The Professionalization of History in English Canada

Tim Cook is the World War I historian at the Canadian War Museum. He is
the author of No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the
First World War and Clio’s Warriors: Canadian Historians and the
Writing of the World Wars.

This specialized work examines the professionalization of the historical
discipline in Canada from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th
century. Donald Wright, a professor of history at the University of New
Brunswick, looks at the organization and changing nature of an
intellectual community. In the formation of the academic discipline,
there was an evolution from the leisurely study of history and its use
to glorify the past to the more rigorous, fact-supported,
document-driven, seemingly impartial studies offered by academics. As a
part of this deliberate process of forming boundaries, a professional
organization dominated by men was founded at the expense of local,
amateur, and women’s historical groups.

While this book offers much insight into the role of historians, how
they viewed one another, and the policies they enacted to limit or
silence dissent through a complicated series of academic standards, it
does not supersede Carl Berger’s brilliant overview of the profession,
The Writing of Canadian History (1986). As well, Wright provides little
analysis of the essential archives of the nation, the laboratory where
historians hunker down for months and years to tease out their empirical
works. The professionalization of historians has been shaped strongly by
access to and use of the archival records, with the marginalization of
those gifted amateurs who chose or could not choose to follow this
time-consuming and privileged methodology. Wright does not spend enough
time analyzing and deconstructing these same archives, and especially
the power relations that play out within them through their guardians
(the archivists) and their users (the historians).

Most disappointing is Wright’s decision to avoid taking the story
into the latter half of the 20th century and the firm grounding of
academic history in universities, which now produce thousands of
undergraduates and hundreds of graduate students each year. Most of
those students would profit from reading this history (and perhaps from
tracking down some of the voluminous footnotes that occupy 67 pages),
but it remains an incomplete study.

Perhaps Wright’s greatest insight is that the ivory tower of
academia, protected by men who rigorously applied rules in constructing
their profession, also unintentionally marginalized historians from the
larger reading public. While that public is not likely to find much
engagement in this book, academics are best advised to pay attention:
the professional conversations of historians have become increasingly
private, whispers to one another in the ivory towers of academia.