Harold Innis drops a footnote

 When Harold A. Innis wants to cite some evidence on the power relationships between late nineteenth capitalists, he does so with authority.  His 1923 work, A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is a dense economic history which argues that the company brought civilization to the Canadian West at the cost of Westerners.  Note that not only does the single footnote on American railway interests run for three pages, the sentence which it provides evidence for, has a further two footnotes!

Four pages Professor Innis?! Your passion for the politico-economic background to the Pacific Scandal has no bounds!

Shawn Cafferky and Oral History

Shawn Cafferky.  FB photo.

Prior to the latest edition of Canadian Military History, I hadn't thought about Dr. Shawn Cafferky for a while.  I first received the news of his untimely death in 2008, through an email from the University of Victoria's Dr. David Zimmerman.  I had been Dr. Cafferky's student in his inspirational Oral History and Veterans class, and through this experience was inspired to pursue a Masters degree in Second World War military history.  There was something fascinating in the interviews in UVic's Special Collections on Second World War armoured operations.  Despite the inherent problems in the recollection of military memories, I was converted to a disciple of oral history.


It was hard not to get caught up in Cafferky's enthusiasm for his subject.  He had an easy-going manner which encouraged participation in seminar, in the hallways of the history department, or occasionally at the pub.  Cafferky's connections with the Vancouver Island branch of the Royal United Services Institute, allowed his students to have unprecedented access to retired members of the Canadian Forces.  In retrospect, it was incredible that Major-Generals were inviting mere undergraduates into their homes to conduct interviews on their military careers.


It was in Cafferky's course that I learned that doing history could be more than the time-honoured tradition of desk-bound academia.  Here was human history, with all its inherent problems of abrasive personality, selective memory, and interpreted experience.  Historians turn a skeptical eye towards the personal testimony of oral history, so often recorded long after the events in question.  For my own part, I consider oral history as another welcome source, to be scrutinized by the historian with due consideration for the nature of the oral medium.

Cafferky's article  "Battle Honours Won", published posthumously in the Summer 2010 edition of Canadian Military History, examines the British escort aircraft carrier HMS Nabob, which after the fall of 1943 was captained by Horatio Nelson Lay of the Royal Canadian Navy, and staffed by a mixture of Canadian and British Soldiers.

C.P. Stacey Award Past Winners

It has just been announced that a new release by Kevin Spooner called Canada, The Congo Crisis and U.N. Peacekeeping is the recipient of the 2009 C.P. Stacey Award.  The award is granted by the Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War and the Canadian Commission for Military History and was adjudicated by Serge Bernier, Paul Dickson, Doug Delaney and Norman Hillmer.


For those interested in what works have won the award in the past, (required reading for any Canadian Military historian), here is a partial list:

2009 Kevin Spooner, Canada, The Congo Crisis and U.N. Peacekeeping

2008 Paul Douglas Dickson, A Thoroughly Canadian General: A Biography of General H.D.G. Crerar (University of Toronto Press)

2008 Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe (McGill-Queen's Press)

2006 Douglas Delaney Bert Hoffmeister: The Soldier's General

         Honourable Mentions

         Jeffrey A. Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers Canada’s Second World War

         David Mackenzie (Editor), Canada and the First World War: Essays in Honour of Robert Craig Brown, published by University of Toronto Press.

2004 Marc Milner, Battle of the Atlantic (Vanwell Publishing Ltd) 

        Béatrice Richard, La mémoire de Dieppe. Radioscopie d'un mythe (VLB éditeur)

2002 Brian Tennyson and Roger Sarty, Guardian of the Gulf: Sydney, Cape Breton and the Atlantic Wars (University of Toronto Press)

2000 Tim Cook, No Place to Run: The Canadian Corps and Gas Warfare in the First World War (UBC Press)

1998 Jonathan Vance, Death so Noble

1996 George Blackburn, Gun's of Victory

1994 Desmond Morton, When Your Number's Up

1992 Bill McAndrew, Terry Copp, Battle Exhaustion

1990 Robert Vogel, Terry Copp Maple Leaf Route

1988 Norman Hillmer, W.A.B. Douglas The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Volume II: The Creation of a National Air Force (Toronto: University of Toronto Press)

The official Call for Papers notes:

C.P. Stacey. Photo DND

              The C.P. StaceyPrize is an award in honour of author and long-serving Official Historian at the Department of National Defence, Charles P. Stacey. He was one of Canada's foremost military historians and as an Official Historian established a level of excellence for official histories that continues to influence practitioners and their approach to Canada's military past. He trained several generations of military historians, and his influence is still felt in the field of military history. His work on the official histories of the Canadian army during the Second World War is considered a model for similar histories. This award honours his commitment to furthering the field of military history. The aim of the award is to highlight the best book written in a one-year period on the Canadian military experience. The award considers studies of all three services, including operational histories, biographies, unit histories and works of synthesis (if they include original insights and/or new material). It can also include high quality edited collections and annotated memoirs.

Sources
http://www.cs.mun.ca/~lawards/litawards/index.php?award=986 
http://christophermoorehistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/wolfe-versus-crerar-who-would-win.html
With help from Drs. Delaney and Dickson