Within and Without the Nation: Canadian History as Transnational History ed. by Karen Dubinsky, Adele Perry, Henry Yu (review)

Abstract

twentieth century, but Morgan insists that Carnochan was set apart by ‘the wider range of her interests, her sustained and close attention to archival detail and her love of research, and her insistence on the centrality of a particular place, not just events, to the past’ (p. 55). Morgan returns to the history of Niagara-on-the-Lake in the fourth chapter, examining how the Niagara Parks Commission, the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, the local government and various residents of the town laboured to establish Niagara-on-theLake as a tourist destination and to create for it ‘an identity that managed and married landscape, history, and culture’ (p. 113). Today, Niagara-on-the-Lake is best known as the site of the Shaw Festival, and Morgan has some interesting material on the controversies that accompanied the establishment of the Festival, although not as much as one would like about how the Festival affected the town’s historical identity. It also seems strange to end the story of Niagara-on-the-Lake in the 1970s, given that the town was one of the places centrally involved in the recent 200th anniversary commemorations of the War of 1812. The middle chapters deal with a very different theme – the efforts to create a historical narrative that established the importance of Indigenous peoples and contested ‘the forms of colonial knowledge that placed them outside of the historical time of the nation’ (p. 61). Chapter 2 focuses on two Six Nations historians, Elliott Moses and Milton Martin, ‘two civilized Indian men’ who approached the history of their people from very different perspectives (p. 175), illustrating the point that debates over history ‘take place between colonized people themselves, not just colonizer and colonized’ (p. 78). Chapter 3 examines the efforts of a sympathetic white woman, Celia B. File, who taught at the Mohawk school at Tyendinaga and produced an insightful memoir of her experiences, to ensure that the history of the Iroquois people in southern Ontario was not forgotten. Morgan’s efforts to link together her four studies in her conclusion are not entirely successful but the book still offers a wealth of new and original insights into the role of place and of the importance of local historians in the construction of history. Phillip Buckner, Professor Emeritus, University of New Brunswick