The Contested Past: Reading Canada's History

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, and Chile and the Nazis, and the coauthor of Invisible and
Inaudible in Washington: American Policies To

For this book, editor Marlene Shore has selected excerpts from some 70
articles published in The Canadian Historical Review between its first
issue in 1920 and Allan Greer’s 1995 commentary on the events of
1837–38. With the exception of Fernand Oueleet’s “Le Nationalisme
canadien-franзais” (1964), all are in English, and they deal with a
wide range of topics: New France, the Conquest, and Quebec nationalism;
the 19th century in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada; Native and contact
history (including “The Extermination of the Buffalo in Western
Canada” by Frank G. Roe, written in 1934); military, economic, labour,
and gender history; cultural and social history; and historiography.
Writers include Michael Bliss, Michel Brunet, Donald Creighton, John
English, G.P. de T. Glazebrook, Cornelius J. Jaenen, Arthur Lower, D.C.
Masters, Kenneth McNaught, Stan Mealing, Desmond Morton, W.L. Morton,
W.S. McNutt, Arthur Silver, Frank Underhill, George Wrong, and Charles
Beard (who wrote for the CHR in 1933).

Some of the articles disagree with each other. E.R. Adair, writing in
1932, argued that Dollard des Ormeaux had fought an unnecessary battle
against the Iroquois and by losing so many French settlers had
jeopardized New France, which already had a precariously low population.
The Iroquois were therefore in a position to celebrate a major victory.
Commenting that same year, Gustave Lanctot defended Dollard as a
“Saviour” whom contemporaries had justifiably celebrated for
preventing the annihilation of the colony. In 1931, W.A. Mackintosh
praised The Fur Trade in Canada by Harold Innis. In 1979, William Eccles
catalogued the supposed inadequacies of that Canadian classic.

Apart from university libraries, few own complete runs of the The
Canadian Historical Review. Individuals who do may want to downsize
their collections and create some shelf space. The Contested Past is the
best available substitute for the real thing.