An Introduction to Canadian History

John Kendle is a history professor at St. John’s College, University
of Manitoba.

This collection of essays is aimed at the first-year undergraduate
market and is designed to familiarize students with a wide sampling of
writing on Canadian history. As the editor is at pains to point out, it
is not complete in itself, and “context and continuity” will have to
be provided by lectures and/or a standard text. There are 19 sections
containing 38 articles—ranging from “French-Indian Relations in the
17th and 18th Centuries” to “Modern Quebec”— and the editor is
almost invisible, providing context, questions, and suggestions for
further reading in a one-page introduction to each section.

All such collections, of course, are a matter of personal conviction as
to where the discipline should be anchored and where it might ultimately
be headed. This collection reflects the more traditional approaches to
Canada’s past, but while it contains essays that will firmly ground
the student in both the key political and the key economic conjunctions,
it also draws attention to some of the best writing on Canada’s social
history.

Students will be well served if they are asked to read and discuss
these articles. The question, of course, is will they have the
opportunity? Failure to replace the retiring professoriate, burgeoning
class sizes, and cuts in funding for teaching assistants have led to the
cancellation of seminars in most first- and second-year history courses
across the country and an inexorable drift toward fewer essay
assignments and more machine-readable testing. It is to be hoped that
Silver’s collection will not only be recommended as supplementary
reading but, in fact, used as it was designed to be: as a launching pad
for debate about Canada’s past and the writing of history.
Increasingly, however, the future for collections such as this and for
the education they are designed to enrich is bleak.