, that Canuck Rock looks at the
“transition from ‘music in Canada’ to ‘Canadian music’” (5), but the vast majority
of the book looks at music in Canada. The history of music in Canada that
Edwardson provides is a clichéd and well established history of popular music:
moral panics over rock & roll in the 1950s, the British invasion (and the moral pan-
ics linked with the invasion) of the 1960s, the growth of psychedelic music and
drug culture, etc. The first five chapters of Canuck Rock provide this overview of
“music in Canada” and do not make much, if any, contribution to the academic
literature on popular music in Canada. Indeed, the first five chapters focus most-
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Ivana Caccia, Managing the Canadian Mosaic in Wartime (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010)

Webb, Jeff A.

Book Reviews 191
and English Canada. However, throughout the book, Rifkind emphasizes that
Comrades and Critics is a study of English Canada only. The reason for this deci-
sion is not clearly communicated to the reader and thus begs the question: What
about women in French Canada?  A simple footnote explaining the decision to
focus only on English Canada could have addressed this issue. Second, in her
analysis of women, literature, and the left, Rifkind relies heavily on Ian McKay’s
work on Canadian socialism, without adequately situating his research in relation
to the broader historiography. For example, she writes “McKay breaks with his-
toriographical tradition to propose a different starting point for understanding
socialism in Canada, one that sets aside factional disputes over the time, place, or
personalities of authentic Marxism in favour of interrogating the broader project
of the Canadian left in the twentieth century” (6). This statement is supported
with a reference to McKay; however, no reference is made to any specific exam-
ples of the previous “historiographical tradition” with which McKay’s work sup-
posedly breaks. While lengthy discursive footnotes can be dry and cumbersome,
situating research in relation to previous works is a crucial part of producing
responsible and informed scholarship.
These criticisms aside, Comrades and Critics nevertheless provides an
important analysis of leftist women’s literary contributions during the 1930s, and
is thus an important addition to the historiographies on Canadian literature, and
on women and the left in Canada.
Julia Smith
Trent University
Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In The Province of History: The Making of the
Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2010).
Ian McKay is one of Canada’s most prolific and well-respected historians. Among
his diverse body of work is a series of attempts to deal with the views of Nova
Scotia’s past of organic intellectuals. So, when I saw this most recent book, I
immediately wondered how In the Province of History differed from his highly-
regarded Quest of the Folk and his earlier essays on Peggy’s Cove, the tourist gaze
and the imagined Scottishness of Nova Scotia. As he tells the reader in a foot-
note, this volume (and another book yet to come) is an installment in his not yet
completed study of the creation of a past for Nova Scotia that was useful as a
tourist destination and supporting the racial and economic status quo.
Something of the evolution of McKay’s thought can be gleaned from his
theoretical debts, although his work cannot be reduced to playing out other’s the-
ories. Early on he was reading (among many dozens of other historians) Raymond
Williams on the representations of the rural pastoral and Hobsbawm and Ranger
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Left History 15.1192
on the Invention of Tradition. Soon he was reading David Lowenthal’s The Past is a
Foreign Country, and Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country, books that opened
many eyes to the differences between “heritage” (the commodity) and “history”
(the critical view of the past). But McKay seems to have been a little uncomfort-
able with these British scholars’ pretensions to knowing better than the “folk”
what their real history was. By 1994 he was thinking along the lines sketched by
Jackson Lears, and emphasizing the ways that anti-modernist intellectuals inter-
vened in culture. McKay’s analysis of such in Quest of the Folk earned him a new
audience that was more attuned to the new cultural history than the labour histo-
ry which McKay had written in graduate school. He was not left behind when his
younger contemporaries took the linguistic turn. Of course, McKay has consis-
tently returned to the insights of Gramsci, emphasizing that how we think of the
past is important because it justifies the present day distribution of wealth and
power, and that conception of the past is contested. That is where the most recent
book fits.
McKay and his collaborator Robin Bates assert that a critical inquiry into
