The Canadian Historical Association / La Société historique du Canada
Black community members in and of Montreal have always worked to document and transmit their histories. Over the years, constellations of women and men spread histories that anchored Blackness in the city, while anchoring the city in wider Black networks. By circulating historical, methodological, and archival knowledge, they forged a Black Montreal historical tradition that continues to be carried forward. The contributors to this special section of the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, comprising three generations of Black historians based in Montreal, are very much part of this wider tradition. The special section comprises an introduction, three articles, and an interview. This introduction is based on a recorded conversation between the contributors and offers reflections on what it means to think about and transmit histories of Black Montreal collectively.
The decision to commit a loved one for carceral treatment and care in a mental asylum was never an uncomplicated one. However, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century families who had a loved one suffering from a mental illness caused by maternity faced additional logistical and social issues because of the societal and geographical realities of living in British Columbia. Using records from the British Columbia Provincial Insane Asylum, this article explores how settler-colonial families navigated these struggles as well as how insane mothers complicated idealized motherhood and the settler-colonial project in British Columbia as a whole.
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.
Steven High's presidential address, delivered at York University in May 2023, grapples with many of the issues facing our discipline and what it means to be a historian in the present. Despite the extreme political polarization of our time, he expressed admiration at the courage of so many historians who continue to speak truth to power, even at considerable risk to themselves. He also addresses the structural violence of precarity within our discipline and what we as a professional association can do about it.
Sometime in 1866, a Spaniard named Josep Soler (1840-1906) arrived in Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand. Born in Constantí in the Camp de Tarragona winemaking region south of Barcelona, Soler came from a winemaking family and was a winemaker himself before leaving Spain. He planted his first New Zealand vineyard shortly after arriving in Whanganui, and his business life was one of uninterrupted success. In 1880, the New Zealand Herald proclaimed him its "New Zealander of the Year" for "his founding role in a great industry."
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)?