Thinkers & Dreamers: Historical Essays in Honour of Carl Berger ed. by Gerald Friesen and Doug Owram (review)

This collection of eleven chapters was published to honour the retirement of the University of Toronto’s Professor Carl Berger, author of two of the most important and enduring books published in English-language Canadian history in the 1970s: The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867–1914 and The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English Canadian Historical Writing 1900 to 1970. It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of both these books or the influence of Professor Berger, whose appointment to the University of Toronto history department in 1966 coincided with a dramatic expansion in graduate training in Canadian history.

The individual contributions to this festschrift, authored by friends, colleagues, and former students, mix issues of historical periodization, intellectual biography, and historiography with specialized case studies on Canadian and American intellectual and cultural history. The case studies have geographic range (covering Montreal, New York, and the Prairies) and have a chronological reach from the Victorian period through to the present day. The emerging discipline of psychology and elite cultural associations through the Harlem Renaissance come under study. Themes related to immigration, progress, and citizenship are also examined.

Three essays are of particular note. Ramsay Cook as a friend and colleague blends personal and academic insights to provide an overview of Carl Berger’s professional and intellectual career. He sketches out the range of Berger’s intellectual interests and suggests both influences and his influence.

Michael Gauvreau’s provocative historiographical contribution on the current state of Canadian intellectual history will be valued by those trying to make sense of current trends. Since the wave of millennium-linked literature reviews, there has been a dearth of historiographical overviews in Canadian history, and this will be welcomed by those trying to get a broad sense of Canadian intellectual history. Gauvreau argues that English- (and French-) language intellectual history in Canada has recently been more open to influences of thematic, theoretical, and transnational forces in other areas of the discipline.

A.B. McKillop’s stimulating and compelling chapter on writing history deserves the widest possible audience. This engaging contribution sets out the case for why academic historians, regardless of their particular specialization, need to be writing for a public audience and offers suggestions and practical advice (including suggested readings!) on how to move in this direction. He urges scholars to take seriously the importance of emotion and the dramatic arc when writing and offers the wise counsel ‘Whatever the balance between the effective and the cognitive in our lives and work, whatever the relationship between narrative and analysis, art and science, to be truly engaged, requires us to look within, and then to muster the courage and the desire to be true to ourselves and not to subordinate our desire to the expectations of others.’ This astute direction applies to practitioners at all levels and returns us to the historian Carl Berger. His own scholarship and intellectual interests exhibited this attention to writing. This collection is a fitting tribute to an important career.