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In 1922, the Chanak crisis unfolded in Turkey, Lionel Groulx published a novel imagining an earthly paradise in which the French would be free of English domination, journalist Miriam Green Ellis travelled through and reported on the Mackenzie River Delta, and four hundred people were “marooned” in the Lachine Rapids when their steamer cable broke.[1] People were born and lived and died in a myriad of ways, forgotten by most, remembered by some, but all part of the world that was Canada in 1922. This was the world in which people writing in the earliest version of this journal worked; within its pages, and over the hundred years of its existence, one glimpses something of what Canadians — or at least those Canadians who called themselves historians — considered important, or relevant, or useful about both the past and about the world within which they lived and worked. Much changed over a hundred years, but there is almost always a clear presence of what might be called “political history.” There are, within this narrower category as well, shifts and regenerations, fruitful alliances and surprising divisions; there is also remarkable continuity. Over the course of a hundred years, we find political history embedded, splintered, and repeated; never absolutely missing but equally never entirely marked. Finding the path of political history as it wends its way forward into the present is both heartening and cautionary, a reminder of both change and endurance.

In the very first presidential address delivered to what would become the Canadian Historical Association, Lawrence Burpee laid out a quintessentially Canadian origin story, one that offers useful information about the original orientation of the CHA and some clues to the reasons that the history published within the covers of the Journal evolved the way it did over the next century. “At the last annual meeting the Council [of the Historical Landmarks Association],” he reminded the audience, “was charged with the task of drafting a Constitution.” In Burpee’s rendition of the origin of the Canadian Historical Association, there were no fireworks, no divisions, no factions, just a constitution. The new organization even had elements of the federal constitution that shaped the nation: Burpee insisted that the change was not an abandonment of the “specific objects for which the Historical Landmarks Association was created,” but instead an incorporation of those purposes into “the general scheme of a national historical society.”[2] This new constitution would marry elements of the old organization into a new, broader, stronger alliance: Burpee foretold that “we may look forward to many years of increasingly valuable activities, in which our old work will by no means be overlooked, but will be associated with other efforts towards the encouragement of historical research and of an intelligent public interest in the history of our country.”[3] Thus in its very founding, the CHA echoed the political language of the period, designing constitutions that framed alliances and embraced older entities, even imagining its role in “bringing into more perfect harmony the two great races that constitute the people of Canada.” The Association’s publication, originally called the Report of the Annual Meeting, then the Historical Papers, and finally the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, similarly begins by centring politics in its scholarship. But as the Journal marks its centenary, not only has the place of political history changed but so too has the very meaning of political history.

Few authors explicitly identified their articles as works of “political history”; fewer still identified themselves as political historians. There are, perhaps, obvious reasons why this is so, which will be examined later, but without either authors or content to guide the identification of historical genus, what follows is the result of somewhat arbitrary decisions. Included in my definition of “political history” are all those articles which consider people who played roles in formal political activities, political institutions, political ideas, or political culture. Others, including in many cases the authors themselves, will disagree with my categorizations. Each of the articles might, under a different organizing principle, qualify as something other than political history. Nevertheless, this definition offers at least a way to begin to make sense of the vast backlist of potentially political history and allows us to offer some tentative conclusions about the way the field has changed over the last century, at least insofar as it is understood in the pages of the Report/Historical Papers/Journal.

Embedded: Understanding the “Political” within the “History”

In the very beginning, when the 1922 Report of the Annual Meeting marked the emergence of the Canadian Historical Association from the chrysalis of the Historic Landmarks Association, political history lurked within the “Anciens forts dans le nord-ouest,”[4] or at the “Landing Place of Jacques Cartier at Gaspe in 1534.”[5] The politics in 1922 was structural, emanating from places that had been the focus of the Historic Landmarks Association for the previous seventeen years of its existence. Even as members broke away from the landmarks that had been their earlier focus, there remained a clear physical presence to the political history examined in such works as D. C. Harvey’s study of the evolution of the senate in pre-Confederation Prince Edward Island.[6] It did not take long, however, for the rebranding of the association to bear fruit in the proliferation of topics tackled by members in the pages of the Report. Many of those topics, although certainly not all, were broadly political history. We find, for example, most of a volume devoted to Confederation, numerous examinations of political decisions, like where to locate a capital and loyalist land policy, as well as various considerations of political figures.[7]

