Forty Years Back

T SHE last forty years have seen as many changes in the approach of historians to their study of the past as have been seen in science and technology. Time appears to have been telescoped, condensed, accelerated. In the field of North American colonial history we have gone from the romantic, chauvinist but felicitous prose of Francis Parkman to history contrived with the aid of the computer. Indigenous peoples and social groups, hitherto ignored, are now to the fore. It has been a highly interesting, and at times aggravating, period in which to practice the craft. Intellectual historians some years hence will have a rich field to winnow. When I returned to Montreal and university after World War II, and chose New France as my field of specialization, I dutifully reread Parkman's epic series, France and England in North America, and found nothing in those works with which I could disagree. I read all the other secondary sources, French and English, and found that the latter were, for the most part, little more than paraphrased Parkman. The only difference was that they lacked his literary style. Most of the works in French showed a marked pro-clerical bias. The only recent writings of any value were the articles by E. R. Adair, a specialist in early modern British and European history with an international reputation. Upon moving to McGill from the University of London, Adair had turned his attention to seventeenthand eighteenth-century Canadian history. With his depth and breadth of knowledge of the age, he quickly put things in a new context and destroyed some old myths in the process, greatly to the dismay of the old guard in both English and French Canada. His family background went a long way to explain his irreverent attitude, his inability to suffer fools. He was the son of one of the younger colonels-he claimed the youngest-in the army of the Confederate States of America, who had refused to take the oath of amnesty at the end of the war, removed to England with his Spanish Florida Creole wife, and there lived the rest of his long life. When England went to war in 1914 and the senior Adair had to register as an alien, he did so as a citizen of the Confederate States of America. It was under the direction of his son Robin, a proud, arrogant man, that I elected to work. Amongst the history graduate students Adair enjoyed a fearsome reputation as an extremely demanding teacher, never satisfied with whatever they did, but most painstaking in his criticism. They warned me that I would surely regret my decision. Yet, I thought, during four long years the Kriegsmarine and the Luftwaffe had failed to cause me serious

Political science · Canadian Identity and History · History

• The Historians' Indian

  Open Access•Bruce G Trigger•Canadian Historical Review•1986

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• Gender and the Professionalization of History in English Canada before 1960

  Open Access•Donald Wright•Canadian Historical Review•2000

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