the past can provide a useful explication of racial, class and sexual dynamics of
power. History (as a critical engagement with evidence from the past), they sug-
gest, is superior to heritage (the celebration or commodification of decontextual-
ized representations of the past) in that it can help us make the world a more
humane place. No argument from me on that point, but the body of the text does
not argue the point asserted in the conclusion, nor does it provide a critical histo-
ry of Nova Scotia, as it might have done to illustrate how history should be writ-
ten. Instead, the book examines, in great detail, some of the narratives of the past
that held sway for earlier generations and finds them wanting. There is a chapter,
for example, on how Longfellow’s “Evangeline” was contested, celebrated and
commemorated in ways that bore little relationship to the past lives of real
Acadians. There are also studies of the literature of Will R. Bird (which readers
of the journal Acadiensis will have encountered before) and Thomas Raddall, both
of whom reflected their class and ethnicity and sexuality in their imaginings of a
Nova Scotia past.
When McKay and Bates return to the construction of a Scottish identi-
ty, which draws upon material McKay published in Acadiensis in the 1980s, they
emphasize more than just the use of invented traditions to market the province to
tourists. This account argues for the racist underpinnings of the choice to exclude
Acadians, people of African ancestry, Mi’kmaq and other ethnic groups, that was
implicit in the choice to portray the province as more Scottish than Scotland.
Similarly, this book is attentive to the ways that gender roles and heterosexual
norms are reinforced by the literature. Those familiar with McKay’s Rebels, Reds,
Radicals will recognize his openness to rethinking the nature of being left; away
from privileging class and toward seeing many inequalities and oppressions as the
object of leftist analysis. They conclude that the imagined past of Nova Scotia was
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Book Reviews 193
useful as commodities to sell to tourists, but it was wrong. More seriously, the
mythology makes contemporary awareness of problems in the province more dif-
ficult to address.
Jeff A. Webb
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American
Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2010).
Blair L. M. Kelley’s Right to Ride is the first comprehensive study of the streetcar
boycott movement. This was an early movement (1899-1906) to combat the indig-
nity that emerged with the introduction of segregated seating on electric streetcars
in the South. All Southern cities with a significant black population organized boy-
cotts and legal cases to combat state-wide Jim Crow laws specifically targeting
streetcars. Kelly selected New Orleans, Richmond and Savannah as cities that rep-
resent the broad trends of this movement and its impact.
Kelley rightly concludes that this movement was not a fruitless effort to
end Jim Crow as August Meier and Elliott Rudwick concluded over forty years
ago, but this was one link in a long chain of grass roots protest that stretched back
to the early 19th century and continued on through the moment when Rosa Parks
refused to give her seat up for a white passenger in Montgomery. Kelley makes an
important contribution to our understanding of the long Civil Rights Movement
and may be the first author to place its origin in the antebellum North. Kelley also
demonstrates how these movements were indicative of racial, class and gender
divisions within the black and white communities in these cities, all of which
Kelley effectively depicts throughout the book.
Although Kelley challenges us to rethink the chronology of the Civil
Rights Movement, the place and context within this history could be more devel-
oped. For example, why do New Orleans, Savannah and Richmond make the best
examples for understanding this movement rather than Nashville, Jacksonville,
Augusta and Atlanta all of which had rich stories and outcomes different than the
three cities studied here?  The book also begins with the earliest Jim Crow trans-
portation cases we know of, that of Frederick Douglass on a train in the 1840s and
Elizabeth Jennings on a Brooklyn horse-car in 1854. These incidents along with
some others from the late 19th century help the reader to understand that these
transportation protest have a long history, but Kelley is just really pointing to the
early cases as examples and not connecting these movements to a continuity of
urban transportation protest concluding with the streetcar cases at the turn of the
twentieth century. It would have been helpful to integrate that long story into this
study in more than one chapter or mention it more briefly and explain why the
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Ian McKay and Robin Bates, In The Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2010)

