Word from the Editor-in-Chief

The Journal of the Canadian Historical Association has long been a venue for the dissemination of papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. Until recently, in fact, the JCHA was restricted to publishing only articles that arose from presentations at the CHA conference. The journal’s mandate was changed in 2019 so that its call for papers could be opened more widely to any submissions by members of the CHA. As it turns out, this change was timely: the Annual Meeting scheduled for 2020 at Western University was cancelled due to COVID-19, and so there were no papers presented at a CHA conference that year. Nevertheless, the JCHA continues.

Volume 31 offers a mixture of articles originating in papers presented at an earlier (pre-pandemic) CHA conference and articles whose trajectory into print was interrupted or forced into detour by COVID-related disruptions. Issue 1 opens with an article by Olivier Guimond tracing the connections between Louis-Joseph Papineau’s seigneurialism and his admiration for Thomas Jefferson’s republicanism. Next, David M. K. Sheinin’s article analyzes changing perceptions of the Argentine frontier over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cheryl Thompson’s article explores how Black minstrelsy appealed to White audiences in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canada as a form of nostalgia for plantation slavery. This issue also features the roundtable for the CHA Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History Prize awarded to Shirley Tillotson for Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy, with contributions by Brian Getter, Lisa Pasolli, and Dimitry Anastakis. Issue 2 will offer additional articles and the roundtable for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize awarded to Aidan Forth for Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903.

Readers with a particular sensitivity to chronology may notice a change in how the journal treats the dates of its volumes. The JCHA has traditionally named each volume after the year of the associated Annual Meeting. Volume 30, for example, although it came out in 2020, was called “2019” because it contained papers that had been presented at the conference in 2019. Since the journal is no longer restricted to publishing only papers that were delivered at the CHA conference, the editors have decided to name the volumes after the years when these volumes appear. We hope that this change will alleviate some confusion around when the historians’ work is actually published, although we also recognize that it may introduce a new area of confusion: the seeming disappearance of 2020. When historians and historiographers in the future note that Volume 30 (the previous volume) was dated 2019 and that Volume 31 (this volume) was dated 2021, we can hereby assure them that the lack of 2020 is not an act of erasure on our part — however tempting an erasing of 2020 may be for people of our time — but rather an administrative catching up so that volume names more accurately reflect the chronology of publication.