These articles filled the pages of the early Journal, and presumably these sorts of topics and questions were what animated Canadian historians in an era when the very idea of a Canadian historian was only tentatively taking root. The way historians thought about their profession and about their scholarship in these early years was more speculative than it would become later; they were in the process of building a field, so the rules — “what sort of history will historians in Canada do?” — were very much still being made. In this regard, the situation of historians in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s was comparable to that of politicians and jurists in the early years after the implementation of the British North America Act. Confronted with a new framework — in this case, the idea of a Canadian nation — historical actors in the nineteenth century thought about what that meant, how it might be shaped or understood, and debated various alternatives.[8] In much the same way, historians in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s were able to ruminate, float trial balloons, and experiment with what being a historian in Canada actually meant.

In his analysis of American constitutional culture in the eighteenth century — again, a period when definitions were fluid and debate over what words like “law” and “republicanism” and “rights” meant — historian Jonathan Gienapp offers a useful paradigm for understanding the thinking of some of the American constitutional drafters. He reminds us that while some parts of the constitution were “constituted by text,” much was “non-constitutive, merely calling attention to pre-existing powers, principles and rights…. The constitutional text,” he continues, “was presumed to be embedded within a broader web of fundamental law that was not, by definition, textual in nature.”[9] Ideas that permeated a broader understanding of the legal environment did not need to be expressly included in the constitutional document; they were already rooted in the world of the eighteenth century. Gienapp reminds us that assumptions about the American constitution — how it worked and what it meant — were just as much a part of understanding the document as the words that were written on it. And if this is true about a constitution, then understanding the assumptions of the Canadian historical community in the 1920s and 1930s may offer some insights into the scholarship that appears in the pages of the journal. And what becomes abundantly clear in these early volumes is how embedded politics is within the history.

To think about history in the 1920s meant, for many, to think about politics in its many forms; it meant grappling with alliances and compromises, hierarchies and power shifts. Many of the early articles in the Report deal quite explicitly with political topics; others addressed issues that seemed, at least on the surface, to be about nonpolitical topics that might be more familiar to social or cultural historians of a later period. However, the consideration of politics was embedded deeply in the histories that were published in the first volumes of the Report. Even those subjects that seem to be unrelated to the political world — the study of the social club that Northwest Company traders established in the eighteenth century, for example, or an examination of the trials of settlement in early twentieth-century Saskatchewan — weave political considerations into their analyses. In Lawrence Burpee’s “The Beaver Club,” he utilized the minutes of the club, the manuscript diaries of one its members, and the occasional mentions in histories of Montreal to describe the activities of the group of traders and to debunk some of the earlier tales of their deeds. While there is plenty of information about drinking and dining, Burpee uses the club to understand the rise and fall of the Northwest Company, mapping its activities onto the company’s fortunes and examining the power structure of the fur trade through the social activities of its members. The “Beaver Club” is an element of the political world of the fur trade. The assumption in the 1920s was that historical insights shed light on political configurations, but that would not always be the case. In the hands of a twenty-first-century historian, however, the same evidence we find in Burpee’s article is used to support an examination of masculinity. Carolyn Podruchny’s “Beaver Club” is an interpretation that builds on the work of social and cultural historians, positioning the club within political and economic worlds and arguing that men could “honour strength and courage” within the confines of the club but also “venerate risk-taking.”[10]

In another example, Edmund Oliver writes about the Barr colonists and the establishment of Lloydminster in early twentieth-century Saskatchewan as a study of pluck and determination, and of settlement and territorial expansion, concluding that the colony successfully advertised the Northwest to potential immigrants in England. He positioned the episode within a political framework of colonial expansion and territorial occupation. Despite the fact that the article consisted of the lengthy reproduction of a series of letters from a Mr. and Mrs. William Rendell describing their experiences in coming to Canada — letters that described intimate family experiences rather than exploring larger political forces — Oliver’s analysis sees the Barr colonists as part of a political narrative. The assumption that understanding essentially political relationships was the goal of historical inquiry was deeply, deeply embedded in the thinking that permeates the pages of the journal. In at least the first two decades of the Report, articles like these two examples are fundamentally political, tacking analyses that in a later period would seem to point to social or cultural or religious analysis onto political scaffolding. History, then, was political, the politics embedded in the historical narratives in ways that were impossible — or seemed to be — to extricate.

