Monod, David. 'Who Owns History Anyway?' The Political Assault on North
American History. In: Ahornblätter. Marburger Beiträge zur Kanada-Forschung.
12. Marburg 1999. (Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek Marburg; 90)
ISBN 3-8185-0274-9 ISSN 0931-7163 http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sum/90/sum90-5.html
"The new historians have effectively and efficiently taken over
history, setting up new journals or assuming control of the old. They ascended
to the presidencies of the scholarly associations and set up specialized
associations of their own, driving out all those who did not follow the
mandated approach. They rewarded themselves with the prizes and fellowships
that were under the control of historians ... They took over the hiring
processes in their departments, thus guaranteeing that they could replicate
themselves at will, and they trained graduate students to do the kind of
work they preached and practiced. They freely denounced the political historians
as second rate; teaching unimportant subjects and publishing shoddy work."
1
Well, the old white males have rallied themselves and are now fighting
back and they have some unusual allies. In this paper, I will discuss the
concerted assault that has been launched on the credibility of social history,
both from within the university and from beyond it. The struggle for dominance
within history has in the last decade entered the public arena and I will
try to demonstrate that the contest has actually already undermined the
position of social history within the intellectual community. In fact,
though social historians continue to occupy key positions on granting agencies
and professional associations in certain niche fields, such as Canadian
history, in the broader North American context their dominance has already
been shattered.
The problem for social historians is that they have since the 1980s been
waging a war on three fronts. On the one side, they have been wrestling
to contain the corrosive influence of cultural studies; on the other, they
have faced in the 1990s a rear-guard action on the part of traditional
historians.2 More seriously, while
they have been so preoccupied, the gains they had won outside the university
- their influence over school curricula, the writing and airing of popular
history and student interests - have been eroded.
Internal divisions and self-doubts have contributed to these troubles.
Though few North American social historians were Soviet marxists, the existence
of an alternative to capitalism grounded their dissent from traditional
history and their criticism of dominant power structures. Superpower confrontation
lent a certain credibility and relevance to the argument that history involved
a struggle between oppressor and oppressed. The collapse of global alternatives
and the fracturing of the left under the body blows of feminism and multiculturalism
served to confuse social historians and to undermine their unity. This
crisis has found reflection in the social-historical canon whose more recent
elements seem strikingly bereft of purpose. The great interpretative frameworks
that were established in the 1960s and early 1970s continue to preoccupy
too many of their number, confining their thoughts to the well-worn grooves.
Though scholars are producing endless studies that qualify, localize, nuance
or correct existing models, they are not developing frameworks that might
serve as launching pads to new heights. With the collapse of confidence
in alternatives to bourgeois capitalism their work has taken on an almost
surreal irrelevance. The cultural studies invasion since the mid-1980s
has uprooted the rest.3
While cultural studies has freed many social historians from traditional
concerns, it has also helped to denude them of their purpose. Unable to
any longer confidently ground their beliefs in the political rightness
of what they did, many historians have accepted the weightlessness of post-modern
relativism. History according to Michael Keefer, a prominent Canadian proponent
of cultural studies, should not involve putting the past "in a proper
order of causal dependence," rather it should be "baffling, laden
with inconsistencies, a sequence of unconcluded struggles and contests.4
From this perspective realities and facts have become texts to be read
and re-read, fragments of the past that float freely in interpretative
space, with attachments to be sure, but without secure moorings.
Still, those social historians who surrendered to the seamless flow
of cultural studies have generally been more confused than destructive.
Greater harm to the discipline has been wrought by the cultural studies
advocates who have in the last ten years invaded the field from outside,
denying the validity of social history and attacking the very basis of
its claim to voice the interests of the forgotten. Cultural studies in
North America needs to be distinguished from cultural studies in Germany,
though many of the great names of German cultural analysis - George Mosse,
in particular - have a kind of cult-like status among American thinkers.
Cultural studies in North America has been heavily influenced by semiotics,
to the extent that it treats all objects as signs containing socially significant
meanings, and by post-structuralism, in the sense that it denies that those
signs represent a coherent meaning grounded in a structure of binary oppositions.
Rather in cultural studies all signs are equal, and all are multiple in
their potential meanings. To explain it another way, an underwear ad and
a play by Shakespeare are both equally valid signs to be decoded and neither
have 'fixed' meanings. Rather each can be read in large measure according
to the sensibilities and cultural predispositions of the reader. In effect,
there is no separation of subject and object, each engages in a discourse
of mutual construction. The result of all this is a denial of history:
everything we thought we knew is just a reading, and we cannot really know
history because we are engaging in a discourse with the subject of another's
discourse. The only constant is a kind of continuing interplay of power-relationships.
There is a dominant discourse and dissenting discourses (generally the
dominant discourse is white male/heterosexual and bourgeois while the dissenting
is everything else), but cultural studies denies us the ability to decide
which was more important - the message or its reading.5
Initially, social historians saw all this as terribly exciting and
potentially usable. They liked the idea of employing cultural discourses
to dissect the power relationships that they were documenting and they
welcomed the weight placed within cultural studies on issues of race and
gender. Unfortunately, cultural studies is an exacting master and its supporters
quickly and effectively challenged the historians' fundamental assumptions
concerning structures of class relations, ethnicity and gender. As Michael
Denning has explained, in cultural studies the terms "race/class/gender
... are, in a deep sense, synonyms."6
Among social historians the reaction to ahistorical
judgements such as this has been confusion; as old-time social historians
fight to defend women's history against the blast of gender studies and
class analysis against the assaults of hegemony-theories and the insistence
that class is a culturally constructed discourse and as such no more fundamental
than hair colour, their confidence in their own forward-thinking radicalism
was undermined.7
By the early 1990s social history in the US was in disarray, while
in Canada it had begun to stagger, unsure of how to proceed.8
It was at this point that conservative historians struck back, allying
themselves in the process with the cultural studies advocates in an all-out
offensive on the demoralized forces of social historical analysis.
Now much of the assault on social history had to do with power. Those who
had once dominated the profession took advantage of the social historians'
soul-searching apologetics to exact revenge. The struggle has been waged
in countless funding committees, book prize committees and in university
hiring committees. This is not a dimension, however, that I want to linger
over, though it forms a backdrop for the discussion that follows. What
I do want to do is to move beyond the individuals and to discuss the counterattack's
impact not on social historians but on social history as a method. In other
words, rather than offering a narrative of a struggle of personalities
or even of disciplines, I would like to approach the counterattack as a
coherent cultural and political phenomenon. Using this approach, I feel,
leads us to see how broad based the assault has been, how effectively it
has been carried and how dangerous to the survival of social history it
has become. It also allows us to trace the connections between events of
apparent uniqueness. The death-struggle of social history is not so much
about such 'excesses' as 'political correctness' or 'antediluvian Leninism';
it is a challenge to the method and purpose of a way of seeing the past
and at the same time an attack on a particular and, I believe, vital approach
to democracy itself.
