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Welcome to our third annual CHA Reads! We’re back again this year, with five readers to review and reflect on the five books shortlisted for the Canadian Historical Association’s (CHA) Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize in 2019.

Over the course of this week, five scholars will argue why their book should win the coveted award.

Based on the format of CBC’s Canada Reads, five different scholars have agreed to champion these five books. They are:

  • Dan Horner (Ryerson University)
  • Mary-Ann Shantz (MacEwan University)
  • Heather Green (St. Mary’s University)
  • Jessica DeWitt (NiCHE)
  • Emma Battell Lowman (University of Hertfordshire)

And Andrea will be acting as moderator.

Each scholar selected a book that was outside their particular field of expertise, so that the books could be judged on their merits alone. Because we are Canadians and academics, we have decided that this will be a friendly discussion, rather than a competition. To that end, each scholar has written a short piece explaining the merits of their chosen book and why they think it should win the top prize in Canadian history.

 

The Contenders

Here is this year’s shortlist for the CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize, in alphabetical order, as determined by jury members.

Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren. Le Piège de la liberté: Les peuples autochtones dans l’engrenage des régimes coloniaux. Montreal: Les éditions du Boréal, 2017.

Cover of Le Piège de la liberté: Les peuples autochtones dans l'engrenage des régimes coloniaux.

Le présent ouvrage raconte comment la « rencontre des deux mondes » entre les nations autochtones et les empires européens a provoqué un immense choc des cultures. Il analyse les mécanismes qui ont mené, au nom de la civilisation, à l’écrasement et à l’expropriation des peuples de l’Amérique septentrionale. Par des exemples concrets, il dévoile ce que les auteurs appellent « le piège de la modernité », la liberté promise par les Occidentaux servant en définitive à opprimer et à refouler les populations amérindiennes. Vaste fresque qui couvre plus de trois cents ans d’histoire, ce livre nous en apprend au moins autant sur les nations autochtones à l’époque coloniale que sur le monde occidental dans lequel nous vivons. Le portrait qui se dégage de cette étude à la fois fouillée et accessible est d’une implacable lucidité.

 

Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon. Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton. Montreal: Les éditions du Boréal, 2018.

Cover of Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton

La Commission royale d’enquête sur le bilinguisme et le biculturalisme, communément appelée commission Laurendeau-Dunton, s’est tenue tout au long de la décennie 1960, période associée à la Révolution tranquille, au repli du Québec sur l’État québécois et à la montée de l’indépendantisme. Elle représentait une importante entreprise de réconciliation nationale pour résorber ce que certains observateurs de l’époque appelaient la crise canadienne, une entreprise où des notions comme le bilinguisme, le biculturalisme, le multiculturalisme et un statut spécial pour le Québec ont été abordées. Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon vise à situer l’origine de ces notions tout en examinant leurs manifestations ainsi que les débats intellectuels qui ont permis de les définir. Elle veut également témoigner de la richesse intellectuelle des années 1960, alors que les experts en sciences sociales se sont mobilisés comme jamais auparavant, en déployant des réseaux internationaux notamment, pour mieux comprendre le projet confédératif, cerner ses failles et tracer les voies de l’avenir. Ce livre permet de renouer avec des personnalités qui ont joué un rôle crucial dans l’histoire québécoise et canadienne, notamment André Laurendeau, Paul Lacoste, Léon Dion, Frank Scott et Gertrude Laing, et de plonger dans leur conception d’un Canada idéal. Il permet également de mettre en lumière la complexité du projet canadien et nous rappelle tous les espoirs de voir une constitution refondée dans les années 1960, une question qui demeure toujours actuelle.

 

Jean-François Lozier. Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018.

Cover of Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century.

The Saint Lawrence valley, connecting the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, was a crucible of community in the seventeenth century. While the details of how this region emerged as the heartland of French colonial society have been thoroughly outlined by historians, much remains unknown or misunderstood about how it also witnessed the formation of a string of distinct Indigenous communities, several of which persist to this day.

Drawing on a range of ethnohistorical sources, Flesh Reborn reconstructs the early history of seventeenth-century mission settlements and of their Algonquin, Innu, Wendat, Iroquois, and Wabanaki founders. Far from straightforward byproducts of colonialist ambitions, these communities arose out of an entanglement of armed conflict, diplomacy, migration, subsistence patterns, religion, kinship, leadership, community-building, and identity formation. The violence and trauma of war, even as it tore populations apart and from their ancestral lands, brought together a great human diversity.

