Who Killed Canadian History?: A View from the Trenches

In his book Who Killed Canadian History? (1998), J.L. Granatstein accuses Canadian academic historians of having abandoned the writing of a national past in favour of overspenalized and ideologically driven forms of history. This article contends that in the interests of polemic, he miscasts the role of the scholar as citizen, misrepresents the purpose of scholarship, and distorts the nature and quality of academic historical writing. In doing so, he puts forward a conception of Canada’s ‘national’ history that is no better suited to serve national self-understanding than the scholarship he dismisses. His narrow and traditional view of national history ignores the impact of geopolitical conditions on the world of scholarly interpretation. Nominally without ideological purpose, it can be viewed instead as part of the process of political legitimation. His construction of the important ‘facts’ of Canadian history ignores the way event-driven facts arc inseparable from considerations of value and therefore from the realm of the interpretive. Finally, by ignoring contemporary works of international historiography and structural determinants of professionalization, his polemic is largely written in an intellectual and contextual vacuum.