That sounds pretty sweeping and perhaps laughably minatory, so let me explain.
In North America, 'traditional' social history is not simply the study
of society. It is an approach that rests upon a distinct idea of what history
should mean for the people who read it. Though political and nationalist
historians often claim that social history has no relevance to our political
and national consciousness, they are wrong. Social historians do what they
do because they want to raise political and social consciousness: their
goal is to create a feeling of participation in history among ordinary
people and in so doing to advance a democratic appreciation.
How is this achieved? Social history is, of course, a vast field embracing
many interpretative approaches and methodologies. Still, at its core are
certain key concepts that I believe lend it unity. First, in concentrating
on ordinary people, social history is implicitly about power. It deals
with the oppression of groups, sexes, races, classes, regions and ethnicities
and it also treats the reverse: the effort of people in ordinary circumstances
to maintain their self-esteem, their rights and their traditions. The object
of this, as has often been noted, is to 'give people back their history';
a history that was taken away from them by political and national historians
who emphasized the actions of powerful elites in detachment from the societies
in which they lived. Society in traditional history was no more than 'context'
- a handy and somewhat tawdry concept - and one hardly likely to inspire
those who have been reduced to it. Because social historians believe that
people do not share the same values or interests, they make it their goal
to tell each group in society about their special past. It is in this way
intended as an instrument of empowerment. Consequently, it is also a force
of dissent, and most social historians devote a good part of their time
to researching the interests of those in power and their efforts to undermine
the authority of ordinary citizens and groups. It is in this way that social
history becomes a potent weapon in the politics of community empowerment
and opposition.
To illustrate this, let me repeat a story Michael Cassity has told about
teaching Wyoming history in local communities. Cassity is a professor and
author of an interesting book on social change in the small town Midwest
during the progressive era. In the spring of 1992 he was invited to give
a lecture in the village of Chugwater on Wyoming in W.W.II. Cassity was
not an expert in the field, but as a social historian he was nonetheless
uncomfortable simply repeating the standard 'ritualistic celebration upon
the semi-centenary of the War'. Instead, he decided to lecture about the
internment of prisoners of war and enemy aliens; Chugwater, after all,
was close to Heart Mountain, a big relocation center for Japanese Americans.
The group caught his message, many of the older ones began to remember
their contacts with the internees and to tell stories about their treatment.
Finally, there was an awkward silence as all reflected on the shared experiences
and then the businessman who had organized the talk confessed: 'Folks,
we are going to have to give this more thought. [The War] may not have
been our finest hour after all'.9
This, in microcosm, is what social history has offered our society.
Cassity focused not on the national narrative, not on the pageant of victory,
but on the suffering of a group oppressed on a local level. He presented
their case with dignity and understanding, and his talk encouraged the
small town audience to reflect critically on their own lives and beliefs.
Ultimately, it led them to question the accepted historical record, to
develop sympathy with the oppressed and, one hopes, to resolve never to
allow such a miscarriage of democracy - the forced relocation of a group
of American citizens - to happen again. Social history is a way of reaching
out to people, of educating them about the role they and others like them
played in history and of encouraging them to think analytically about values
like justice, power, understanding, freedom, and democracy.
If social historians have themselves lost sight of this in their effort
to come to terms with cultural deconstruction, their failings pale in comparison
to the bombardment that has come from both inside and outside the academic
community. The assault has taken innumerable forms, but I would like to
review a few examples, American and Canadian, to illustrate the scope and
character of the current challenge to social history's vision.
Social history under fire
In the US what made social history a political target was in part the
existence of a large federal funding agency charged with supporting the
Arts and Humanities. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) together
with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were created in 1965 to
satisfy an arts and letters community and were made prominent during the
Kennedy years, now concerned that the race to the moon, new poverty programmes
and weapons developments were leading to an excessive emphasis on science.
Both agencies grew dramatically through the sixties and seventies, as is
evidenced by their combined budget which swelled from an original $29 million
(1995 dollars) to $256 million fifteen years later. But while the NEA cultivated
its connections to the artistic avant-garde, the NEH remained staunchly
loyal to its liberal beginnings.
Criticism of the NEA began during the Carter years, when right-wing politicians
went after the agency for its funding policies: for favouring radical thinkers
and supporting supposedly pornographic and un-american art (such as Serano's
crucifixes floating in urine and Mapplethorpe's images of penises). Under
Reagan appointee William Bennett and Bush appointee Lynne Cheney (wife
of defence secretary Dick Cheney), the administration purged the Endowments
of their liberal administrators and discouraged the funding of contentious
projects. Unfortunately, change did not occur fast enough: big organizations
made up of insiders still favoured their own and this meant no real end
to government support for 'dissidents' and 'perverts'. Through the NEH
the Public Broadcasting Service still got money to make a show celebrating
homosexuality, and the dance division of the NEA still funded such projects
as Karen Finley's 'feminist body art'.
The result was an intensification of the culture war in the late 1980s,
as the moral and religious right in America went after the moderate right
that now controlled the endowment agencies - attacking them for being too
soft in their war on obscenity and anti-Americanism. In 1989 Congress passed
a motion preventing either agency from funding obscene or homoerotic art
or anything depicting sexual conduct. After the federal court ruled this
violated first amendment rights, much of the offending legislation was
rescinded, but the attacks continued. Increasingly, the target came to
be 'political correctness', a phrase used to refer to the supposedly self-serving
activities of a left-feminist-multicultural elite in arts and academe who
were blocking the development and airing of conservative ideas. Under pressure,
Clinton's NEA appointee, Jane Alexander, gave way and shifted money away
from avant garde projects and towards 'safe' causes, leading right-wing
spleen to settle on the NEH.
