Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas


Book Description

Frank Underhill (1889-1971) practically invented the role of public intellectual in English Canada through his journalism, essays, teaching, and political activity. He became one of the country's most controversial figures in the middle of the twentieth century by confronting the central political issues of his time and by actively working to reform the Canadian political landscape. His propagation of socialist ideas during the Great Depression and his criticism of the British Empire and British foreign policy almost cost him his job at the University of Toronto. In Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas, Kenneth Dewar demonstrates how Underhill's thought evolved from his days as a student at Toronto and Oxford, to his drafting of the Regina Manifesto - the founding platform of the leftist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation - to his support of his long-time friend Lester Pearson’s Liberals in the 1960s. Not willing to be bound by partisan loyalties, his later shift toward the political centre dismayed many of his former allies. The various issues Underhill confronted, Dewar argues, were connected by the pioneering role he played as an intellectual and by his social democratic vision of politics. Dewar also reassesses Underhill’s historical work, focusing on how it differed from the new professional history practised by his younger colleagues. Intelligently written and thoroughly researched, Frank Underhill and the Politics of Ideas delivers important insights into twentieth-century political life and innumerable lessons for twenty-first century Canada.




Frank H. Underhill


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Unbuttoned


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When Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King died in 1950, the public knew little about his eccentric private life. In his final will King ordered the destruction of his private diaries, seemingly securing his privacy for good. Yet twenty-five years after King's death, the public was bombarded with stories about "Weird Willie," the prime minister who communed with ghosts and cavorted with prostitutes. Unbuttoned traces the transformation of the public’s knowledge and opinion of King's character, offering a compelling look at the changing way Canadians saw themselves and measured the importance of their leaders’ personal lives. Christopher Dummitt relates the strange posthumous tale of King's diary and details the specific decisions of King's literary executors. Along the way we learn about a thief in the public archives, stolen copies of King's diaries being sold on the black market, and an RCMP hunt for a missing diary linked to the search for Russian spies at the highest levels of the Canadian government. Analyzing writing and reporting about King, Dummitt concludes that the increasingly irreverent views of King can be explained by a fundamental historical transformation that occurred in the era in which King's diaries were released, when the rights revolution, Freud, 1960s activism, and investigative journalism were making self-revelation a cultural preoccupation. Presenting extensive archival research in a captivating narrative, Unbuttoned traces the rise of a political culture that privileged the individual as the ultimate source of truth, and made Canadians rethink what they wanted to know about politicians.




The Race Question in Canada


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The Vimy Trap


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The story of the bloody 1917 Battle of Vimy Ridge is, according to many of today’s tellings, a heroic founding moment for Canada. This noble, birth-of-a-nation narrative is regularly applied to the Great War in general. Yet this mythical tale is rather new. “Vimyism”— today’s official story of glorious, martial patriotism—contrasts sharply with the complex ways in which veterans, artists, clerics, and even politicians who had supported the war interpreted its meaning over the decades. Was the Great War a futile imperial debacle? A proud, nation-building milestone? Contending Great War memories have helped to shape how later wars were imagined. The Vimy Trap provides a powerful probe of commemoration cultures. This subtle, fast-paced work of public history—combining scholarly insight with sharp-eyed journalism, and based on primary sources and school textbooks, battlefield visits and war art—explains both how and why peace and war remain contested terrain in ever-changing landscapes of Canadian memory.




The Government Generation


Book Description

War, depression, secularization, urbanization, and the rise of industry – between 1900 and 1945 Canada struggled with all these developments, and from them was born the modern welfare state. New services were created, along with new taxes to pay for them and expanded bureaucracies to administer them. Government activity grew enormously; so did government expenditures. The role of the state in a modern industrialized society became the focus of a lively and continuing debate for two generations of intellectual reformers. Doug Owram looks back at that debate and the academics, civil servants, and political activists who engaged in it. Adam Short, W.L. Grant, Frank Underhill, W.C. Clark, Harold Innis, and many others exchanged ideas – sometimes cautiously, sometimes passionately – about the wisdom of planning and reform, and on practical schemes for their realization. Owram explores the reforming impulse and its political dimension: the impact of warm and depression on attitudes to the state, the League of Social Reconstruction and its relations with the CCF, R.B. Bennett’s New Deal, and the various changes of heart experienced over forty years by Mackenzie King. The Canada that emerged from the Second World War was very different from the one that had existed at the turn of the century relations between the individual and the state had altered drastically and irrevocably. The people examined in this book and the social and political movements in which they believed helped shape Canada’s response to powerful forces that were changing its way of life forever.




Academic Freedom in Canada


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Covering issues from the resistance in universities to Darwinist thought, to the experience of women and ethnic minorities, to "economic" and "political correctness," from 1860 to the present.




Wilsonian Visions


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In Wilsonian Visions, James McAllister recovers the history of the most influential forum of American liberal internationalism in the immediate aftermath of the First World War: The Williamstown Institute of Politics. Established in 1921 by Harry A. Garfield, the president of Williams College, the Institute was dedicated to promoting an informed perspective on world politics even as the United States, still gathering itself after World War I, retreated from the Wilsonian vision of active involvement in European political affairs. Located on the Williams campus in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, the Institute's annual summer session of lectures and roundtables attracted scholars, diplomats, and peace activists from around the world. Newspapers and press services reported the proceedings and controversies of the Institute to an American public divided over fundamental questions about US involvement in the world. In an era where the institutions of liberal internationalism were just taking shape, Garfield's institutional model was rapidly emulated by colleges and universities across the US. McAllister narrates the career of the Institute, tracing its roots back to the tragedy of the First World War and Garfield's disappointment in America's failure to join the League of Nations. He also shows the Progressive Era origins of the Institute and the importance of the political and intellectual relationship formed between Garfield and Wilson at Princeton University in the early 1900s. Drawing on new and previously unexamined archival materials, Wilsonian Visions restores the Institute to its rightful status in the intellectual history of US foreign relations and shows it to be a formative institution as the country transitioned from domestic isolation to global engagement.




Untied Kingdom


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How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom, Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers.




Big Men Fear Me


Book Description

Nominated for the 2023 Heritage Toronto Book Award • Finalist for the 2023 Ottawa Book Award in English Nonfiction • Longlisted for the 2023 National Business Book Award The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most influential media moguls. When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s biography "one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history"—until now. In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh’s inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.