rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] More on School History Books (Reply)

My Grade 12 history class was taught by the late great Herbie Morrison. Mr. Morrison was an excellent teacher: smart, personable, just eccentric enough to be memorable. The class when he played a Boney M LP to illustrate his presentation on the Russian revolution is one of the clearest memories of his class. We were taught more-or-less the same history of the United States that was described in the Washington Post, emphasizing the degree to which the War of American Independence was a civil war and the on-going threat of American invasion throughout most of the first half of the 19th century. The textbook went up to the late 1980s, to cover the first debates on Canadian-American free trade.

My favourite school history textbooks, though, are my mother's from her childhood in the 1950s and the 1960s. These textbooks describe a Canada deeply implicated in the British imperial project, as a country that took shape thanks to British interest in North America and which (in the wars of the first half of the 20th century) returned the favour by aiding the mother country. It's amazing how quickly the ties of the Commonwealth decayed, really.