In 1994 controversy exploded over the Enola Gay exposition at the Smithsonian's
National Air and Space Museum. The plane which had dropped the bomb on
Hiroshima was to be the centre-piece of the Museum's 50th anniversary commemoration
of the event. In the text which accompanied the exhibit the curators achieved
a relatively balanced view of the decision to drop the bomb - seeing a
desire to intimidate the Soviets as only 'one more reason' for its use
and accepting that 'saving American lives and shortening the war' were
'more important'. Moreover, the curators, reflecting contemporary functionalist
scholarship, argued that Truman did not really engage in a 'decision to
drop the bomb' at all, as 'the Manhattan project had a great deal of momentum'
and the strategic bombing of German and Japanese cities had already made
the bombing of civilians an accepted and, according to most of the President's
advisors, effective form of warfare.10
Revisionist political historians have argued that the storm that immediately
erupted over the exhibit was a form of censorship of their views. According
to left-wing journalist Philip Nobile, it was the treatment of the decision
to drop the bomb 'that aroused the most controversy and led to the eventual
purge of the exhibit'.11 Nobile,
I believe, is only partially right on this point. It might be comforting,
on a certain level, for revisionists to see their contribution as the prime
target of censorship - it confirms many of their conspiratorial beliefs
concerning the political establishment - but they are exaggerating their
claim. Though much of the criticism of the exhibit dealt with its treatment
of the decision to drop the bomb, this element became even more controversial
because of its placement within the layout. The actual core of the display
was a presentation of the effect of the bomb - an effort through artifacts
and photographs to create 'the view from ground zero'. Preceding this section
was a large display dealing with American racism, the brutality of the
Pacific War and the internment of Japanese-Americans. "Wartime propaganda"
read one caption "portrayed the Japanese as sub-human 'monkey-men',
vicious rodents or venomous insects. "The implication was emotionally
powerful: by linking the dropping of the bomb - an action which most Americans
supported because they believed it had shortened the war and saved American
lives - to something most Americans felt guilty about - the internment
of Japanese-Americans and nativism in the United States - the exhibit made
the decision to drop the bomb seem an act of barbarity and racism. Add
to this the exhibit's questioning of the idea that no other option existed
and its assertion that the US military secretly did not believe that an
invasion would be particularly costly, and you have a forceful indictment
of white American hatred and inhumanity.12
It was this that set the critics off. As the Wall Street Journal stormed:
"The picture that emerges is of besieged Japan yearning for peace.
This Japan lies at the feet of an implacably vicious enemy - the United
States - hell-bent on total victory and the mass destruction of women and
children. And why?" And here the journal quotes one of the photo captions
in the exhibit, because "for most Americans, this war was a war of
vengeance. For most Japanese it was a war to defend their unique culture
against Western Imperialism." The quote was taken out of context and
was, anyway, promptly removed from the exhibit, but the point it was chosen
by the newspaper is illustrative. The aim of the exhibit was to make Americans
question the act of dropping the bomb, to doubt its necessity, to confront
their own racism and guilt and to sympathize with the mangled, deformed
and charred people who suffered the bomb's devastating impact. As the Air
Force Association's executive director stormed, the exhibit "... treats
Japan and the United States ... as if their participation in the war were
morally equivalent."13
Now many social historians would be as uncomfortable with this as were
conservative critics. Indeed, few social historians would accept unqualified
the current cultural studies belief that racism is a continuum and that
the relocation of the American Japanese, anti-Asian racism and the dropping
of the bomb were necessarily of a kind. The bomb was dropped for political
and military reasons, and while Americans were racists that's not why they
did it. Still, the aim of the exhibit was one with which social historians
were in agreement - consciousness raising - and they could not fail to
notice that the structure of the display and its effort to put 'a human
face' to the war owed much to the methods they had developed over the preceding
twenty years. Arguably, however, they were too little accustomed to defending
their work in the corridors of power and perhaps too much intimidated by
the cultural studies assertion that all racism is the same that they failed
to separate the good from the bad in the exhibit or to come to effective
grips with the issues. The result was a deafening silence from a troubled
and uncertain community of social historians.14
Undefended by its natural allies, the exhibit fell easily to the slaughter.
Before it had even opened to the public, it was cancelled and the director
of the Museum resigned. According to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the NEH,
which had subsidized the exhibit, "has gone off the deep end in proposing
things that are destructive of American civilization." "The Museum
administration" he went on "had fallen under the influence of
'the elite intelligentsia' and had been encouraged to despise American
culture, to rewrite history and to espouse a set of values which are essentially
destructive."15
Gingrich is a former college history teacher and despite the contempt
with which he is held by most academics, I think he was right in his reading
of this event. The exhibit had adopted the subversive approach of social
history, it had attempted to demonstrate that policy makers were not free
from social prejudices and it had suggested that their decisions revealed
their contempt for the lives of ordinary people. It had shown Americans
to be culpable, racist and fallible. Moreover, it had worked to build sympathy
for the victims of the explosion, not just for those physically harmed
but for all Japanese sufferers of racism and hate. This inversion is basic
to the social historians' message, and it was this infusion of dissident
social history into the Enola Gay exhibit that proved most controversial
and ultimately led to its termination.
If the closing of the exhibit was a major defeat for the social historical
method, it also placed a powerful and somewhat unexpected weapon in the
hands of traditional historians. Encouraged by the new climate, they began
to publicly denounce the 'left-wing orthodoxy' they saw spreading out from
universities. There was, announced Pat Buchanan, leader of the 'Christian
right', "a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion
towards America's past. The Left is now serving up, in our museums and
colleges, a constant diet ... of the poison of anti-Americanism."
As Irving Kristol, another of the leading conservative propagandists, proclaimed
"far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as
sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the
liberal ethos."16 To these
conservative activists and thinkers social history was a force as insidious
and powerful as communism because of its ability to turn students and the
public away from American ideals and lure them to the side of a false god.
That falsehood was now called 'political correctness' (PC). Applied liberally
by conservatives, the term came to mean a veneration of otherness in society
- homosexuality, ethnicity, race and gender - and an attack on elite white
males who had attempted to eradicate the history of these groups. PC was,
of course, the special preserve of the cultural studies rather than of
historians, but social historians became easily and automatically associated
with it because of their efforts to recover and empower the lives of those
traditionally excluded from both the historical record and political power.
The cultural studies critics understood this connection and in their own
hunt for legitimacy used the social historians' sensitivity to the oppressed
as a way of muting any criticism of political correctness they might muster.
The ease with which conservatives were able to defeat social history through
the charge of political correctness and the inability of social historians
to challenge that attack was revealed in another of the major panics of
the early 1990s, the reappearance of the fear of an education gap. Concern
that American children were not performing as well in aptitude tests as
foreign kids, fear that American children were not learning basic values,
and horror over violence in schools all coalesced into a demand from the
political right for 'standards'. 'Standards' would supposedly ensure that
all children in the multicultural US received a common set of education
priorities. It was, in this sense, a broad attack on the 'difference' social
history celebrated and an effort to re-forge the melting pot. In 1989 NEH-head
Cheney declared her support for a single nation-wide method for evaluating
students' learning. This received Congressional blessing in 1991 as Goals
2000, which was a new plan to develop national education standard. The
plan here was not to create a single curriculum, but rather to establish
a set of themes, topics and questions that any student studying at a given
level would be expected to master. Goals 2000 authorized funding for States
to set up panels to draw up plans for renewing schools and integrating
national standards. Out of the first year appropriation of $400 million,
Cheney awarded $1.6 million to the University of California to organize
a National Standard in History (NHS). Unfortunately, though the director
of the project was a conservative - Charlotte Crabtree - she proved a figurehead
and real control over the project passed to Gary Nash, a UCLA history professor,
author of several books on aboriginal-white relations and a well-known
'champion of multiculturalism'.17
After laborious gestation, the history standards were released in the
autumn of 1994. They immediately drew attack from conservatives, including
Cheney, who were emboldened by their successful assault on the Enola Gay
exhibit. Cheney, who had commissioned the work, but who no longer headed
the NEH, fired the first salvo, charging that the NHS was so negative it
"... made it sound as if everything in America is wrong and grim."
