What he was talking about when he talked about colonialism

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 2:33 AM - 68 Comments

The Prime Minister’s Office offers its interpretation of what the Prime Minister meant when he said in Pittsburgh that Canada has “no history of colonialism.”

“It was in response to a question from Reuters about Canada’s voice and role in the international financial market. Basically, the prime minister was giving some context and saying that unlike past global empires, Canada does not have a history of colonialism with respect to the financial market,” said spokeswoman Sara MacIntyre. “Past global empires have implemented policies that are colonial in nature. It was really focused on the international financial scene … I think it has been misunderstood and the prime minister stands behind his apology that was made last year.”

Footage of the Prime Minister’s press conference at the end of the G20 is here, the question in question coming nearer the end of his availability (about a third of the way through that video). The Reuters reporter wondered whether the Prime Minister was concerned Canada’s voice would be “diluted” as the G20 supplants the G8. The applicable portion of the Prime Minister’s response reads as follows. Continue…

Maclean’s Interview: Theodore Roszak

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

In 1969, historian Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture coined the term that defined a generation. His new book, The Making of an Elder Culture, explores the potential social sea change resulting from a geronto­cracy in which most of Western society is over the age of 50.

Q: You make the provocative claim that baby boomers have a second chance to reshape history due to their demographic clout, even that their place in history could hinge more on their second act as “elders” than their first act as radicals.

A: Yes, the people leading the way toward a gerontocracy are the same people who were raising hell on the college campuses of the ’60s. This is a very special population because they had a special historical experience that acquainted them with the willingness to make big changes. These people are going to be older for a longer period of time than they were ever young and have much more political and financial clout than younger people.

Q: How will this shift in social consciousness begin to shake out?

A: Well, once again the demographic weight is going to force people to think differently, even if they start off with a very negative attitude—which is generally the attitude we have toward aging. But you’re going to have to put up with the fact that we now have a lot of 70-year-olds and 80-year-olds who are not like your grandparents or great-grandparents. They go on working, they’re professionals, they are active. These are not just parasites leaning on the rest of the society. I talk about experience being of great economic value, but we’ve never given it enough weight in our economic thought. And I speak as a historian—this is an unprecedented state of affairs, and so it’s new to people, they’ve never had to think about the demographics of their society in this way. Continue…

"The deadliest disease in history"

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 12:08 PM - 1 Comment

The Spanish Flu began in China in 1918 and spread to North America on ships carrying home soldiers wounded in the First World War, reports the Ottawa Citizen in a look back at the 1918 epidemic and its impact on the city. Five weeks later, when it was finally over, at least 520 Ottawa residents—and about 50,000 people across the country—had died, many of them young adults. One Ottawa newspaper, the Journal, told the tale of a healthy baby who starved to death as the rest of the family (a mother, two brothers and a sister) lay sick in their beds with flu, unable to get up and feed the infant. In Ottawa, schools, theatres and concert halls were closed; churches cancelled services, and the Ottawa Electric Railway was made to disinfect its streetcars with formaldehyde daily. Short of doctors and nurses because of the war, health services were overrun; at least five doctors died of the flu. The death that struck the city the hardest, the Citizen reports, was that of Hamilton (Hamby) Shore, a 32-year-old local-born hockey star who died after nursing his wife back to health. Tributes to Shore appeared in newspapers throughout the city. After the outbreak was finally over, nearly 200 children and teens in Ottawa were orphaned by the disease.

Ottawa Citizen

Reading comprehension (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 12:45 PM - 44 Comments

Jason Kenney, last week. The minister said the information booklet that leads to the citizenship test has a page on recycling, but he said he doesn’t recall seeing one paragraph on Confederation.

Jason Kenney, interviewed in this week’s issue of Maclean’s. “Right now, if you look at the preparatory booklet for the test, there’s three sentences, I think, on Confederation history, and not one single sentence about Canadian military history.”

Abraham Lincoln's terminal illness

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 1:55 PM - 0 Comments

An American cardiologist is contending that Abraham Lincoln was suffering from a genetic disorder and would have died from cancer within a year had he not been assassinated. John Sotos says that Lincoln had multiple endocrine neoplasia, type 2B, which would explain his tallness, the lumps on his face and his well-known gastrointestinal problems. He wants to test the pillow on which Lincoln’s head rested after he was shot, which is preserved in a Philadelphia museum. There are blood stains on it and a DNA test would reveal the truth about whether Lincoln had the fatal disorder.

WBBM 780 Chicago

Globalization—It’s older than money

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, April 17, 2009 at 3:47 PM - 2 Comments

In their new book, academics Karl Moore and David Lewis trace the origins of the world economy all the way back to the origins of civilization. Drawing on archeology, religion and economic history, The Origins of Globalization argues that international trade has been around as long as trade itself—and that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Moore, a professor at McGill’s Desautels faculty of management, spoke with Macleans.ca about the book and the lessons the ancient world might hold for these troubled economic times.

Q: Your book is about globalization, and yet you write that “regionalization is the major story in the world economy.” How do you reconcile the two?
A: It used to be that there were two ways of looking at the world: the first level was national; the second one was global. Today, we argue there are four. We’ve added region-think NAFTA, the European Union. We also have-and Richard Florida has talked a lot about this-city and the creative class. Nation is becoming less important, while region and cities are becoming more important.
Continue…

How the Nazis made Germans complicit in the killing of the Jews

By macleans.ca - Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM - 2 Comments

How culpable are all Afghan men for the misogyny of religious zealots among them? How widely were Canadians responsible for the harm done to native children in residential schools? Were nearly all Rwandan Hutus implicated in the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis? Whenever the extent of group guilt is at issue, the ur-question lurking in the background is, How much did ordinary Germans know about the Final Solution? This review of recent breakthrough historical writing suggests a nuanced answer, perhaps best summed up as “enough to know that it was better not to know more.”