McKay, Kathy

helped lay the foundation for the rise of the welfare state. Apart from telling us
little about the social and cultural history of Vancouver’s longshoremen after the
1935 strike, Parnaby does not appear to consider the possibility that, instead of
underwriting state expansion, the labourist ideals he sees at the heart of the
longshoremen’s political culture might indeed have privileged the anti-statist pos-
sibilities of working class autonomy and independence. This is, however, a book
that suggests fruitful conversation on any one of a number of historical ques-
tions; the link between the longshoremen’s sense of citizenship and the emer-
gence of Canada’s welfare state is only one. Citizen Docker is an important book.
It deserves a wide readership.
Robert A.J. McDonald
University of British Columbia
John Douglas Belshaw, Becoming British Columbia: A Population History
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).
John Douglas Belshaw’s Becoming British Columbia: A Population History is an essen-
tial work for anyone exploring the history of the colonial project in BC and
beyond. This history of British Columbia examines the importance of demo-
graphics in the construction of the historical narrative. Belshaw’s focus is to
investigate the measurement of mortality, fertility, nuptuality, and immigration
within the context of BC history using Marxist and feminist theories. He argues
that a narrative that does not consider the role of demographics lacks substance
and maintains such a history is built upon an ill prepared foundation (4). In the
case of BC, he contends the “Portland cement” missing from most histories is
acknowledgement that the “demographic project was constructed within a dichoto-
my between the growth of the European population and its competition with
Aboriginal and Asian peoples” (9). This isn’t the end of the sentence in the
quote?
Belshaw initiates his discussion with a detailed examination of death,
particularly in relation to Aboriginal cultures. He asserts most histories of BC
are “characterized by substantial and sustained growth… a tale of victory, of the
triumph of a particular imperial and/or national goal.” (13) According to him,
this type of history ignores the cost extracted from Aboriginal peoples in the
construction of BC. He maintains that recent histories focus on the impact of
impersonal diseases while “the conscious efforts of European intruders to
destroy Aboriginal British Columbians have skulked out of the spotlight.” (28).
Further, he states, “development, a euphemism for capitalism, is both an eco-
nomic program and a cultural artifact” (15). Thus, histories based on the theme
of progress and development, integral components in this tale of growth and
victory, provide a celebration of capitalism rather than an examination of the
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cause of fluctuation in the population. Belshaw carries this perspective through-
out the text as he questions how the demographic narrative of BC was con-
structed and why it has not been previously scrutinized.
Belshaw then shifts to a discussion of the immigrant population. He
notes even the vocabulary of most triumphant histories record immigrants as
“settlers,” whereas they should actually be considered as workers (14).
Immigration was not random, but rather was a response to real or perceived eco-
nomic prospects in the province. This point is integral to Belshaw’s argument as
he builds upon comparisons of the employment prospects in various regions in
the province. For example, he examines how marriage and fertility rates among
immigrant coal miners on Vancouver Island, largely recruited in England, dif-
fered both from other immigrant groups as well as from their cohort who
remained at home (122-4). This devise allows Belshaw to clearly argue that BC
presents a vital, and often overlooked, laboratory for demographic study.
Although Belshaw exhorts historians to consider population studies, he
advocates a critical examination of any demographic data for both validity and
reliability (10). He notes that concepts such as marriage and family have shifted
radically since the Victorian era (7) While death and birth initially appear as con-
stants, he reports that many life events may not have been recorded at certain
times and among some groups of people (8,172-3, 180). Most importantly, he
situates the census not as an impartial measure of population, but rather as an
inaccurate tool of the colonial project (9). Although these inconsistencies may