"Why," she asked, "was so much time spent on McCarthyism
and the Ku Klux Klan, on Watergate and working class protest. It made everything
gloomier than the story of the United States ought to be."18
What brought critics together was an overriding hostility to the social
history they felt pervaded the NHS and to the very notion of empowering
the ordinary. The result, conservatives maintained, was a history that
seemed to cast shadows across the American experience rather than enlightening
it. As Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole remarked: real history
should show us "how American came to be the greatest nation on earth."19
The list of complaints against the NHS filled volumes,
but a few examples will serve to illustrate the general character of the
criticism. Critics complained that:
- Black ex-slave and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman, was mentioned six times
while Thomas Edison, Robert E.Lee and Paul Revere got nary a reference.
Great man theory had been replaced by the history of nobodies.
- In its treatment of wars no attention was paid to specific battles -
the Bulge, Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal - but reference was made to the relocation
of the Japanese and to the contribution of women to the war effort.
- The welfare state was invariably presented in a positive light. In fact,
the standards implicitly attacked conservative economics by presenting
them only in the context of the Depression and President Hoover's policies.
- The standards placed too much emphasis on white guilt and gave too much
attention to minorities.
- Reagan's foreign policy was mocked by asking students where the term
'Evil Empire' originated.20
Critics charged that all of this was a sign of the standards' 'political
correctness': its automatic hostility to anyone white and male and its
excessive concentration on the poor and on ethnic and racial minorities.
The difference between the standards, which treated class and racism as
historical phenomena present with unequal force in different circumstances,
and cultural studies, which maintains that all forms of racial, gender
and class discrimination are essentially the same and present in all situations,
was ignored. The social historians who dominated organizations like the
AHA and the OAH supported the standards, but they were also conscious of
their weakness on this point and appeared not to know how to fight the
PC charge without sounding like sexists and racists themselves. While they
mobilized organizationally to endorse the standards, they failed to effectively
make their case before the American public.
Unfortunately for the standards, the 1994 Congressional elections had produced
a solidly conservative Senate which promptly condemned them by a vote of
99 to 1 and then abolished the Goals 2000 programme. The NEH and NEA budgets
were then slashed by 30%. Today the NHS is dead; employed in only two states.
The eight additional states using autonomous history standards have adopted
alternate models that emphasize a straight political narrative. It was
a crushing blow to the prestige and power of social history.21
The Enola Gay and NHS Controversies tell us much about the forces arrayed
against social history. What the critics targeted in both instances was
precisely those things I have suggested lie at the core of social history's
political message. The NHS failed because it attempted to reach out directly
to students of diverse backgrounds and to honour them in their difference.
While it did not portray all white middle class men as villainous, it is
true that it consistently criticized American politicians and business-leaders.
This was done in part to encourage democratic participation based on resistance;
as Gary Nash said, his goal was "to open up the mental prison that
we [as teachers] have created." But in so doing, it became anathema
to all those interested in unifying the country beneath a meta-narrative.22
We in Canada are somewhat arrogant in our view of the US. We are nationally
predisposed to consider Americans barbarians and we pride ourselves on
our restraint, liberality and good manners. Social historians are, however,
kidding themselves when they think that it could never happen here. True,
the political assault on their craft has not attracted as much attention
in Canada as it has in the US, and its manifestations have been more muted
and indirect. But studying a few Canadian examples in light of the American
case reveals to what extent the assault on social history is today a North
American phenomenon. Though as yet only partially realized, social history
in Canada is losing its preeminent place among historical methods.
Not only is there, in Canada, the same complaint among traditionalists
that social historians control university departments, hiring procedures
and the funding of scholarly research, but there has also been a series
of significant public confrontations over historical interpretation. Not
all of these controversies have been configured in the same ways, and not
all have involved an obvious attack on social history, but all have ultimately
contributed to the progressive erosion of the social-historical method's
legitimacy.
In 1988 the Canadian government officially apologized to Japanese Canadians
for the expropriation of their property and their relocation in 1942. This
prompted criticism from some historians who argued that while restitution
for property seized was certainly justified, Canadians were being encouraged
to forget that there had been a war and that the evacuation and detention
of the Japanese Canadians had been 'militarily justifiable'. When Ukrainian
and Italian Canadians also took up the lobby for restitution and an apology
for the internment of members of their communities was judged at the time
security risks, a howl of protest went up from traditionalists in the historical
community. There was similar objection from the same historians, when provincial
and federal governments moved to honour Louis Riel as a champion of aboriginal
rights. As J.L. Granatstein snarled, Riel "was a crazed religious
fanatic who led two armed rebellions." He has, in short, "no
credentials as a hero to all Canadians."23
In 1997 the issue resurfaced again when the Canadian Museum Corporation
proposed a Holocaust Gallery be added to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
The Gallery would feature representations of the liberated concentration
camps by Canadian artists and photographers, information on the Canadian
army's capture of the Westerbork Staging Camp as well as general documentation
about anti-semitism and Nazi race policies. Irving Abella, a Toronto social
historian and past-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, also suggested
that the Gallery would deal with anti-semitism in Canada and the failure
of Canadian politicians to give sanctuary to the Jews of Europe (Canada
had the worst numerical record when it came to accepting Jewish refugees
of any major allied nation). According to Abella, the Gallery would document
'the whole dirty story'. Though no final decision was made as to what the
Gallery would contain, the proposal to include a Holocaust Gallery in a
reconfigured War Museum was vigorously denounced by veteran's groups. As
the President of the Royal Canadian Legion told a subcommittee of the Senate
investigating the plans for rebuilding the Museum, a Holocaust Gallery
would "overshadow the historical military displays while occupying
valuable space which could be dedicated to those who fell in defence of
our country." Ukrainian, German and Polish organisations added their
complaint that the proposed Gallery would privilege Jewish suffering and
would diminish the memory of genocide against their peoples. And Canada's
two most prominent conservative journalists also weighed in against the
War Museum's including the Holocaust. According to one troubled Senator
"it is very difficult to extinguish the fire of misunderstanding,
each community going after each others' community and going after each
others' throat. We do not need that in Canada. This is a multiculturally
sensitive country." The Senators then demonstrated their sensitivity
to this multiculturalism by suggesting that rich Jewish lobby groups had
put the War Museum up to the Gallery idea by offering to subsidize the
building of the new facility.24
In mid-February 1998 the idea of including a Holocaust Gallery in the War
Museum died in a Committee Room of the Canadian Senate, to be replaced
by a recommendation for a stand-alone Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa. The
debate, however, was highly revealing of the developing struggle over Canada's
past. Though the issue of the nature of the actual exhibit was carefully
avoided by the Committee, the issue of what Canadians would be encouraged
to remember was omnipresent. For the Chair of the National Council of Veterans'
Associations "putting the military artefacts and the Holocaust side
by side is a bad mix. Visitors to the War Museum are taking a journey through
Canada's military past ... If the War Museum includes stories of genocide,
a dangerous misconception could arise." As with the Enola Gay exhibit,
the memory of war had to be 'sanitized' and detached from a recognition
of the death and destruction it involved. Indeed, many commentators were
critical of the fact that the proposed Holocaust Gallery would carry a
warning that some of the material on display might not be suitable for
children; in the view of one Senator "should we sanction something
that would cause nightmares among our children?" Clearly, no one wondered
whether a rifle, bayonet, or cannon might not also be unsuitable for children,
nor did they consider whether nightmares aren't exactly what a good war
museum should provoke.25
Two issues were clearly at stake in the debate over the Holocaust Gallery.
