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

Following the inception of CBC Television in 1952, viewers might have been forgiven for forgetting that Newfoundland and Labrador even existed. Aside from Donald Creighton's visit to L'Anse aux Meadows, a Norse settlement in Newfoundland, in one episode of Images of Canada (1972–1976) called "Heroic Beginnings," the province did not figure at all as a place of significance, even in a CBC Television program whose aim was to devote more attention to the nation's diverse cultural and regional histories. Only with the sweeping new millennial survey Canada: A People's History (2000–2002) did Newfoundland and Labrador, almost fifty years after Confederation, finally begin to break through. The very first episode, "When the World Began," opens with a dramatization of costumed actors portraying Shawnadithit, the last surviving Beothuk, and William Cormack, a Scottish explorer who devoted his life to understanding and preserving Beothuk culture. Even to this day, however, coverage of Newfoundland and Labrador (and the rest of the Atlantic Canadian provinces, for that matter) pales in comparison to the depth and time spent on Ontario and Quebec.

The absence of Atlantic Canada, among other subjects, in these programs is the focus of Monica MacDonald's Recasting History: How CBC Television Has Shaped Canada's Past. But in addition to analyzing the content of CBC Television historical programs—such as English-French relations, the threat of Americanization, Canada's wars, and political victors—MacDonald demonstrates that how the CBC presents Canadian history is just as important as what it deems pertinent to defining Canadian national identity. Charting this form's transformation over the past half century, MacDonald argues that the CBC has moved away from its earlier reflexive presentational styles and on-screen historians and begun to employ more creative and dramatic treatments of historical events and actors with the aim of providing a single, linear, unambiguous, and emotionally stirring narrative of Canadian history. Presentation styles, MacDonald argues, are shaped by many historical and social forces. For these CBC documentaries and docudramas, the growing role of professional journalists—at the expense of professional historians—as the authors of history, individual personalities, political and social tumult, and internal and external policies have all shaped how the CBC has told Canadian history.

MacDonald begins her examination of CBC Television in her first two chapters by turning to Explorations (1956–1964) and Images of Canada, respectively. Focusing on production staff members like Eric Koch and Vincent Tovell, MacDonald explains how both Explorations and Images of Canada were marked by a desire to educate Canadians about their history in order to foster a common national identity, a desire that was shared by many professional historians. Both programs frequently featured professional historians, such as Donald Creighton, Charles Stacey, and Jack Saywell, both on screen and behind-the-scenes, as consultants. At times, not all historians agreed on the details of Canadian history. History itself was undergoing a shift, as historians increasingly moved away from homogenous narratives to plural, contingent understandings of history. In Explorations, the "contingency of historical knowledge," as MacDonald puts it, was "on full display" (32). The program's experiments in form reflected historians' desire to reveal history as a "mode of inquiry" (19). From pairing up archrivals Donald Creighton and Frank Underhill, a renowned leftist who challenged Creighton's conservative British loyalism, to employing a pseudo You Are There-style approach, in which Lord Durham appears in present-day Winnipeg for a press conference, Explorations told Canadian history from a range of perspectives that were unified by similar themes. In the face of the competition that arose from the Broadcasting Act in 1968, however, the days of experimentation at the CBC came to an end, and Images of Canada adopted a far more homogenous approach to Canadian history than Explorations—though it still recognized the value of historians as critical mediators of Canadian history. In response to the Broadcasting Act's call for regional productions because...