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The History Wars in Canada
Jack Granatstein’s 1998 jeremiad Who Killed Canadian History? was the opening shot of the History Wars, a fierce conflict about the meaning and purpose of our nation’s past. Academic historians, he satirically concluded, had abandoned traditional military and political history in order to specialize in topics like “the history of housemaid’s knee in Belleville in…
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Heritage Minutes, Rebel Mayor and More: Issue Six Launch Party on May 7!
We’re thrilled to announce that on May 7, to greet its sixth issue, The Toronto Review of Books is hosting the Canadian Historical Symbolism event of the season. Join us for what we suspect will be the world’s first Mystery-Science-Theatre-style screening of Heritage Minutes, along with some thoughts from Toronto political mascot @rebelmayor (a.k.a. writer Shawn Micallef),…
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Jimmy Carter wonders what happened to the Canadians in Argo
Nobody should expect the movies, or novels, or monographs by political scientists, to be the last or only word on the past. The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001) offer at best a partial view of the Second World War while telling us more about the times and places in which…
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A TRB Q&A with Richard Gwyn, author of Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times
In the lead-up to the announcement of the winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize, The Toronto Review of Books will feature Q&As with each of the five finalists. In 2007, Richard Gwyn published John A: The Man Who Made Us, the first volume in his biography of Canada’s first prime minister, which…