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  • Confederation, Biography, and Canadian History
  • Dimitry Anastakis and Mary-Ellen Kelm

As editors of the Canadian Historical Review (CHR), we organize an occasional feature designed to provide the Canadian historical community with multiple perspectives on particular issues, events, and topics in Canadian history and historiography, called “Historical Perspectives.” During 2017, Canadians will commemorate a number of events that have been pivotal to the shaping of memory, meaning, and history in this country, including the one-hundredth anniversaries of the battle of Vimy Ridge, the Halifax Explosion, the death of Tom Thomson, and, of course, the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Canadian Confederation.

This latter event, the sesquicentennial of Confederation, provides an opportunity for historians to ask different kinds of questions about Confederation and its meaning and to develop different frameworks and ideas for interpreting this event. Certainly, there will be no shortage of conferences, workshops, collections, and writings on Confederation, Canada, and history during this year, many of which will thoughtfully and thoroughly interrogate Confederation and all of its implications. This Historical Perspectives scrutinizes Confederation, but the feature also examines another aspect of historical writing that historiographically has been central to framing our understanding of Confederation–biography. In doing so, we felt that critical reappraisals of both Confederation, as an event, and biography, as a subfield within Canadian history, might result. We hope that the feature has achieved this goal and that readers will find these contributions useful to a greater understanding of both strands of this Historical Perspectives. [End Page 294]

In pursuing this feature, the editors asked four Canadian historians to contribute writing that was in some way connected to either or both topics–Confederation and biography. We stipulated only that each author consider these two themes as starting points; they were not in any way beholden to write in the strictest sense about either or both topics. By consciously keeping the parameters loose, we wished to give these historians as much leeway in developing the topic(s) as they saw fit. What results is an exploration of the gendered, imperial, colonial, linguistic, and intellectual dimensions and connections across and between Confederation and biography. While each piece takes a distinct approach, there are links and intersections among them, and each asks us to reconsider otherwise well-travelled historiographical terrain. By doing so, the pieces provoke new ways of thinking about biography and about Confederation and how we conceptualize each, both together and separately.

Along with these four contributions, the CHR also offers a bibliography of articles published in the Journal since 1920 that touch upon the subject of Confederation. In this, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the passing of the British North America Act, and Canada’s founding as a nation-state, such a bibliography may prove useful to readers, teachers, students, and others who wish to further interrogate this seminal event in Canadian history.

Dimitry Anastakis and Mary-Ellen Kelm
The Canadian Historical Review
  • La Confédération, le genre biographique et l’histoire du Canada
  • Dimitry Anastakis, Mary-Ellen Kelm, and Suzanne Morton

La rédaction de la Canadian Historical Review publie occasionnellement une section appelée « Perspectives historiques » qui vise à fournir aux canadianistes des points de vue multiples sur des enjeux, des événements et des sujets spécifiques en histoire du Canada et en historiographie canadienne. En 2017, les Canadiens vont commémorer un certain nombre d’événements déterminants dans la construction de la mémoire, de l’identité et de l’histoire du pays. Parmi ceux-ci figurent le centenaire de la bataille de Vimy, de l’explosion de Halifax et de la mort de Tom Thomson et, bien entendu, le cent cinquantième anniversaire de la Confédération. [End Page 295]

Ce dernier événement offre aux historiens l’occasion de poser différentes questions sur la Confédération et sa signification, d’élaborer différents cadres d’analyse et différentes idées afin de l’interpréter. Au cours de cette année anniversaire, il ne manquera certainement pas de congrès, de colloques, d’ateliers, de collections et d’écrits sur la Confédération, le Canada et l’histoire, dont bon nombre examineront en...

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