Historiography of Canada
Diplomatic history starts in the early 20th century, and for the post 1945 era emphasizes Canada's role as a middle power in world affairs.
The most influential of the amateur historians was François-Xavier Garneau (1809–1866), a self-educated poor boy who defined the essence of Quebec nationalistic history for a century with his Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’ à nos jours (3 vol., multiple editions from 1845 onward).
He assumed the assimilation of French Canadians into a superior British culture was inevitable and desirable, for he envisioned Canada as one nation with one anglophone population.
By far the most popular of the amateurs was the Harvard-based American Francis Parkman (1823–1893), whose nine volumes on France and England in North America (Boston, 1865–92) are still widely read as literary masterpieces.
[11]The Conquest of New France has always been a central and contested theme of Canadian memory—as exemplified by an episode in 2009 when re-enactors were prevented from restaging the decisive 1759 battles in Québec.
[12] Cornelius Jaenen argues: The Conquest has remained a difficult subject for French-Canadian historians because it can be viewed either as economically and ideologically disastrous or as a providential intervention to enable Canadians to maintain their language and religion under British rule.
[14]At the other pole, are those Francophone historians who see the positive benefit of enabling the preservation of language, and religion and traditional customs under British rule.
[13] Scholars such as Donald Fyson have pointed to the legal system as a success, with the continuation of French civil law and the introduction of liberal modernity.
[17] Anglophone historians, in sharp contrast, typically celebrated the Conquest as a victory for British military, political, and economic superiority that was a permanent benefit to the French.
The Loyalist tradition, as explicated by Murray Barkley and Norman Knowles, includes: The elite origins of the refugees, their loyalty to the British Crown, their suffering and sacrifice in the face of hostile conditions, their consistent anti-Americanism, and their divinely inspired sense of mission.
Canadians think of it equally pridefully as a war of defense in which their brave fathers, side-by-side, turned back the massed might of the United States and saved the country from conquest.
A powerful oligarchy closely tied to Britain controlled Upper Canada (Ontario), and their criteria for legitimacy was loyalty to London, rather than heroic episodes in the war of 1812.
They argued that the Canadian Economy (beyond the level of subsistence farming) was primarily based on exports of a series of staples—fish, fur, timber, wheat—that shipped to Britain and the British Empire.
Innis argued that Canada developed as it did because of the nature of its staple commodities: raw materials, such as fish, fur, lumber, agricultural products, and minerals.
This fur trade was controlled by large firms, such as the Hudson's Bay Company and thus produced the much more centralized, business-oriented society that today characterizes Montreal and Toronto.
They hoped Creighton could modernize the field and he came through, by adding not just biography, but also social, cultural, and especially long-term economic patterns as the matrix on which Canadian politics was played out.
Canadian policy was never to develop agriculture so as to improve the conditions of those who cultivated the soil but to aid imperial military and political goals and provide profits for commercial interests.
He says the: interpretive schemes that dominated Canadian historical writing through the middle decades of the twentieth century were built on the assumption that history had a discernible direction and flow.
[46]With the decline of Whig history, Canadian scholarship since the late 20th century has avoided overarching themes and concentrated on specialized research topics.
[50] Greer concludes that: The result has been a great advance in empirical knowledge: myths have been punctured, generalizations of the and qualified, and a wealth of factual data has been accumulated.
[52] In a 2000 journal article, historian Ian McKay argued that Canadian Confederation was motivated by the ideology of liberalism and the belief in the supremacy of individual rights.
The struggle over Confederation involved a battle between a staunchly individualist economic philosophy and a comparatively collectivist view of the state's proper role in the economy.
According to Smith, the victory of the statist supporters of Confederation over their anti-statist opponents prepared the way for Sir John A. Macdonald's government to enact the protectionist National Policy and to subsidize major infrastructure projects such the Intercolonial and Pacific Railways.
She argues that their intellectual debts to Locke are most evident when one looks at the 1865 debates in the Province of Canada's legislature on whether or not union with the other British North American colonies would be desirable.
The flagship Canadian Historical Review was heavily weighted toward political history, giving priority to macro themes such as elite politicians and statesmen, public institutions, and national issues.
Glassford argues that: The Big Questions are now seen to be societally based, and emanate from a cultural interpretation of such fundamental concepts as social class, gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and sexual orientation.
[60] Granatstein recalls the backlash: As the old white males rallied themselves and fought back, the resulting war produced heavy casualties, much bloodshed, and vast expenditures of time and effort.
[62] Franca Iacovetta reported in 2007: Although the most prestigious awards and endowed chairs still go mostly to men, and men still outnumber women at the full professor rank, the greater influence of feminist historians within the wider profession is evident in their increased presence as journal and book series editors, the many scholarly prizes, the strong presence of women's and gender history on conference programs, and the growing number of their students who are in full-time positions.
[64] The advent of the feminist movement, combined with the "New social history" that featured the study of ordinary people, created a new demand for a historiography of women.
[65] Research has often been interdisciplinary, using insights from feminist theory, literature, anthropology and sociology to study gender relations, socialization, reproduction, sexuality, and unpaid work.