First, whether social history should be allowed to invade the country's
military mythology and create a sense of sympathy for the victims of violence
and war and second, whether Canada's memory of World War II should be allowed
to include anti-semitism, both domestic and foreign. For the Senators,
veterans and traditional historians (a few of whom were interviewed by
the committee) the question as to whether Canadian history needed to be
painted so darkly and whether the historical empowerment of the oppressed
and neglected was not leading to the subversion of national pride was at
the back of much of the discussion. More than one declared Canadian history
'exciting and worthwhile' and emphasized that what was at stake was 'who
should tell our history and how it should be told'.26
These issues have become especially potent in Canada because the threat
of Quebec separation has made us all conscious of the weakening of our
identification with the Canadian nation state. What is ironic is that the
growing support for the idea that history should restore the national narrative
and act as a force of cohesion is being accompanied by a full-scale assault
not just on political correctness but on the social-historical method as
well. Both are being accused of offering bad and unpatriotic perspectives.
Unquestionably the most interesting Canadian case involved The Valour and
the Horror, three docu-dramas commissioned by the National Film Board and
aired by Canada's national broadcast corporation, CBC television, in 1992.
Each of the programmes dealt with a different aspect of Canada's participation
in the Second World War. The first explored the controversy surrounding
the dispatch of poorly trained Canadian troops to defend Hong Kong and
their subsequent obliteration at the hands of the Japanese Army. The second
treated the actions of Canadian soldiers in the battle of Normandy and
the third dealt with 6 (Canadian) Bomber Group and its role in the night-time
area bombing of German cities from the fall of 1942. The three programmes
had a common theme: all stressed the bravery of Canadian soldiers and all
impugned the generals and politicians for in the first two shows needlessly
slaughtering Canadian boys and in the third involving Canadian airmen in
an evil, vicious and ineffective campaign of terror against civilians.
In broad terms, none of this was very new: Canadians have a long tradition,
part of our colonial inheritance, of seeing themselves manipulated by elites
and they take a certain pride in having done well in hopeless situations,
the assault on Vimy Ridge in WWI and the Dieppe raid in WWII being the
most obvious examples. More novel was the style of the three films. The
series attempted to employ several of the techniques I suggested earlier
were central to the 'new interpretative mode' developed in social history
in the 1960s and 70s and now carried over into a study of the military.
They focused on the struggle of ordinary people and their attempt to act
nobly and humanely despite the cruel actions of insensitive elites and
they strove to build empathy between the observer and the object of gaze
by humanizing the topic. This was done first by 'framing' each episode
with films of veterans fifty years later returning to the scene of the
narratives' action. In the first programme, two veterans returned to Hong
Kong and met Japanese veterans; in the second, two veterans toured the
battlefields of Normandy and in the third, two airmen confronted German
survivors of their bombs. Second, interspersed throughout the shows were
fictitious 'interviews' with the young men who served (played by actors).
In these interviews the soldiers - standing against stark, dark backgrounds
or sitting in simple chairs (as though on stage) - spoke to the audience
of their fears, emotions, feelings, thoughts and desires. In addition,
arrogant, strutting generals were periodically allowed to speak though
they invariably said things that made them seem cruel and inhuman. Further,
there was throughout an identification with the victims. The third episode
made this point most clearly by depicting the Luftwaffe pilots and flak
gunners who tried to shoot down the Canadian bombers as the real heroes
of the campaign. As one airman (an actor was used) says in one of the 'interviews':
the bombing allowed the Germans to "end the war morally undefeated
... We had given them ... the one thing they lacked ... a clean cause to
fight for."27 Finally,
there was an effort to show decision-makers as narrow, prejudiced and upper
class (the actors playing them all spoke with snotty British-inflected
accents as opposed to those playing the ordinary soldiers, who had Canadian
voices); individuals without the slightest care for how many of the ordinary
people, be they civilians or soldiers, they killed or maimed in the pursuit
of their military goals.
These four techniques have been crucial to the development of social history
since the 1960s. Through them historians have sought to recover everyday
lives, to present a history to which ordinary people might identify, to
create a history that focuses on oppression and the struggle of individuals
to achieve dignity and to challenge official accounts of the past as the
creations of a narrow group of rich and powerful white men. The techniques
employed - role playing, the recreation of everyday life, the careful construction
of ideologically opposed positions, the view from the ground up - were
all reliable elements in the social historians' bag of tricks.
As they already had in the cases of the National History Standards, the
Enola Gay and the Holocaust Gallery, specialists immediately denounced
the producer/writers of The Valour and the Horror and pointed to the innumerable
inaccuracies in the programmes. They were appalled by the use of actors
to mouth lines that, it was later revealed, were often loose renderings
of comments made by the individuals depicted in interviews given fifty
years after the fact. They were especially hostile to the lack of 'context'
provided in the shows. They were offended by the charge made in the programmes
that historians had failed to tell 'the real story' and that there has
been a systematic 'cover-up' - an official history that did not make clear
the real evil, cowardice and cunning of the decision makers and generals
nor the true heroism of the ordinary soldiers. In the wake of a Senate
Committee inquiry into these charges, criticism by the CBC's ombudsman
and a tongue-lashing by a right-wing CBC board member, the broadcaster
quietly distanced itself from the series.28
As with the other cases I have been discussing, the specific objections
raised against the docu-dramas were not unjustified. Still, no matter how
valid the criticism, what is interesting is the similarity between the
character of the attack on The Valour and the Horror and that of the other
cases where the 'social history method' had invaded a traditional area
of research. Further, it is interesting that in all cases the issue was
politicized, and in each case the traditional historians depicted themselves
as victims of a powerful 'politically correct thought police'.29
It is also worth noting that in every instance the conservative historians
won.
