By Keith Grant and Denis McKim
It was a packed house in Ottawa this summer for a Canadian Historical Association session entitled, “Who Killed Pre-Confederation Canadian History?” The large turnout and energetic Q & A period seemed to belie the title’s sense of demise: the history of early “Canada” appears to be alive and kicking.
Tom Peace and Robert Englebert, the organizers of that session, have rightly drawn attention to the relative underrepresentation of Pre-Confederation history at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, and wonder if this signals a wider crisis in the field. However, David Zylberberg has recently questioned this narrative of decline, observing that other measures—such as dissertations, faculty hires, or prestigious book prizes—suggest an enduring interest in early Canadian history. We might add, anecdotally, that for better or for worse, historians who work on New France, Indigenous peoples, or the British Empire often hang their academic hats at more specialized conferences or journals. Early Canadian sessions, for example, were a significant presence at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (Halifax, June 2014), and at the American Society for Environmental History (Washington, March 2015). Or recall the lively pieces by Jeffers Lennox (on the geography of interactions in early Nova Scotia) and Nancy Christie (on families and authority in counterrevolutionary Montreal) in recent issues of the William and Mary Quarterly. Plenty of good work on early Canada is being done; it’s just that a good deal of it is being done in contexts that aren’t overtly Canadian. Continue reading
In recent years, non-experts, with the Harper government leading the way, have advocated and pushed for a conservative rewriting of Canadian history in an effort to find “heroes”