The opposite embedding — or perhaps encasing — was also true of the early articles in the Report, where topics that appeared to be overtly political, like studies of political figures or political institutions, frequently strayed into discussions of a more private or personal nature. In R. G. Trotter’s consideration of the Durham Report, he describes the ideas as percolating in a deeply social environment of visits and correspondence and efforts to gain “the active good-will and cooperation of the French”; Fred Landon considers the Rebellion of 1837 as more than “certain military events in the city of Toronto” but as “the thoughts and passions, the endeavours and failures of the common folk of 1837.”[11] Scholars writing in the pages of the Report took erstwhile political events and considered elements of them — associations, ideas, economies — that in a later period might be considered something other than “political” history. Their political histories encased something much broader.

Similarly, the writers on these pages considered great politicians or military men,[12] and moments generally understood to have had political importance,[13] in what seems to be fairly traditional, by-the-books political history. But in the early years, these were particularly busy political histories, dabbling in much more than just the politics of the period. When Frank Underhill complained that the idea that Canadian history was boring was a result of overemphasizing “biographical details about the leading actors in the drama” at the expense of “studies of the atmosphere, social, economic and intellectual, in which the political movement took place,”[14] many scholars seem to have listened. The pages of the Report are filled with articles that took Underhill up on the challenge, ensuring that their political histories were textured analyses of the world within which politics was unfolding. The histories of “great men” in the pages of the Report included consideration of their emotional stability, their affections, their indebtedness to an economic elite, their intellectual tussles with questions of race and identity.[15] These were political histories that embraced far more than just the politics of a period or a person.

The Heyday of Political Biography and the Beginning of Fragmentation

The prevalence of political characters in the mid-twentieth century is noticeable. Characters often anchor studies of particular events, as Underhill did with his examination of Edward Blake and Unrestricted Reciprocity, or V. J. Jensen did with responsible government and LaFontaine.[16] The real domination of the biographical approach to political history occurred in the 1950s, when Donald Creighton’s star was particularly bright and his studies of Macdonald were illustrating the extraordinary literary possibilities that one life offered. Creighton only published one article on Macdonald, but the example of his wildly successful and much-praised two-volume biography must surely have had an impact on the explosion of political biography in the pages of the Report.[17] In the twenty years between the end of war and the reinvention of the Report as the Historical Papers, there were at least thrity-seven articles on “great men”: biographical interpretations of an era through the lens of a particularly prominent political player within that period. The earlier period had seen plenty of people used to frame the histories being written, too, but in the postwar period, the genre seemed to reach an important tipping point. While there were none in 1945, 1946, or 1947, in every year thereafter except for one, the Report included at least one article (and sometimes as many as four) that centred a political person as the scaffolding around which the article developed. By 1965, it seemed appropriate to invite an executive of the Macmillan Company of Canada to deliver a paper on “Biography as History,” so completely had the Canadian Historical Association embraced the genre.[18]

The takeover was not complete: nestled among the articles focusing on individual careers or decisions, there were pieces examining political practices, like responsible government, or institutions, like the Department of External Affairs,[19] but there were far fewer of these institutional political histories in the years between the end of the war and 1965 than there were people-centred analyses, especially written by Canadianists.[20] Thus the Canadian political history of mid-century published in the Report confirms a stereotype that has gained considerable traction since that time: political historians write about dead white men. Pinpointing why that might be the case offers some interesting ways of understanding the trajectory of political history over the last century, though, particularly as it was articulated in the pages of the Report. The biographical approach that seems to have found such favour may owe much to the importance of Donald Creighton’s work, but it also offered an opportunity to heed Underhill’s advice. A life given full consideration may have offered some clue to the nature and importance of various political developments, but it also gave historians a chance to tease out other sorts of meanings. Biography as a form offered political history as a field a chance to be about something more than just politics — like ideas, or emotions, or economics, or relationships. And the practice of political history, particularly as it was expressed in the biographical contributions that dominated the pages of the Report, was rich and complex, putting pressure on the boundaries that the idea of a political history subfield might impose.