In their submissions to the Senate Subcommittee undertaking hearings into
The Valour and the Horror, traditional historians wove their complaints
against social history into the fabric of their critique of the television
programmes. According to John English, a historian at the Royal Military
College, the writer/producer of the shows was a 'petulant flower child'
who distorted the work of 'objective historians ... for his own predetermined
ends'. Echoing these sentiments, Terry Copp, one of the country's foremost
military historians, denounced the series as a "sophomoric set of
isn't war horrible platitudes mixed with anti-military, anti-British and
anti-Canadian biases. History in The Valour and the Horror is a grim joke
in which a member of the sixties generation imposes his own 'feelings'
on the past." Understanding the 'real context', they claimed, would
build sympathy for the generals and politicians. As S.F. Wise noted in
his submission to the ombudsman investigating the case, the series "failed
to give the events it recounts the background which would render them fully
meaningful." Since the 'background' offered in The Valour and the
Horror presented Canada's military and political leadership as cruel
and callous, one must conclude that 'full meaning' would involve a reversal
of that judgement. For traditional historians, the bombing of German cities,
for example, was not, as The Valour and the Horror presented
it, a 'revenge' campaign designed to 'punish' the Germans and kill civilians.
The bombers were targeting 'legitimate' military targets and their bombs
only killed civilians because it was impossible for airmen flying at night
with relatively primitive location-tracking devices against heavy defences
to accurately pin-point their targets. Moreover, in the 'context' of 1942
what could the western allies do offensively but bomb Germany? One historian
goes even further in asserting that civilians were 'legitimate military
targets' and that the television programme had 'prejudiced' the case by
offering 'pictures of casualties on the ground'.30
Looking into the critics' eyes
If the lines in the debate over the telling of history are becoming
increasingly clear, what can be said of the motivations of the critics?
From a historical/cultural perspective are we really dealing with alternative
intellectual and ideological paradigms or simply with petty jealousies
and sour grapes? Why has military history been at the centre of so much
of the recent controversy on both sides of the border? What effect is the
debate having? And finally, what can we expect in the future?
The opponents of the social history paradigm are not simple reactionaries
unable to accept an ostensible decline in their influence. The historians
among them are, generally speaking, people who subscribe to both a particular
approach to history and a distinct understanding of the role the discipline
plays in political society. It is the intellectual underpinnings of their
approach rather than their politics, per se, that has drawn them into loose
alliance with conservative social commentators and right-wing politicians.
In this sense, it is really not surprising that this unusual union should
have been consummated on the nuptial bed of military history. Firstly,
military history is the last great preserve of historiographical traditionalism;
an area still relatively unclouded by social history's subversive influence.
Further, each nations' military record has been in the past presented in
such a way as to make it the particular embodiment of its national myths:
the unknown and belittled Canadian triumphing where none expected success
and the American 'citizen-soldier' manifesting all that was best in the
country's democratic spirit and technological capacity. North American
soldiers, it seems, haven't so much killed people as saved lives.
For conservative politicians and thinkers, the army is a microcosm of their
ideal society. For both Canadians and Americans, there is the image of
citizen armies and of forces that cross-cut their societies (the fact French
Canadians were severely underrepresented in the armed forces in both world
wars is ignored in most popular presentations). In short, in the army one
finds 'the right sort of multiculturalism'; cultural differences that are
not diminished but forged together in the service of the nation. Military
history brings out both the heroism and singularity of the individual and
their participation in, dependence upon and service to the greater whole.
Clearly, by invading this area, social historians are pressing on the zealously
defended heart of the right-wing political and social vision.
In interpretative terms, what is also at stake is the traditionalists'
view of history. Traditional historians maintain that history should not
be a 'presentist' art, but rather that it should seek to 'recreate' the
past. Consequently, they are committed to the idea of entering into the
experiences and thoughts of historical actors and understanding how they
lived. This is, admittedly, something most social historians also claim
to do. But traditionalists dismiss social history for putting false thoughts
into the minds of historical actors: for interpreting their actions in
light of theories and models that people in the past did not know and could
not enunciate. In this sense, traditionalists fetishize the fact. To them,
facts are hard things supported by documents and obvious to all who look
for them. Though many would admit that facts are interpreted, even by those
first confronting them, they suggest that the meaning of a fact lies in
what it said to those actually experiencing or creating it and not in what
it ultimately might mean to future generations.
This emphasis on understanding facts in historicist terms is partnered
with a vigorous emphasis on context. Now context is, to my mind, one of
the most questionable of explanatory tools, since the choice of which 'context'
to highlight is seldom explained, never justified and invariably suspiciously
suited to proving the arguments advanced. However, traditionalists suggest
that facts must be understood in the 'context' of their time and they reject
the idea that they have chosen to emphasize the context that best suits
them. As a pair of conservative historians responded to the question 'how
much context will satisfy you'?: "As much as is needed to ... arrive
at a reasonable conclusion about what actually happened."31
Contemplating the towering circularity of this state-ment is enough to
give one vertigo.
The traditional historians' veneration for the 'fact' and their reluctance
to think critically about their own preconceptions or about the selectivity
of their evidence creates a false dichotomy between their own respect for
the past and the social historical 'presentism'. Since both groups clearly
have a political agenda - as the politicization of the debate over the
meaning of history so clearly reveals - it is important to reflect on what
the traditionalists want. The answer, I think, is relatively simple: they
seek to destroy the dissident potential of social history. In this struggle,
conservatives have presented themselves as the victims of the 'politically
correct thought police' and they have used the argument that they are defending
free speech as a way of curtailing dissent. Right-wing politicians have
happily played along with this and are willingly throwing the baby of empowerment
out with the unsavoury bath-water of 'political correctness'.
The vision of traditional historians rests on a particular approach to
democratic society. In arguing against 'presentism' traditionalists are
really suggesting that interpretative concepts like gender, class and race
were not understood or expressed or considered in the past in the same
way that we consider them today. Rather than looking at workers' lives
and choosing the evidence selectively so as to pinpoint those beliefs and
actions that contributed to the eventual formation of a working class 'for
itself', they argue that historians should write about what it was like
to be a worker and should explore the totality of workers' beliefs and
not just those that serve the social historian's political agenda.
