randomosity

As I was wan­der­ing to the whole food store tonight I heard the dron­ing of an air­craft I couldn’t identify. There was the beat of a heli­copter blade, but I could identify the comingled drone of a heavy engine. Then as the sounds grew closer a huge Ford Tri-motor roared over the trees a block away. The Tri-motor was cruis­ing at no more than 1000ft accom­pan­ied by a heli­copter shoot­ing video. It was an amaz­ing sight. The sun was at a lovely even­ing height giv­ing a won­der­ful orangey ambi­ence, the sky clear and I was trans­por­ted to another era. I was drawn back to a time when an air­plane was the nov­elty (rar­ity) that the Tri-motor is today. What would it have been like to have seen this virilely power­ful metal beast soar­ing over a small town bring­ing the hope/promise/threat? of a faster com­mu­nic­a­tion and trans­port? The sheer size and mech­an­ical won­der must have inspired an awe even more sub­stan­tial than my serendip­it­ous amaze.

The heli­copter buzz­ing about the lar­ger ship seemed like a hawk being men­aced by a spar­row or two. Espe­cially as another heli­copter came shoot­ing across the sky­line head­ing in for a closer look as well. I will have to find out where the mag­ni­fi­cent beast was head­ing. A new addi­tion to the Cana­dian War­plane Her­it­age at the air­port per­haps. Given that only 18 are known to still exist, I was blessed with a rare exper­i­ence tonight.

Mar­vin McIn­nis chal­lenges the widely held belief that Cana­dian agri­cul­ture was adversely affected by the First World War. His talk at the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph Rural Roundtable yes­ter­day, presen­ted a nuanced and revi­sion­ary look at the com­mon story that war­time demand drove Cana­dian farm­ers to double acre­age devoted to wheat and unwit­tingly cre­ate a dan­ger­ous mono­cul­ture. A situ­ation that led to a massive col­lapse in GNP when the price of wheat col­lapsed after the war. McIn­nis’ earlier paper “Cana­dian Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment in the Wheat Boom Era” sets an appro­pri­ate stage for this fur­ther dis­cus­sion. In this paper, McIn­nis ques­tions the con­clu­sion that Canada’s rapid eco­nomic growth dur­ing the first dec­ade and a half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury res­ted on west­ern set­tle­ment and the ‘wheat boom.’ This has been a per­sist­ent and widely accep­ted view until more recent re-examination has ques­tioned the role of wheat in this growth and determ­in­a­tion that other factors were of greater con­sequence to this growth. This story though has sup­por­ted the con­sequent one that envi­sions war­time demand and response to it as greatly affect­ing Canada’s agri­cul­tural economy.

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The latest addi­tions to The Great Unsolved Mys­ter­ies in Cana­dian His­tory Pro­ject were pub­lished today. When I took a look at the three new mys­ter­ies I was reminded what a power­ful addi­tion to the teach­ing of Cana­dian his­tory that this col­lec­tion is. The new mys­ter­ies: “The Red­path Man­sion Mys­tery”, “Death on Painted Lake: The Tom Thom­son Tragedy,” and “Death of a Dip­lo­mat: Her­bert Nor­man and the Cold War” keep rais­ing the bar of how to effect­ively present mater­ial using the web. The pro­ject is a col­la­bour­at­ive effort amongst Cana­dian his­tor­i­ans to provide enga­ging and fun teach­ing tools dir­ec­ted towards high school and uni­ver­sity level stu­dents. The mys­ter­ies are presen­ted as self-contained web­sites, each one with its own theme and approach. Typ­ic­ally they provide com­pel­ling nar­rat­ive and also offer a wealth of primary doc­u­ments and other source mater­ial to aid in learn­ing about Cana­dian His­tory and his­tor­ical meth­ods. With the addi­tion of these new mod­ules, the breadth of the site is reach­ing a point of crit­ical mass and offer a nicely diverse col­lec­tion from through­out time and geo­graphic area.

About a year ago I adop­ted the French Repub­lican Cal­en­dar for my per­sonal journ­alling. Why? Really for no other reason than to be dif­fer­ent. It offered me the oppor­tun­ity to learn the Repub­lican Cal­en­dar through prac­tise (a word-a-day sort of arrange­ment). The upheaval of the switch to a new sys­tem in France in 1795, caused con­fu­sion, was not widely adop­ted and in the end was dis­con­tin­ued by Napo­leon dur­ing the Empire. This was not before such ref­er­ences such as the Coup of 18 Bru­maire and lob­ster Ther­midor forever embed­ded the poet­i­cisme of the cal­en­dar­ing sys­tem in our his­tor­ical memory.