seem to contradict his insistence on the inclusion of demographics, Belshaw
deconstructs the problematic aspects of the data and skillfully uses them as tools
to dismantle the narrative of the colonial project.
As well as including numerous charts and graphs, Belshaw provides
technical sidebars to both demystify the mathematics behind his demographic
arguments, and to illustrate how statistics are used. For example, he carefully
explains the difference between terms such as age-specific fertility rate and total
fertility rate (130-1). This type of information permits Belshaw to compare
expansion in BC to that within specific provinces and to Canada. He also
includes helpful appendices to illustrate many of the points made in the text.
Appendix A lists the leading settlements in BC from 1871-1951. Although the
population as a “running total” increased, many settlements appeared and disap-
peared over time (195-200). Most significantly, he tracks the change in sex ratios
from 1891 to 2001 in what was often known as a “man’s province” (202-10).
In Becoming British Columbia, Belshaw presents a convincing case for the
inclusion of demographic data in historical discourse. He presents a plethora of
information that at times seems overwhelming, yet remains logical and consis-
tent. Although those who do not agree with his philosophy may find fault with
his argument, this does not diminish the success of his objective - to encourage
all historians, not just those who study BC, to critically examine demographic
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data before they include it in their works. Belshaw does not present his work as
either exhaustive or definitive, rather he offers “A, not The, Population History of
BC” (5). This is not a textbook on how to construct demographic studies, but
rather an extensive discussion on the significance of demographic discourse using
British Columbia as its focus.
Kathy McKay
University of British Columbia
Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and
Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-55 ( Vancouver: UBC Press. 2009).
Summer camping for children in the United States and Canada is one of features
of twentieth century childrearing. Summer camps could only develop when urban-
dwellers were far enough removed from “the countryside” as a site of agricultural
production and hard work, and it could be seen, increasingly as a site of leisure
and self-development. Historians have begun to turn their attention to these insti-
tutions both as educational sites and as prisms though which we can understand
how adults expressed their own cultural goals, aspirations, and ambivalences
through for children’s’ development away from the day-to-day life of the city.
Sharon Wall has framed this book about the summer camps of Ontario,
as they expressed an increasing unease with urban life. The framework she uses
throughout the book is the seeming contradiction of a rural (or wilderness) ideal
as an expression of both modernity, and a disquiet with that very modernity. This dis-
quiet, or antimodernism was one of the key features of all the camps she examines.
The first group whose unease with the culture they themselves had creat-
ed, was the urban upper-middle class. Like in the US, well-to-do Canadians
mourned the loss of rugged self-reliance among their boys, now spending so much
of their time in schools, and watching their fathers go to work in offices. This
group promoted summer camps with a focus on making these elite boys more
rugged. (Wall mentions that with the creation of some elite summer camps, par-
ents of boarding school boys wouldn’t have to ever be around their children for
long periods of time).
Soon a second, very different group of summer camps was developed as
part of the concern among social reformers with the “unhealthy” qualities of
childhood among the poor and working classes. Although many of the activities
were similar, the job of these “fresh air camps” was to cure working class children
of socially disruptive behaviour they learned from living in the city, in families
either over-worked or vulnerable to poverty, if they were not. Like the elite camps,
these camps emphasized activities like canoeing and learning to swim, but also
were notable for the care taken to provide good food (sometimes in short supply
at home) and regular physical examinations. If the children gained weight while at
camp, their experiences were deemed a success.
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John Douglas Belshaw, Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).