In this way, conservative historians shift emphasis away from the agencies
of division and the study of oppression. Their goal is to remove the history
of resistance from the mainstream narrative or, more properly, to place
it in context. But whose context? Rather than demonstrate the continuities
in the history of dissent and in so doing empower contemporary 'outsiders',
traditional history isolates each instance of protest. Because nineteenth
century women did not speak the language of modern feminism, they assert,
their lives cannot be understood in feminist terms. Oppression in the past
must be detached from inequality in the present and placed in its own context.
History must not be allowed to inform today's minorities or inflame dissenters.
Ultimately, this inner conservatism is far more important than any party
label. Traditional historians see a need to emphasize the centripetal forces
in the historical record and to minimize the centrifugal. Order is stressed
over resistance, the nation over the particular, the main current of history
over the backwaters and crosscurrents. This is not in itself a party issue
but a deeper question of social and cultural power. It does not pit republicans
against democrats or socialists against conservatives. In fact, while most
of the critics of the social history approach have stood politically on
the right, there are several noteworthy socialists and a whole slew of
liberals. The point here is that those sharing an elite vision of history
are not necessarily on the political right. As we know, elites are not
homogeneous, but they do have a certain sympathy of cultural vision.
At the heart of the conservative historical vision, then, is the idea that
nation states are good things and that they are held together by an acceptance
of certain rules. While some dissent is justified, social revolution is
not. By creating a feeling of oppression and by allowing contemporary outsiders
to experience kinship with past dissenters, social history threatens to
unravel the weave that holds together the social order. Empowerment is
a fine thing, but not when it leads people to such degrees of group identification
that they do not feel a greater loyalty to the nation state and its established
political culture.
In this sense, the debate over the nature of history reveals some of the
fundamental divisions within North American society; divisions that have
been obscured by democratic freedom and free market ideology. To critics
of the social historians' inversion of traditional history we are free
to dissent but not free to disrupt the core of the national/democratic/capitalist
state, even if those fundamentals have resulted in widespread marginalization,
oppression and disempowerment. Criticism which the existing structure of
political, cultural and social life cannot absorb, mediate or resolve should
not be permitted. In effect, though traditionalists present themselves
as anti-ideological, as defenders of historical truth and of the kind of
academic purity befitting so many modern-day Collingwood's, their position
is as ideological as its antithesis. Consequently, the division is not
going to go away. In fact, it is deepening as the traditionalists discover
both the social historians' weaknesses and the broader society's sympathy
to their message of national renewal and consensus.
In general terms, then, what the history wars bring us towards is an understanding
of the current malaise in North America. A strong feeling exists that multiculturalism,
the rights of minorities, regional differences, and class strife have been
allowed to go too far. One sign of this has been increasing reluctance
to welcome new immigrants and a raising of the borders against non-whites
in particular. Another has been a desire to recover 'national pride', to
feel good again about being a Canadian or an American. The political right
has been able to capitalize on these sentiments and traditional historians
have profited from the connections they have been able to build with reactionary
political elements.
Traditional historians have especially benefitted in recent years from
the ability of the right to politicize the failure of the education system.
This is something we have seen in Canada as well as in the US. In Alberta,
Premier Klein created a sufficient sense of crisis to justify dramatic
intervention in the education field, both in the form of budget cuts and
in an effort to remold the curriculum in order to foster shared values
among students. The Conservatives in Ontario are today doing the same thing,
and they have recently introduced a series of history standards which emphasize
political continuities over social inequalities. Similarly, the lesson
of the NHS in the United States is that the values most acceptable were
those that embodied the ideals of the political and moral right. This politicization
has not yet flowed upward into the universities, though it has already
begun to affect areas more directly under the public's control. One sign
of this is the general lament among today's social historians that students
seem increasingly drawn to the study of subjects they believed had been
buried twenty years before.
Even more disturbing has been the complete failure of the social historians
to formulate an effective response to their declining influence. The popular
press is now dominated by negative reviews of their work and positive comments
mostly appear in specialized journals aimed at academics and an elite of
teachers. Again, social history seems to be one of the first victims of
the gathering anti-intellectualism evident in North American society. Don't
misunderstand me: criticism of the education system is a good and healthy
thing, but the current debate is based on certain false assumptions: most
notably on the pernicious, but widespread ellipsis of social history and
cultural studies.
As to the future, let me offer a couple of grim thoughts. Social historians
might continue to win battles in individual history departments across
North America, but the death knell of social history itself has already
been sounded in the high schools (in Ontario, in 1960, history was a required
full-year course in each of the 4 senior years of high school. Today only
one half year in total is required). Increasingly, there is a public perception
of social history as misleading or bad. This is having the effect of diminishing
the authority of almost all historians and of the study of history itself.
Traditional historians blame social historians for this - in that they
failed over thirty years to produce any real 'greats' who might speak to
today's students - but they have to accept themselves much of the credit
for history's damaged prestige and the growing image of its irrelevance.
The pendulum has swung. Already we seem to be facing a situation in which
departments are composed largely of social historians teaching subjects
to students who doubt the validity of the approach offered and opposed
by vigourous young conservatives protesting the way in which they are being
shut out of academic jobs. As a leading Canadian historian, Carl Berger,
has mused, "of only one thing may we be certain, in time the new history
will suffer the same fate as the old."32
If my reading of the tea leaves is correct, that time is now.
Prof. Dr. David Monod, Department of History, Wilfried Laurier University,
Waterloo, Ont., N2L 3C5, Canada
e-mail: dmonod@mach1.wlu.ca
[1] Diggins, J.P.: Can the Social Historian
Get It Right. In: Society. 3 (1997): 16; Granatstein, J.L.: Who Killed
Canadian History? Toronto 1998: 58-59.
[Zurück zum Text]
[2] G. Stedman-Jones has highlighted the potential
future convergence of the cultural studies approach and traditional historical
analysis. Cf. Stedman-Jones, G.: The Determinist Fix. Some Obstacles to
the Further Development of the Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s.
In: History Workshop Journal. 42 (1996): 20.
[Zurück zum Text]
[3] For the origins and impact of cultural
studies see Hall S.: The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of
the Humanities. In: October. 53 (1990): 11-23; Pfister, J.: The Americanization
of Cultural Studies. In: Yale Journal of Criticism. 4 (1991): 199-229.
[Zurück zum Text]
[4] Keefer, M.: Lunar Perspectives. Field Notes
from the Culture Wars. Toronto 1996: 110, 123, 207.
[Zurück
zum Text]
[5] Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Cora Kaplan,
Peter Stallybrass, Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha have been among the most
thoughtful writers on cultural studies. Three good anthologies are During,
S. (ed.): The Cultural Studies Reader. London 1993; Grossberg, L. et al.(eds.):
Cultural Studies. London 1992 and, for historians, Attridge, D. et al.
