Rather than accept John Norton’s self-fashioning at face value, I explore the incongruities, counterclaims, and complexities that make it appear much more likely that Norton was an early-modern trans-Atlantic shapeshifter, stretching the truth at best, and completely fabricating his own reality at worst.
Greer positions the absence of context, connections between collections, and supports that reflect the nuance of archival research as LAC being “determined to hide the results of their past efforts from the eyes of researchers”. In actuality, what is unfolding is a predictable outcome of an impossible situation and the absence of an adequate number of trained professionals to provide anything better.
In fairness to LAC, I recognize that their problems are rooted in chronic underfunding. That and a succession of governments measuring their success with inappropriate metrics. While wishing that management had made different choices under the pressure of inadequate financing, I also wish they were not forced to choose between outreach and basic archival services.
It is as if LAC had shoveled its digitized material out into a virtual dumpster and invited researchers to dive in. There are indeed treasures to be found here, but systematic research is out of the question.
This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2015 edition of Canada Watch: The Politics of Evidence. By Karen Murray Knowing our democratic selves, our democratic possibilities, and most crucially our democratic failings steers us toward greater freedom and justice in Canada and beyond. With these thoughts in mind, I offer a personal reflection on the erosion of the people’s memory… Read more »
By Thomas Peace This post is a little late in coming, but hopefully it will be useful for those of us working in pre-twentieth century North American history or with online resources. About a year ago, I discovered that one of the most useful reference resources I use, Statistics Canada’s E-Stat tables of the Censuses of Canada, 1665-1871 had been… Read more »
Digital History isn’t for everyone. In Canada, according to the 2010 Canadian Internet Use Survey, one-fifth of all households remain without access to the internet in the home.
By Sean Kheraj If there was a weekly prize for active historians in Canada, Ian Mosby would have been last week’s winner. Canadian national news media (including print, radio, television, and web) prominently featured Dr. Mosby’s recently published Histoire Sociale/Social History article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952.” This paper… Read more »
By Pete Anderson I had the good fortune to facilitate a lively discussion on the role of public historians in the history wars at a ‘dine around’ session during the recent annual conference of the National Council on Public History, held in Ottawa from April 17-20. We had representatives from both Canada and the United States of various ages and… Read more »
The new history wars are not battles over the meaning of Canadian history. They are battles over public financing of historical research and historical preservation.
