Benjamin Bryce
Benjamin Bryce
The first article in this issue, Harold Bérubé's "Selling the Suburbs to Montrealers: Advertising Discourse and Strategies, 1950-1970" is a revised translation of his 2017 article that appeared in the Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française. This is the beginning of a collaboration between the JCHA and the RHAF to try to bridge the historiographic divide that linguistic boundaries produce in Canada.
Ramsay Cook (1931-2016) rewrote Canadian history. Distinctly uncomfortable with nationalism, like his intellectual hero George Orwell, he insisted on pluralism. His best-known contribution to Canadian historical writing was the idea of limited identities, which he refined across the length of his career but never abandoned. He also embraced federalism, bilingualism, multiculturalism, and minority rights as the best guarantees of difference. Herein lies the distilled essence of Ramsay Cook the historian.
What can be said about one hundred years of historical writing in the journals of the Canadian Historical Association, as they have evolved from the Report of the Annual Meeting|Rapport de l'assemblée annuelle (1922-1965, the journal only took on a bilingual name in 1951) to Historical Papers|Communications historiques (1966-1989) and then to the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association|Revue de la Société historique du Canada (1990-present)?