Recasting History: How CBC Television Has Shaped Canada's Past by Monica MacDonald (review)

In the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2000s, the dramatization of Canadian history on television came to occupy a central place in Canadian public and scholarly discourse. If there was a galvanizing event for this sudden interest, it was the controversy surrounding The Valour and the Horror, the cbc's 1992 documentary series that outraged veterans' groups and conservative nationalists, led to a Senate inquiry over journalistic standards, and inspired jeremiads such as Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? The Canadian state's recurrent legitimacy crises, he argued, were the product of a national "memory-crisis". In response to the pervasive belief that memory (the right kind of memory, at least) could bring about national unity, a large public-private consortium began to produce the Heritage Minutes, while the cbc launched Canada: A People's History, a 32-hour docudrama series.

Inspired by the rise of cultural memory studies and the critique of nationalism, a group of scholars, in the early 2000s, turned their attention to the alleged Canadian memory-crisis and the media products produced to counter it. Over the past decade, however, the rise of social media, the emergence of digital humanities, the shift in public history practice towards collaborative and community models, the Harperite rewriting of Canadian history as one of noble warriors and intrepid Arctic explorers, and the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, have redirected the interest of researchers on Canadian public memory elsewhere. As a result, the issue of television and memory seems to have slipped off the agenda.

Recasting History is therefore a pleasant surprise. To my knowledge, it is the first book-length treatment of the long history of the cbc's attempts to bring Canadian history to the small screen, as well as one of the first scholarly books written on cbc television since the 1990s. Based on meticulous archival research and interviews with Ramsay Cook, Knowlton Nash, Gene Allen, and Jack Saywell among others, MacDonald tracks the cbc's production of Canadian history from low-budget and experimental broadcasts beginning in 1952, which made use of minimal dramatization and maximal deployment of prominent historians as talking heads to the overwrought and overdramatized People's History fifty years later.

One of the great values of MacDonald's research is that it teases out of the archive the many ways in which background bureaucratic logics impacted what appeared on screen. Recasting History spends a great deal of time, for example, exposing the consequences of how ongoing boundary disputes between "entertainment" and "documentary" divisions of the cbc strongly influenced programming. MacDonald's critiques of the programming itself were relatively unsurprising and it seems to me that, in many cases, she could have gone much further. To take one quick example, almost all the personages in her story are white, upper-middle class men. More to the point, they are all white, upper middle-class men vying for the position of being the voice of the nation. Given what feminist and postcolonial scholarship has revealed about the links between cultural nationalist movements and privileged forms of masculinity, the book's silence on masculinity and nationalism was a missed opportunity.

That said, Recasting History is one of the most valuable books on Canadian historians and their wars of position with competing cultural professional groups, and for what Randall Collins calls "attention-space" in the Canadian public sphere. Emplotted as a fall from grace, the villains in MacDonald's story are the arriviste journalists and TV executives who, in their bid to unseat them as the legitimate bards of the nation, portrayed historians as boring and/or complicit with institutionalized power. According to MacDonald, these villains are responsible for the progressive entrenchment of the colony to nation metanarrative in cbc historical productions well into the twenty-first century, long after most professional historians had abandoned it. This entrenchment...