Canadians and Their Pasts by Margaret Conrad et al. (review)

This book details a collaborative Community–University Research Alliance project that set out to “probe how Canadians engage with the past in their daily lives” (152). Largely informed by similar studies in the United States (Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, Columbia University Press, 1998) and in Australia (Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, History at the Crossroads: Australians and the Past, Halstead, 2010), this study is based on telephone surveys with 3,419 respondents in 2007–08. Arguing that people use history “as a vehicle for legitimizing or destabilizing power relations, maintaining or undermining community identities, and challenging the way we see ourselves collectively and individually” (10), the study documents how Canadians “use history to situate themselves in the present and plan for the future” (152).

The interview questions and survey methodology are described in detailed appendices, and a quick overview is in order here. Subjects were randomly selected from each province, with focused oversampling of recent immigrants, First Nations, Acadians, and Francophone Quebeckers. All subjects were asked to report on and evaluate various ways in which “the past” (used interchangeably with “history” in the interviews) informed their lives. For about twenty-two minutes, respondents were asked whether they were “very interested; somewhat interested, not very interested, or not at all interested” in various pasts, including familial, regional, provincial, and national. They were invited to talk about their engagement in, and the significance to them of, specific past-related activities in the previous twelve-month period, including looking at photographs, preparing a scrapbook or photo album, reading historical books, viewing historical movies, visiting museums or historic sites, and looking things up on the Internet. They were invited to give their opinion on how trustworthy various sources of historical information were. Researchers attempted to understand respondents’ “sense of the past” by asking them whether things were getting better, staying the same or getting worse, and what, in their opinion, should be passed down in history. Finally, interviewers requested the biographical information that provided the categories of analysis for the study, including respondents’ age (all over 18), gender, income, birthplace, place of residence (and whether rural or urban), geographic mobility (to and within Canada), ethnicity, religion, language used at home, education, occupation, income level, Internet access at home, and whether or not they had children.

The book is organized into thematic chapters addressing the survey’s identification of issues, including the importance of public history, the problem of trust, families in a globalizing world, and immigration. One of the chapters discusses the international comparisons made possible by this survey, and another provides a detailed study of the “oversampled” groups noted above.

Historians will be heartened by this survey’s clear evidence that Canadians, like most Americans and Australians, engage actively and regularly with the past, even if most are reportedly more interested in family history than provincial and national histories. The study usefully provides an overview of the range of activities that Canadians do (or say they do) in their encounters with the past, provides national perspectives on the questions asked, and urges the importance of such activities in a democratic country. Detailed survey results, however, will be of most use to those promoting various kinds of heritage activities, products, and government policies for a range of specific purposes.

Social scientists will certainly be more comfortable interpreting the often-bewildering lists of correlations than either general readers or scholars in the humanities, including (ironically) historians. The obscure significance of many of the correlations points up some deeper problems. Surveys and the statistical information that such constrained oral testimonies generate sit awkwardly within the methodological and epistemological frameworks of the humanities; the book is oddly un-historical in its explanations and its methods. What is the best way to interpret the fact that “as educational achievement increases so does the likelihood...