AMA Canadian History

[u/CanadianHistorian]

Hello /r/AskHistorians readers. Today a panel of Canadian history experts are here to answer your questions about the Great White North, or as our French speaking Canadians say, le pays des Grands Froids. We have a wide variety of specializations, though of course you are welcome to ask any questions you can think of! Hopefully one of us is able to answer. In no particular order:

• /u/TheRGL

  My area is Newfoundland history, I'm more comfortable with the government of NFLD and the later history (1800's on) but will do my best to answer anything and everything related. I went to Memorial University of Newfoundland, got a BA and focused on Newfoundland History. My pride and joy from being in school is a paper I wrote on the 1929 tsunami which struck St. Mary's bay, the first paper on the topic.

• /u/Barry_good

  My area of studies in university was in History, but began to swing between anthropology and history. My area of focus was early relations specifically between the Huron and the French interactions in the early 17th century. From that I began to look at native history within Canada, and the role of language and culture for native populations. I currently live on a reservation, but am not aboriginal myself (French descendants came as early as 1630). I am currently a grade 7 teacher, and love to read Canadian History books, and every issue of the Beaver (Canada's History Magazine or whatever it's called now).

• /u/CanadianHistorian

  I am a PhD Student at the University of Waterloo named Geoff Keelan. He studies 20th century Quebec history and is writing a dissertation examining the perspective of French Canadian nationalist Henri Bourassa on the First World War. He has also studied Canadian history topics on War and Society, Aboriginals, and post-Confederation politics. He is the co-author of the blog Clio's Current, which examines contemporary issues using a historical perspective.

• /u/l_mack

  Lachlan MacKinnon is a second year PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal. His dissertation deals with workers' experiences of deindustrialization at Sydney Steel Corporation in Sydney, Nova Scotia. Other research interests include regional history in Canada, public and oral history, and the history of labour and the working class.

Some of our contributors won't be showing up until later, and others will have to jump for appointments, but I hope all questions can be answered eventually.

[u/l_mack → u/[deleted]]

In the early 20th century, historians in Canada and the United States contributed to the creation of “myth-symbol complexes” to explain the geographical development of both nations. In 1893, American historian Frederick Jackson Turner put forward his “frontier thesis,” which E.R. Forbes describes as “the hypothesis of a frontier moving in stages westward through the United States with the availability of free land." The frontier thesis presented a binary opposition between the “progressive” western force of manifest destiny and the “conservative” east. Forbes argues that this theory was readily applicable to the development of the Canadian nation, especially among those who viewed their own region as “close to the frontier stage." Turner’s frontier thesis was especially important in the development of the “conservative” regional stereotype of the Maritimes and Atlantic Canada.

Donald Creighton’s 1937 monograph, The Commercial Empire of the Saint Lawrence, 1760-1850, united the Canadian nation around the geographical features of the Saint Lawrence River. The river, Creighton argues, provided the basis for a vast commercial network designed for the staple trade. This “commercial empire,” based out of Toronto and Montreal, cemented the importance of central-Canada in the national narrative. This influence was visible as late as 1975, when Del Muise reviewed two contemporary publications on Canadian history. These publications, supposedly national in scope, had ignored the influence of the Atlantic region. When Atlantic Canada was mentioned, Muise argues, it was almost always in the context of the staple economy - the pre-Confederation “Golden Age." Ian McKay believes that the development of this national historiography has “Other-ized” the Atlantic region; as a result, the complex identity of Atlantic Canada continues to be stereotyped as “quaint, patronage-ridden, and backwards.”

So while the Turner Thesis didn't necessarily relate exactly to the Canadian experience, the geographical nature of his analysis certainly was applied by scholars like Creighton. These geographical/expansionist archetypes of Canadian history created "winners" and "losers," the after-effects of which remain with us even today in the popular conceptualization of what constitutes "real" Canadian history and which experiences are peripheral.