(eds.): Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge 1987.
[Zurück zum Text]
[6] Denning, M.: The Academic Left and the
Rise of Cultural Studies. In: Radical History Review. 54 (1992): 39.
[Zurück zum Text]
[7] Vernon, J.: Who's Afraid of the Linguistic
Turn? The Politics of Social History and its Discontents. In: Social History.
19 (1994): 81-97 and Joyce, P.: The end of social history. In: Social History.
20 (1995): 73-93.
[Zurück zum Text]
[8] For a lament see Palmer' s cri de coeur
in Palmer, B.: Descent into Discourse. Philadelphia 1990.
[Zurück zum Text]
[9] Cassity, M.: History and the Public Purpose.
In: Journal of American History. 81 (1994): 972-973.
[Zurück zum Text]
[10] Curators of the National Air and Space
Museum. The Crossroads. The End of WWII, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins
of the Cold War. In: Nobile, P. (ed.): Judgment at the Smithsonian. New
York 1995: 1-126.
[Zurück zum Text]
[11] Nobile, P.: On the Steps of the Smithsonian.
Hiroshima Denial in America's Attic. In: Nobile 1995: xxiii.
[Zurück zum Text]
[12] Linenthal calls the view of the Japanese
the emotional heart or the exhibit, as opposed to the section on the
decision to drop the bomb, which was the intellectual heart; he also
makes clear that this was the most contoversial aspect of the exhibit.
See Linenthal, E.T.: Anatomy of a Controversy. In: Linenthal, E.T.; Engelhardt,
T. (eds.): History Wars. New York 1996: 39, 45. Cf. also Curators 1995:
17-18, 49-50.
[Zurück zum Text]
[13] Wall Street Journal. 29 August 1994 and
2 September 1994; Nobile 1995: xxxv-vi. The AFA chief is cited in Linenthal
1996: 35.
[Zurück zum Text]
[14] A group of prominent revisionist political
historians did protest the political cleansing' of the exhibit without
success. See Linenthal 1996: 51-2.
[Zurück zum Text]
[15] N. Gingrich, cited in New Republic. 13
March 1995: 46.
[Zurück zum Text]
[16] Washington Times. 7 November 1994; Kristol
is cited in Sherry, M.: Patriotic Orthodoxy. In : Linenthal 1996: 107.
[Zurück zum Text]
[17] Ravitch, D.: National Standards in American
Education. A Citizen's Guide. Washington 1995: 155-60; Jensen, R.: The
Culture Wars, 1965-1995: A Historian's Map. In: Journal of Social History.
23 (1989/90).
[Zurück zum Text]
[18] Cheney, L.: Editorial. In: Wall Street
Journal. 20 October 1994.
[Zurück zum Text]
[19] Cheney, L.: Mocking America at US Expense.
In: New York Times. 10 March 1995; New York Times. 5 September 1995.
[Zurück zum Text]
[20] McDougall, W.A.: Whose History? Whose
Standards?. In: Commentary. 99 (1995): 39; Krauthammer, C.: History Hijacked.
In: Washington Post. 4 November 1994; Washburn, W.: Serious Questions about
the National Standards for US History. In: Continuity. 19 (1995): 54; Belz,
H.: National Standards for United States History. The Limits of Liberal
Orthodoxy. In: Continuity. 19 (1995): 61-66; Leo, J.: The Hijacking of
American History. In: US News & World Report. 14 November 1994: 36.
[Zurück zum Text]
[21] Lobbes, L.S.: Surveying State Standards.
The National History Education Network' s Report on State Social Studies
Standards. In: The History Teacher. 31 (1998): 231-32.
[Zurück zum Text]
[22] Washington Times. 3 November 1994.
[Zurück zum Text]
[23] Granatstein 1998, xiii.
[Zurück zum Text]
[24] Montreal Gazette. 2 February 1997, C8;
Ottawa Citizen. 1 February 1998, A3; Globe and Mail. 14 November 1997,
D1-2; Globe and Mail. 22 November 1997, D3; Montreal Gazette. 24 November
1997. The two conservative journalists were Barbara Amiel and David Frum.
See Controversy over a delicate matter. In: MacLean's. 110/111 (1998):
13 and Veterans are aliens in their own land. In: Financial Post. 2 December
1997: 19. See also Senate of Canada, Standing Committee on Social Affairs
and Science and Technology. Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Veterans'
Affairs: Public Hearings on the Canadian War Museum. 3 February 1998, 4:10;
2 February 1998, 3:69 and 4 February 1998, 9-14.
[Zurück zum Text]
[25] Public Hearings on the Canadian War Museum.
3 February 1998, 4: 35-36, 56-57.
[Zurück zum Text]
[26] Public Hearings on the Canadian War Museum.
3 February 1998, 4: 13; 2 February 1998, 3: 69; 4 February 1998, 5: 58-9.
[Zurück zum Text]
[27] Senate of Canada, Standing Committee
on Social Affairs and Science and Technology, Proceedings of the Subcommittee
on Veterans' Affairs: Public Hearings on The Valour and the Horror. 25
June 1992, 3: 104.
[Zurück zum Text]
[28] For a balanced review of the series see
Dick, E.J.: History on Television. In: Archivaria. 34 (1992): 199-216 and
Dick, E.J.: The Valour and the Horror Continued'. In: Archivaria. 35 (1993):
253-70. A rough text based on the programmes was published as Weisbord,
M.; Mohr, M.S.: The Valour and the Horror. The Untold Story of Canadians
in the Second World War. Toronto 1991. A summary of much of the criticism
can be found in Bercuson, D.; Wise, S.F. (eds.): The Valour and the Horror
Revisited. Montreal and Toronto 1994.
[Zurück zum Text]
[29] Many historians felt that the media'
which strongly supported the film makers, even to the extent of awarding
their efforts, was trying to silence' opposition. For a review of this
aspect of the controversy see Taras, D.: The Struggle over the Valour and
the Horror. Media Power and the Portrayal of War. In: Canadian Journal
of Political Science. 28 (1995): 725-747.
[Zurück zum Text]
[30] Public Hearings on the Valour and the
Horror. 25 June 1992, 3: 74, Appendix A:3 and 3:14 and 3:26. Wise, S.F.:
The Valour and the Horror. A Report for the CBC Ombudsman. In: Wise, S.F.;
Bercuson, D. 1994: 18.
[Zurück zum Text]
[31] Bercuson, D.; Wise, S.F. 1994: 9.
[Zurück zum Text]
[32] Berger, C.: The Writing of Canadian History.
Toronto 1996: 332.
[Zurück zum Text]
[Zum Inhaltsverzeichnis "Ahornblätter 12"]