The Canadian Historical Review

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 3, 2000 The Canadian Historical Review Linda Kealey Canadians are understandably nervous about retaining their separate identity, culture , and history in the context of a rapidly globalizing world. Although on the global stage we can boast of many highly talented, highly paid, and successful musicians, film stars, entertainers, and cultural industry entrepreneurs, as well as well known and respected writers and academics, at home we remain in the shadow of the United States, facing the relentless drive for open borders and freer trade. The book and periodical publishing industry is no exception. For scholarly journals there are concerns revolving around state support and pure survival. In addition, for history journals there are also issues of national identity and the teaching of that history in our schools and universities. This panel on scholarly publishing comes at an opportune time. While my own experience as a co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review ended after a three-year term in 1997, I have also spent three years on the Board of the Conference of Historical Journals (1996– 1999), an organization which represents mainly American but also a number of Canadian history journals. These experiences have reminded me that, while Canadians have to be diligent about our own history, culture, and identity, we nevertheless share some common, or at least similar, dilemmas with colleagues in the United States and elsewhere. These common themes are the focus of what follows. There are several areas of challenge to scholarly publishing in North America that straddle the border between Canada and the United States—the challenge of ever-expanding media to be reviewed, the difficult issue of electronic publishing and its relationship to print publication, and, finally, the gap between popular and academic history. Clearly these issues are not nation-specific, but the context here is somewhat different than that of our neighbour to the south. Thus, I begin with a brief sketch of the CHR’s history and development and its place in the academic world. Secondly, like most journals publishing scholarly research in Canada, the CHR, which is owned by the University of Toronto Press, Inc., has been able to flourish despite some downward fluctuations in subscriptions because of a program of subvention to scholarly journals. So far these subventions from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) have proved crucial to the ability of many academic journals Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 382 to continue publishing. Thus, for Canadian academics, scholarly publishing cannot be separated from more general issues tied to Canadian identity and culture. In considering the challenges presented by expanding forms of historical media, electronic publishing, and the split between popular and academic history, issues of content, ownership, and identity take on a particular Canadian hue. First, the journal itself. First published in 1920, the journal was seen by its editors to have the role of raising “the standard of historical scholarship in Canada and to promote Canadian history” (Shore 411). Somewhat like the American Historical Review, which began publishing in the late nineteenth century, the Canadian journal was concerned with professionalizing the writing and establishing the benchmarks and standard practices in the field. As Christopher Tomlins wrote recently, Scholarly journals were established as mechanisms crucial to defining that early professional identity and to communicating the distinctive practices that would constitute it and thereby bring discipline, as it were, to scholarly—and some would add, to cultural—disorder. (134) The links between the AHR and the CHR are demonstrated by the fact that the latter’s predecessor, the Review of Historical Publications Relating to Canada, begun in 1896 by University of Toronto historian George Wrong, was inspired by Professor Wrong’s involvement in the American Historical Association; according to Marlene Shore’s historical account of the CHR, written for the journal’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Wrong was inspired by both the AHR and the earlier launch of the English Historical Review (411). Since its beginnings in 1920, the CHR has evolved over the decades, with some notable shifts in emphasis. Shore argues that diversity characterized the early stages (1920s and 1930s) of the...