The mid-sixties was the apex of political biography: the four people-centred articles in each of 1964 and 1965 were the highest number within one journal edition and were followed by a noticeable decline. The focus on an individual life that had offered scholars a chance to consider politics — but also so many other things — seemed less necessary. In 1966, rather suddenly, the bits and pieces that might have previously been contained in a consideration of a political life began to spill out into studies of their own. Biography, maybe life itself, began to fragment. There was a study of a collective, many examinations of political ideas, plus a couple of contributions on music and on jargon, all tentatively tethered to a study of politics;[21] but the centre (if indeed that is what politics was) was no longer holding quite so firmly.

This seems particularly significant at a time in the writing of history that the lure of social history was especially strong. Just as the Historical Papers’ pages are beginning to fill with articles on families[22] and on women,[23] the nature of the political history that was being published was also changing. Like their counterparts in social history, political historians began to move a little more clearly toward studies of the collective rather than the individual. In the political history published in the Historical Papers, what that looked like was a lot of papers on nationalism around the Canadian centenary, an increasing number of studies of parties, and a smattering of studies of political ideas. People were still there, to be sure, but when R. B. Bennett shows up in 1969, he’s the last Canadian prime minister to be the central character of an article in the Papers or its subsequent iteration as the Journal.[24] Others lend their name to a period, like the Diefenbaker era,[25] or are figures in policy studies,[26] but the biographies of prime ministerially great men disappear, and the people-centred political histories reorient toward the somewhat less great.[27] Even those, however, are exclusively men.

Fragmentation

Much has been made elsewhere of the changes that occurred to the historical profession in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, so a rehashing of the rise of social history in its many forms seems unnecessary here. But if the study of history in Canada in general seemed to fragment, splintering into different groups with many who had been excluded both writing the histories and figuring in the narratives, so too did the study of political history. If political history was embedded in the history that was written in the 1920s and 1930s, and embodied in the people that were the biographical subjects of the 1950s, by the 1960s and 1970s that core unit was beginning to splinter. The history that had carried a spine of politics even as it ruminated on other subjects gave way to overt discussions of those topics that had at first been peripheral. Women and children and animals all competed for space in the pages of the Journal; emotions and images and sounds began to take centre stage; political history became just one of many more approaches, and perhaps became more circumscribed in its ambition.

Political historians in the 1970s were inching toward the insights that microhistorians offered later: that much could be learned about big ideas by taking a close look at specific iterations. So we find Hector Mackenzie taking a deep dive into the negotiations around Canada’s Reconstruction Loan to Britain in 1946, offering an analysis of Canada’s position in the world through the process of one policy; we find James Pitsula investigating the limits of progressivism in his analysis of the Saskatchewan government’s treatment of Indigenous people in the 1970s; and we find in Miriam Wright’s work a reconsideration of the Cold War through fishing rights.[28] If the focus of the attention of political historians has changed somewhat in the one hundred years of the Journal’s publication, the conclusions that political historians suggest are no less expansive. Within the more restricted topic of, for example, copyright legislation, we still find political historians, in this case Bradley Miller, reaching conclusions about “the larger question of how the government defined its own power,” and how federal jurists and politicians pressed against the limits imposed by an imperial power.[29]

By the time Historical Papers had morphed in the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association in 1989, the political studies are starting to focus on food, on bureaucrats, and on politics outside the state.[30] The focus shifts from formal politics — the people who call themselves “politicians,” the institutions that dot the federal or provincial political landscape, the elections and policies that demarcate political time — to something more abstract. Scholars increasingly began to find political activities in unfamiliar places, like in language or forgotten legislation.[31] Political history is not necessarily about the people who made politics their business anymore — like prime ministers — but has instead transformed into being about many other things that involve negotiations about public power.