By foregrounding Indigenous mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley, Flesh Reborn challenges conventional histories of New France and early Canada. It is a comprehensive examination of the foundation of these communities and reveals the fundamental ways they, in turn, shaped the course of war and peace in the region.

 

Joshua MacFayden. Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent. Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018.

Cover of Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent.

Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint – critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded expanded paint markets. Flax Americana re-examines the changing relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and the land through a narrative of Canada’s first and most important industrial crop.

Initially a specialty crop grown by Mennonites and other communities on contracts for small-town mill complexes, flax became big business in the late nineteenth century as multinational linseed oil companies quickly displaced rural mills. Flax cultivation spread across the northern plains and prairies, particularly along the edges of dryland settlement, and then into similar ecosystems in South America’s Pampas. Joshua MacFadyen’s detailed examination of archival records reveals the complexity of a global commodity and its impact on the eastern Great Lakes and northern Great Plains. He demonstrates how international networks of scientists, businesses, and regulators attempted to predict and control the crop’s frontier geography, how evolving consumer concerns about product quality and safety shaped the market and its regulations, and how the nature of each region encouraged some forms of business and limited others.

The northern flax industry emerged because of border-crossing communities. By following the plant across countries and over time Flax Americana sheds new light on the ways that commodities, frontiers, and industrial capitalism shaped the modern world.

 

Shirley Tillotson. Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.

Cover of Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy.

Can a book about tax history be a page-turner? You wouldn’t think so. But Give and Take is full of surprises. A Canadian millionaire who embraced the new federal income tax in 1917. A socialist hero, J.S. Woodsworth, who deplored the burden of big government. Most surprising of all, Give and Take reveals that taxes deliver something more than armies and schools. They build democracy.

Tillotson launches her story with the 1917 war income tax, takes us through the tumultuous tax fights of the interwar years, proceeds to the remaking of income taxation in the 1940s and onwards, and finishes by offering a fresh angle on the fierce conflicts surrounding tax reform in the 1960s.

Taxes show us the power of the state, and Canadians often resisted that power, disproving the myth that we have all been good loyalists. But Give and Take is neither a simple tale of tax rebels nor a tirade against the taxman. Canadians also made real contributions to democracy when they taxed wisely and paid willingly.

When citizens confront taxation, it is a sign of a vigorously democratic political life. Our unruly tax history should be better known, and perhaps even celebrated.

This book will appeal to those interested in Canadian history and the evolution of our political institutions and cultures, including students and scholars of political science, public policy, taxation, social movements, and governance.

 

The Breakdown

So here is how CHA Reads is going to work. We will be posting two blog posts per day today, tomorrow, and Thursday. The first will be published at 10 am PST, the second at 1 pm PST.

Today, we kick off this mini-series of sorts with an introduction to the series, followed by Dan Horner defending Valérie Lapointe-Gagnon’s Panser le Canada: Une histoire intellectuelle de la commission Laurendeau-Dunton.

On Wednesday, Mary-Ann Shantz will defend Jean-François Lozier’s Flesh Reborn: The Saint Lawrence Valley Mission Settlements through the Seventeenth Century, followed by Heather Green defending Shirley Tillotson’s Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy.

On Thursday, Jessica DeWitt will defend Joshua MacFayden’s Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent,and later in the day, Emma Battell Lowman will defend Denys Delâge and Jean-Philippe Warren’s Le Piège de la liberté: Les peuples autochtones dans l’engrenage des régimes coloniaux

Friday will feature a live twitter conversation of all five books and their defenders which everyone can participate in. Here, we will explore some of the questions and themes that emerged over the course of the week. The relevant hashtag will be #CHAreads2019, and the resulting conversation will be posted on the blog later in the day. The conversation will occur in the afternoon, with the time yet to be confirmed.

 

Social Media

We would love to continue this conversation throughout the week on social media! Use the hashtag #chareads2010 to follow along with the discussion and participate on Twitter. You can also follow all of us individually at the following accounts:

Be sure to join us Friday on Twitter all day when all CHA Reads contributors will be available for questions and answers, and further discussion! Who says Canadian historians don’t know how to have some interactive fun?

Coming up next, our first post!

Special thanks for Catherine Mary Ulmer for having come up with the idea for CHA Reads in the first place.

 

Don’t forget to check out the other posts in the series:

 

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