The Atlantic

Making fun of Canadian history

By Alex Shimo - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 13 Comments

Was Lester B. Pearson too nice to be prime minister? Was John Diefenbaker a mad, bug-eyed egotist? And was Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s marital relationship a little like that of father and daughter? These are the sorts of questions 25-year-old Kate Beaton gently probes in her series of comics on Canadian history, which are unusual enough to have sparked the sort of praise most writers spend a lifetime cultivating.

Originally from Cape Breton, Beaton is a Toronto-based cartoonist who has fans ranging from award-winning graphic novelists to geeky comic nerds. In the little over a year she’s been doing the comics, her work has been talked about on the website Wonkette and in Bitch magazine; a reviewer for Wired magazine called Beaton’s the “funniest comic that I’ve read in awhile.” Recently Daily Show writer Sam Means approached her to illustrate a children’s book he is writing. About 10 other agents and publishers have asked her to write a book, but so far she’s refused. Still finding her feet, Beaton wants to find out more about the industry so she doesn’t get shortchanged. Also, since she hasn’t yet drawn enough to fill a book, she doesn’t want to become “overwhelmed.”

Continue…

Historic documents survived WWII bombing raids. But the building project next door…

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 9, 2009 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

When the archives building in the German city of Cologne collapsed on March 3, the disaster claimed two lives and centuries of history—including the private papers of Nobel prize laureate Heinrich Böll. After years of negotiations, city officials had reached a deal with Boll’s heirs for $1.5 million and held a special transfer ceremony only three weeks ago. None of the documents, ranging from the writer’s school reports to photographs and 80,000 letters, had been copied electronically. The 30 km of file shelves also held documents written by Karl Marx, Georg Hegel and Jacques Offenbach, edicts issued by Napoleon Bonaparte and the minutes of city council meetings going back to 1376, which had survived Second World War bombing raids. Now, historians fear all are irreparably damaged under the mound of concrete, steel and glass rubble created when the archives’ foundations, undermined by a nearby building project, caved in.

The Guardian

History is Still Ending

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, August 23, 2008 at 7:30 PM - 0 Comments

It’s hard to find any analysis of the latest Russian or Chinese muscle-flexing in which the author doesn’t make some snide and knowing remark about how History doesn’t seem to have come to an end after all. Francis Fukuyama has finally got around to defending himself.

Reconstruction

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 6:10 PM - 0 Comments

I got a review copy of Shout! Factory’s The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet: Best of Ricky and Dave. Their first best-of set for Ozzie and Harriet was a major disappointment because all the episodes were syndicated versions, cut from the original 25 minutes to a more syndication-friendly 22 minutes. This set improves on the first one, but only a little: I checked the timings of of the 24 episodes included, and found that eight of them are original-length (25 minutes) and the other 16 are syndication cuts. These masters are provided to Shout! Factory by the only surviving Nelson, David, and it looks as if most of the prints in his collection are of the syndicated versions. Shout!’s Father Knows Best set was the same way, a mix of full-length and syndicated prints with no rhyme or reason as to which episodes were complete and which were not.

The reason I bring this up is that it’s one of the many frustrating things about watching or collecting television shows: so many of them exist in circulate or poor-quality versions. TV is in the same position that movies used to be in. For many years, studios simply didn’t care about preserving movies; they would make cuts to the original negatives, let the films deteriorate and even lose them entirely. Eventually movie fans, and moviemakers like Scorsese and Spielberg, raised awareness of the idea of film preservation, that movies need to be made available intact, uncut, and looking like they originally did. TV episodes were also treated like commodities that could be chopped up, beaten up and battered as much as necessary. The BBC and CBC and many other networks lost or erased many hours of great television; studios sometimes didn’t bother to keep the original episodes on hand once they were cut down for syndication; print quality ranged from mediocre to abominable.

What this means is that even if a studio is willing to release a show in its original form — and most of them are now making cuts and changes of their own even if they have access to the original prints — it may not know where to find the original versions. To reconstruct a show as it originally aired, complete and uncut, Continue…

Quebec and modern memory: a brief sequel

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 9, 2008 at 2:09 PM - 0 Comments

I will translate larger portions of André Pratte’s editorial when I get a minute, but here it is if you want to chew on it yourself. All I can say is that since I wrote this long post yesterday, the usual suspects at Le Devoir are continuing to chew the guedille over the Charest-Harper-Michaëlle Jean “rewriting” of history. Pratte’s editorial in La Presse will be distinctly embarrassing. He opens with a quote from….Champlain:

“Your Majesty must have enough knowledge of the discoveries made in his honour of New France (called Canada) through the writings that certain Captains and Pilots have made.”

That’s from 1613. Hmm. Continue…

History week continues here at Inkless

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 8, 2008 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

On the same day I post this rant about Le Devoir’s interpretation of Quebec history, our paper-and-staples magazine hits the streets with this column in which I compare Stephen Harper to Mackenzie King. Read ‘em and feel old!