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



David Monod

'WHO OWNS HISTORY ANYWAY?' The Political Assault on North American Social History


Let's begin with some widely disseminated 'truths'. Today, the writing of history in North America is dominated by social historians. These social historians have concentrated on documenting people's 'limited identities' - primarily their class, race, ethnicity and gender - and have repudiated narrative, nationalism and the study of politics. Because of their focusing on the diversity of human experience, we no longer have a unifying theme (a national myth) and the large canvas has given way to the miniature. Further, in concentrating on those traditionally left out of the historical narrative, social historians have created the misleading image that conflict, oppression and suffering have dominated the cultural record. Unfortunately, in making their case social historians have also produced work that is widely considered trivial and boring. The concentration on small groups, localities and individual moments in time has restricted the historian's ability to formulate overarching interpretations; the experiences of Italian immigrants in Buffalo, New York, for example, might differ from those of Italians in Cleveland, Toronto and New Orleans so markedly as to bedevil efforts to draw general conclusions about the lives of Italians (let alone all immigrants) in North America. More troubling still, the subjects of all this social history, the victims of historical neglect are, as a group, historically 'irrelevant'. To paraphrase conservative historian J.P. Diggins, where traditional history had great men and a few geniuses, social history has only got averages. To this one might add, when social history does treat individuals, they are more often than not failures. Finally and apparently most offensively, social historians have become a thought-police, powerful defenders of political correctness and tyrannical oppressors of the remaining traditional historians who have become a disparaged minority, a repressed collectivity whose work is not taken seriously, whose teaching positions are not replaced, whose contribution to university life is not welcomed. As one self-declared victim, Canadian military and political historian J.L. Granatstein, fumes:

"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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[4] Keefer, M.: Lunar Perspectives. Field Notes from the Culture Wars. Toronto 1996: 110, 123, 207.
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[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.
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[6] Denning, M.: The Academic Left and the Rise of Cultural Studies. In: Radical History Review. 54 (1992): 39.
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[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.
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[8] For a lament see Palmer' s cri de coeur in Palmer, B.: Descent into Discourse. Philadelphia 1990.
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[9] Cassity, M.: History and the Public Purpose. In: Journal of American History. 81 (1994): 972-973.
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[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.
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[11] Nobile, P.: On the Steps of the Smithsonian. Hiroshima Denial in America's Attic. In: Nobile 1995: xxiii.
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[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.
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[13] Wall Street Journal. 29 August 1994 and 2 September 1994; Nobile 1995: xxxv-vi. The AFA chief is cited in Linenthal 1996: 35.
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[14] A group of prominent revisionist political historians did protest the political cleansing' of the exhibit without success. See Linenthal 1996: 51-2.
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[15] N. Gingrich, cited in New Republic. 13 March 1995: 46.
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[16] Washington Times. 7 November 1994; Kristol is cited in Sherry, M.: Patriotic Orthodoxy. In : Linenthal 1996: 107.
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[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).
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[18] Cheney, L.: Editorial. In: Wall Street Journal. 20 October 1994.
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[19] Cheney, L.: Mocking America at US Expense. In: New York Times. 10 March 1995; New York Times. 5 September 1995.
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[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.
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[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.
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[22] Washington Times. 3 November 1994.
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[23] Granatstein 1998, xiii.
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[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.
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[25] Public Hearings on the Canadian War Museum. 3 February 1998, 4: 35-36, 56-57.
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[26] Public Hearings on the Canadian War Museum. 3 February 1998, 4: 13; 2 February 1998, 3: 69; 4 February 1998, 5: 58-9.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[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.
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[31] Bercuson, D.; Wise, S.F. 1994: 9.
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[32] Berger, C.: The Writing of Canadian History. Toronto 1996: 332.
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