Political History Redux: Second Acts or, What’s Old Is New Again

It is not surprising to see a certain amount of repetition in one hundred years of scholarship. The political history in the twenty-first century is not quite as embedded as it was in the 1920s, but there are topics and approaches that were popular before the Second World War that remain so today. Moreover, political history remains something of a gateway to other types of historical inquiry.

Biography, for example, has certainly not disappeared from the toolbox of historians, and it continues to offer compelling opportunities. Indeed, many of the characters profiled in the pages of the early Report have been the subjects of important recent biographies. In 1925, for example, Walter Sage offered a preview of his book on Sir James Douglas, which itself would not appear for another twenty years. Sage’s study, both in its outline form in the pages of the Report, and then in its mature articulation as a monograph, offered a biographical interpretation of political developments, situating Douglas’s role as governor of British Columbia within the context of his fur trading background. His analysis was unquestionably political in its orientation, but in including comments on the Douglas archive, on Douglas’s role in the colonial project, and on his relationship with First Nations, he nods to the features of the Douglas story that were intriguing to Adele Perry, a far more recent chronicler of the family history.[32] For Perry, the domestic politics that was at the forefront of Sage’s work received less attention than did the networks of colonialism and generational transferral of ideas of race and power, but even this modern assessment of Douglas had clear roots in the work done almost a century earlier. Colonial Relations may not be purely political history, but it is certainly an outcome of it.

Where Sage’s work of political history gave rise to something more nuanced and complex a couple of generations later, other political topics examined in the pages of the Journal have remained topical as politics. Marjorie G. Reid’s study of the reasons that “Canada” remained British following the Seven Years’ War, for example, while focusing largely on diplomatic correspondence and cabinet discussions, was revisited in Helen Dewar’s 2010 Canadian Historical Review article on the same subject.[33] Dewar offers a far more conscious consideration of competing imperial ambitions, but the topic itself has remained both relevant — or at least interesting — and remained within the realm of politics for almost a hundred years. Indeed, many of the political topics introduced in the pages of the young Journal continued to be polished by subsequent generations of historians both in this publication and elsewhere.

Marching through the pages of the Journal from its first volume to its most recent demonstrates clearly that political history has changed shape, although perhaps not so much in these pages as I have argued elsewhere it has transformed more generally.[34] It has loosened its grip on the scholarship that is produced, but again — perhaps not so much as might be expected. In part, that is because there was always more than just political history being published in the Journal, so the decline in the years after 1965 to an average of two articles per issue, and even fewer in recent years,[35] is not quite so steep as the doomsayers would have one believe. And it most certainly has not disappeared — rare is the issue that has nothing on political history at all.

Many of the articles in the Journal, whether on political history or not, are first stabs at a topic, often by scholars just beginning their careers. Work that first appears in these pages often goes on to emerge as books with more complex arguments, more threads that are followed, more nuanced conclusions. Both the Journal and the field of political history itself has provided a springboard — and for far more than just those who identify as political historians. Lots of people dabbled in political history in the pages of the Journal when they might not primarily identify themselves as “political historians.” Jim Struthers, for example, wrote about pension politics and Dan Horner considered the debates about the 1847 typhus quarantine act in Montreal. These people — and many, many others in the pages of the Journal — used the jumping-off point of politics to get into much more complex issues.[36] In each of these cases, the early work on politics in the pages of the Journal led to larger projects on the welfare state, the ideology of improvement, and urban street culture. Politics is apparent in all of those subsequent studies, but it gets woven into a broader analysis of culture and economics, ideology, and class.

History itself has changed in one hundred years; assumptions about what is important and what is worth remembering and researching and analyzing have changed. It is no longer an embedded truth that history is about politics, but in the early years of this journal, the commitment to a political understanding of the past was deep. That changed as the threads of the weave of history began to be picked apart, but it did not mean that political history disappeared. Rather, it came to be a subfield of its own, capable of offering insights into the social and economic and cultural contexts of the past. Questions once answered have been asked again, now in different ways. What was once embedded is now articulated much more precisely, but it is still articulated. In 2021, three of the five stand-alone articles published in the Journal were “political”; rumours of the death of political history have been greatly exaggerated.[37]