., The Missing Plaques Project

61
© Left History
15.1 (Fall/Winter 2010-2011)
Historical Plaques: Images from the Missing Plaques Project
The Missing Plaques Project
The Missing Plaques Project is dedicated to changing the way we think about his-
tory. This Toronto-based project, which has been used as a model elsewhere in
Canada, responds to the idea that the city’s history is conservative, boring and
British. Tim Groves, the project’s founder, has made it his goal to challenge this
perspective by creating his own historical plaques which tell stories often absent
from Toronto’s collective memory. The plaques, which are posters put up using
wheat paste, highlight both Toronto’s distant past, but also some of the darker
sides of Toronto’s more recent history, such as the Bath House raids in 1981 and
the 1992 Yonge Street riot. These are stories that will almost certainly not be rec-
ognized by more official historic plaques, while at the same time have played – and
continue to play – an important role in shaping the city of Toronto. Tim present-
ed many of his posters at Active History: A History for the Future in September 2008.
We have included three of Tim’s posters as part of this volume. The Halloween
Riot tells of the first post-WWII Halloween party on Queen’s street east. As
crowds and revelry grew police intervened and the festive atmosphere quickly
turned into a large confrontation. Another plaque is about the Yonge Street Riot,
which developed after a racially charged police shooting in Toronto. It lead to an
afternoon and evening of rioting. The final plaque takes a different approach,
focusing on changing place names in Toronto. The Wonscotanach River (is also
the Don River) is a good reminder of Toronto’s deep Aboriginal history – a his-
tory which has only seldom been recognized in the city’s urban geography.
For more information about the Missing Plaques Project, or to view some of
Tim’s other plaques, visit the project’s website at:
http://missingplaque.tao.ca/about.html
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Historical Plaques: Images from the Missing Plaques Project

-, -

EDITORIAL NOTE
As we write this, the G8 and G20 summits have transformed downtown
Toronto into a barren, barricaded, heavily policed zone. While scenes of violence
– perpetrated by no more than a hundred self-described anarchists – captivated the
media, thousands of other energetic, progressive Canadians gathered throughout
the weekend to protest and imagine a better world. Our cover picture is from the
large gathering that took place on Saturday, June 26th. That afternoon, thousands
of protestors and demonstrators gathered to peacefully protest a host of issues,
from climate change inaction, to failed promises on HIV-AIDS policies, to job
markets, and to preemptively warn provincial and federal governments that the
public service would not bare the brunt of the economic recovery. This was the
largest gathering of a week of protest, including a Native Day of Action, to the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty protest, to the Toxic Tour, to the gathering of
LGBT activists. As the summit concluded with vague promises around climate
change and ominous warnings about the need to tackle debt, escalating fears
around public services and servants, many were left wondering about whether the
summit was worth it, both in terms of cost and the temporary abridgement of our
democratic rights and freedoms.
All of this demonstrates the continued relevancy of left wing politics,
and of the importance for contemporary activists to have a grasp of the history
behind the policies they fight, of struggles that have come before, in all realms. We
hope that Left History can continue to be a site for further discussion of these
issues, and, as always, encourage you (and your students and colleagues) to submit
articles, essays, and touch base with us.
In this issue, we welcome two new editors and say farewell to one. Krista
Weger will be stepping down as a co-editor after a productive tenure with the jour-
nal, and in her stead we welcome Katharine Bausch and Brian MacDowall as co-
editors. Dan Horner and Ian Milligan will be remaining with us through this issue.
Our next issue focuses on Active History, and will be out in December
2010. The issue is shaping up well, and will contain peer-reviewed articles, theoret-
ical pieces as well as several discussions about active history projects, what active
history is, and the role of historians in all of these projects. If you missed our Call
for Papers, fear not! Please consider contributing, as we’re always looking for great,
original, and compelling content.
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Editorial Note

Brooke, Stephen

Articulating the Nation: British Conservatism, Race and the 1988 Education Act

Mart, Michelle

Rhetoric and Response: The Cultural Impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent

Peace, Thomas

Cole Harris, The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in
Canada before Confederation, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
In his closing remarks to the G20 in Pittsburgh this past September, Canadian
Prime Minister Stephen Harper claimed that Canada has no history of colonial-
ism. Stephen Harper needs to read Cole Harris’s The Reluctant Land.
Rather than having no colonial past, Harris’s tour de force of Canada’s
pre-Confederation history demonstrates the complex role of settler colonialism
in shaping the dynamics of latter-day Canada. Taking a regional approach to
each chapter, the book shows how the contours of the country were shaped and
defined by French, English (and American) imperial systems, commercial and
industrial capitalism, and processes of agricultural settlement. The differing
influence of these components shaped how European and Aboriginal peoples
interacted and how settler societies emerged. When these processes converged,
Europeans completely dispossessed Aboriginal peoples; when one or more were
less influential, a more balanced (yet often unequal) relationship emerged.
Comparison helps to clarify Harris’s complex depiction of colonial
development in French and British North America. Not only does he compare
regions and colonies to each other, but he also draws on more global examples
to make his points. Canadian immigrants are contrasted both to their kin in
Europe, and also to the situation elsewhere in Canada. The result is a nuanced
conclusion that makes two critical points about early European settlers. First,
although colonial society was hardly a paragon of equality, the social gradient
was generally flatter and life in Canada better than from where they had come.
Second, Canada has a long history of multicultural immigration.
Harris’s frequent comparisons reflect his broad and thorough use of
secondary source material to underpin his argument. Bibliographies at the end
of each chapter put most doctoral comprehensive reading lists to shame. These
sources do not just provide the content for his depiction of early settler soci-
eties, but also for succinct discussion about how the sources conflict.
Historiographical discussions range from nineteenth-century debates over the
future of British North America to an argument that uses seigneurial case stud-
ies to debunk the idea of widespread agricultural crisis in early-nineteenth-centu-
ry Lower Canada. Unfortunately each chapter’s length reflects the amount of
historiography on the subject. A consequence of this is that chapters range
from 19 to 75 pages and will require creative manipulation to be used effectively
in the classroom.
A far more serious problem in the book is the relative absence of
Aboriginal people in the discussions of New France and Lower Canada. Nearly
every chapter, except for those focusing on the St. Lawrence River, discuss how
Europeans took possession of Aboriginal lands. The experiences along the St.
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Lawrence varied significantly from elsewhere in British North America. Rather
than engaging in treaties, or having their land outright stolen, these communities
held legal title under the guardianship of the Jesuits during the French regime. It
was only after the Conquest, and through processes seen elsewhere in British
North America, that their right to the land was challenged. Although the sec-
tions on New France and Lower Canada do an excellent job at illustrating the
centrality of French influence to Canada’s composition — one of Harris’s key
conclusions — the absence of Aboriginal people from his history of this region
risks leaving the reader with the impression that Aboriginal people were not dis-
possessed of their land here.
At the end of The Reluctant Land the reader is left with two conclusions
about how the preceding 250 years affected Confederation. In highlighting a
number of the potential political changes proposed during the two decades lead-
ing up to 1867, the book emphasizes the pragmatism and compromise that came
to define Confederation. In Harris’s view, Confederation cannot be boiled down
to the influence of a single founding personality or colonial narrative. Differing
mixtures of imperialism, commercial and industrial capitalism, and agricultural
settlement influenced the variety of goals and expectations that each colonial
stakeholder brought to Confederation. But there were some things all of the
stakeholders held in common: within these negotiations the aggressive nature of
settler colonialism on Aboriginal peoples was ignored. This remains
Confederation’s unfinished business.
It is sometimes tempting to dismiss Canada’s early history in favour of
some of the more immediate and dramatic events of the late-nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. The Reluctant Land demonstrates that some of the most fun-
damental issues facing contemporary Canadian society find their origins in an
earlier period. Ignoring (or skimming) Canada’s colonial past diminishes this
legacy and reinforces a limited knowledge of the Canadian relationship to multi-
culturalism, la francophonie canadienne, human-caused environmental change, and
Aboriginal people. Despite the problems outlined above, the book deserves to
be considered mandatory reading for all students seeking to understand Canada’s
past. There are few books that match The Reluctant Land in breadth and analysis.
Thomas Peace
York University
Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers:
National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009).
This account of the surveillance of Canadian lesbians and gays in the name of
national security is impressive, at once bone-chilling and inspiring. It builds on
Kinsman’s earlier work on sexual regulation to set out the systematic, and
Book Reviews118
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