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I was enter­ing some dummy cita­tions into a social net­worked text shar­ing pro­ject on the week­end.
Serendip­it­ously I chose the genre of his­tor­ical fic­tion and ended up reflect­ing on some of the more mem­or­able books I have enjoyed. At the top of that list is the mem­oirs of Bartho­lomew Wolfe Bandy by Don­ald Jack. This multi-volume series was very deservedly awar­ded the Stephen Lea­cock Award for humour on three occa­sions. This is all the more appro­pri­ate given the very Lea­cockian style of the Bandy papers them­selves.
If you have not ever been exposed to Bandy, I can not recom­mend these books enough. They are superb examples of the comedic novelist’s art down the line of P.G Wode­house, Evelyn Waugh and George Mac­don­ald Fraser. Set in early twen­ti­eth cen­tury Ontario, B.W. Bandy, the hero is an Ott­awa val­ley farm boy who heads off to fight in the First World War. He meets real life not­ables along the way, enjoys some of the most bril­liantly told adven­tures and des­pite the comedic deliv­ery actu­ally teaches much about Cana­dian his­tory. These nov­els demon­strate the close con­nec­tion between lit­er­at­ure and his­tory — the endur­ing import­ance and beauty of a tale well told.

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Dr. Kathy Garay of the McMas­ter Lib­rary gave a lively and fast-paced talk explor­ing the nature of majesty to the Medi­eval and Early Mod­ern Research Group. Her paper,“Manufacturing Majesty: Eliza­beth of Hun­gary, Diana of Eng­land and the Con­struc­tion of Royal Saints, 1207–2007,” reflec­ted on the rather strik­ing sim­il­ar­it­ies between St. Eliza­beth of Hun­gary and Lady Diana Spen­cer. Par­tic­u­larly:

• Lin­eage
• Texts
• Mar­ital Love
• In-Laws
• Beauty
• Moth­er­hood
• The Third Person
• Char­ity
• Agency
• Funeral Rites
• Leg­acy

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A good friend of mine has arranged access to the digit­ised records of the New York Emig­rant Sav­ings Bank for 1850–1883. What a won­drous treas­ure trove of inform­a­tion! These records con­tain the deposit details for thou­sands of newly-arrived immig­rants to New York from 1850. The bank was estab­lished by the Irish Emig­rants Soci­ety and served a largely Irish pop­u­la­tion. Amaz­ingly, the Emig­rant Sav­ings Bank is still around, hold­ing about $15 bil­lion in assets.
These older records are an imme­di­ate resource for gene­a­lo­gists. In addi­tion to trans­ac­tion details, the records include a ‘test book’ which con­tains inform­a­tion on place of res­id­ence, spouse and chil­dren, occu­pa­tion, and addi­tional other nug­gets of inform­a­tion¹. This inform­a­tion was com­piled when a depos­itor wished to send money back home to Ire­land. I am par­tic­u­larly fas­cin­ated by the ledgers which record depos­its and with­draw­als for a large groups of people over a sub­stan­tial period of time. There is a huge fur­ther digit­isa­tion pro­ject here to con­tinue to enter data from these records into formats allow­ing for fur­ther study.
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1. Check out the find­ing aid from the NYPL ref­er­enced above for more details [↩]

In my con­tinu­ing effort to dir­ect you away from my blog, I am com­pelled to note Bill Turkel’s follow-up to a post I ref­er­enced last week. In this one he pon­ders our con­scious cre­ation of “islands of stasis” and why an ana­chron­istic mode of research prac­tise per­sists. More import­antly his ‘punch­line’ refers briefly to how to make use of tools, such as Zotero, effi­ciently to com­pre­hend our private research pro­cesses. He muses “that meas­ure­ments of your Zotero bib­li­o­graphy will be most use­ful to the extent that they are fed back into your research in a use­ful way.” This is very power­ful obser­va­tion and activ­ity, but also dan­ger­ous.
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Bill Turkel has writ­ten a thought pro­vok­ing post at Digital His­tory Hacks call­ing for a re-conception of how we ‘do’ his­tory. He sum­mar­izes his under­stand­ing of the con­ven­tional pro­cess involving meas­ured, con­crete steps, that unfor­tu­nately pre­sup­pose that time essen­tially stands still as we prac­tise our craft. Here I learn about Par­men­ides. Turkel pro­poses a rad­ical new model that accounts, not only for the aspect of con­tinual change, but to my mind also sug­gests that the future of our prac­tise is in greater real-time col­lect­ive research products. I would nor­mally point dir­ectly at a not­able post, but this one war­ran­ted par­tic­u­lar acknow­ledge­ment in hope that you will check it out. Great points to ponder.

I just dis­covered at the HNN that George Mac­don­ald Fraser, author of the acclaimed Flash­man series of his­tor­ical fic­tion novel, passed away yes­ter­day. His rib­ald con­tri­bu­tions to a true appre­ci­ation of the nuances of Vic­torian mil­it­ary and social his­tory will be missed. I have always looked for­ward to the next install­ment of the Flash­man papers. The obits remind that he was author, journ­al­ist and screen­writer. When Octopussy with Roger Moore as James Bond came out I remem­ber think­ing that it had a rather dif­fer­ent feel than other bonds. The Indian scenes were exotic and there even seemed to be a dif­fer­ent pace. Shortly there­after I found out that Fraser had done the screen play and I should have sensed the famil­iar had at work.
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