Historiography of Canada

The historiography of Canada deals with the manner in which historians have depicted analyzed and debated the History of Canada. It also covers the popular memory of critical historical events, ideas and leaders, as well as the depiction of those events in museums, monuments, reenactments, pageants and historic sites.

Amateur historians, self-taught in the knowledge of the sources but with a limited knowledge of the historiography, dominated publications until the late 19th century.

The most influential of the amateur historians was François-Xavier Garneau (1809–1866), a self-educated poor boy who defined the essence of Quebec nationalistic history for a century with his Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’ à nos jours (3 vol., multiple editions from 1845 onward). The first edition came under attack from Catholic Church officials for its touch of liberalism; after he revised the work the Church gave its blessing. He taught the profound linkage of language, laws, and customs, and how the Catholic faith was essential to the French Canadian nationality. His ideas became dogma across Quebec, and were continued deep into the 20th century by Abbe Lionel Groulx (1878-1967), the first full-time university professor of Quebec history.

In Anglophone Canada the most prominent amateur of his day was William Kingsford (1819 – 1898), whose History of Canada (1887-1898) was widely read by the upper middle class, as well as Anglophone teachers, despite its poor organization and pedestrian writing style. Kingsford believed that the Conquest guaranteed victory for British constitutional liberty and that it ensured material progress. He assumed the assimilation of French Canadians into a superior British culture was inevitable and desirable, for he envisioned Canada as one nation with one anglophone population.

Lovers of the past set up local historical societies and museums preserve the documents and artifacts. Amateurs are still quite important, especially as journalists write biographies of politicians and studies of major political developments.

By far the most popular of the amateurs was the Harvard-based American Francis Parkman (1823-1893), whose nine volumes on "France and England in North America" (Boston, 1865–92) are still widely read as literary masterpieces.

...
Wikipedia