2022
Latest Winners
The Clio Prizes
2005
Atlantic Canada
Peter Pope. Fish into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press and Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2004)
Writing with a masterful clarity that belies the complexity of both his topic and his methodology, Peter Pope effectively re-positions Newfoundland in the socioeconomic landscape of seventeenth-century North America and the North Atlantic world. Fish into Wine marshals evidence across disciplines and oceans to fashion a compelling argument about the nature of early settlement in Newfoundland and the complex relationship between planter and migratory fishers on the raw frontier of the international cod fishery.
Popes 17th-century Newfoundland is no isolated economic outpost, a pawn of European empires, where fishers contend with settlers, and English settlement defies official policy. Relying on a superb grasp of a sprawling international literature, an impressive range of archival sources, and innovative archaeological analysis (especially of the proprietary colony founded at Ferryland in 1621), Fish into Wine argues instead for a Newfoundland where the customs and practices of the English fishery extend into the New World, and where permanent plantations serve an essential purpose for both migratory fishers and the European trading network that sponsor them.
Not only does Fish into Wine significantly enrich our understanding of life in the emerging plantations on Newfoundlands English Shore; not only does it offer revisionist insights into the symbiotic relationship between planters and migratory fishers; not only does it convincingly connect those plantations with the nascent European colonies of eastern North America; but it does all of this within a comprehensive, nuanced, and admirably balanced narrative of the foundation of European settlement in Newfoundland and the lucrative international fishery around which it revolved.
In its marriage of diverse disciplines and sources, and in its persuasive analysis, Fish into Wine makes a significant contribution to Atlantic Canadian history. As one reviewer has already concluded, Understanding the early history of Newfoundland now begins here.
Quebec
Denyse Baillargeon. Un Québec en mal d’enfants. La médicalisation de la maternité 1910-1970. (Les éditions du remue-ménage, 2004)
If collective memory has long valued the idea of an alleged excessively high birthrate of Catholic francophones in Quebec (the so-called revenge of the cradles), it has to a lesser extent remembered that, at the beginning of the 20th century, this society experienced one of the worst infant mortality rates in the west. This infamous situation was the first opportunity used by doctors to justify especially by citing the nationalist cause their progressive occupation of the field of pregnancy and childhood. This remarkable work by Denyse Baillargeon, who situates her subject within a perfectly mastered international historiography, allows us to appreciate the specific rhythm and expression of the Quebec case. The author uses a number of clearly handled theoretic approaches which capture both the cultural and social aspects of her subject. Denyse Baillargeon uses a great variety of analytical methods and documentation, and her discipline, critical mind and assurance do as much justice to the medical propaganda as to the statistics. The results of the fascinating oral research also allow us to grasp the role of the mothers themselves in this story and the text is accompanied by truly useful illustrations. All this adds up to a work of rare solidity, intelligent, disciplined and absolutely enthralling, that explains a highly complex, important phenomenon of contemporary history
Ontario
Peter L. Storck. Journey to the Ice Age: Discovering an Ancient World. (University of British Columbia Press, 2004)
Peter Storck’s account of a life spent investigating the archaeology of early paleolithic Ontario is many things: archaeology, history, biography, and a cracking good read. Storck was fresh from graduate school in Wisconsin when he joined the Royal Ontario Museum in 1969, assigned to investigate the earliest archaeological records in Ontario, from 8 000 to 12 000 years ago, or even further back if older artifacts could be found. Off he went to explore the beaches of prehistoric Lake Algonquian, around Georgian Bay and the Niagara Escarpment. Sometimes weeks of tramping, digging, sifting resulted in nothing at all; other years he practically stumbled across the fluted points–visually unremarkable bits of shaped rocks–that provide almost all the surviving evidence of early paleolithic peoples and their lives in Ontario. Finding these bits of stone was only part of the struggle: they couldn’t be carbon dated, so Storck and his colleagues had to rely on other, often speculative ways of determining the age of their makers. Storck had to find the source of the stone, so he could tell what direction these people travelled. He had to tease out an understanding of the tools’ uses (even when that meant going to stone-carving school), until perplexity would give way to sudden insight that these people had caught and filleted fish on the shores of the ancient lake, or that they had hunted hare, or fox, or reindeer across the Ontario tundra. Some mysteries were resolved; many others remain. One’s experience of the Ontario landscape is transformed.
Storck’s account comes as a revelation to the uninitiated because the literature on paleolithic Ontario has generally been written by experts for experts, and inaccessible to a wider audience. Storck manages to convey the human dramas behind the jargon: not only the hard-won knowledge about ancient peoples, but also workings of the modern historical, archaeological and curatorial professions in Ontario, permitting a rare glance at scholarship centered on the museum rather than the university. These were great times for Ontario archaeologists. With research money available, knowledge of ancient history and geology improved enormously, and Ontario was transformed from an intellectual backwater to a focal point for post-ice-age archaeology. Peter Storck is an eloquent and passionate guide to both worlds, and his book deserves a wide readership.
The Prairies
Simon Evans. The Bar U and Canadian Ranching History. (Calgary: University of Calgary, 2004)
This is one of those rare books in which discussions of ropin, ridin, and range management are elevated to finely-honed analysis. It is a work of mature and elegant scholarship that provides the best description to date of the origins of ranching in Alberta and the different epochs of the ranching business in Canada, as seen through the history of the Bar U and its people. It is a careful and detailed local study at the same time as it places the ranch in its bigger geographic, economic, political and social context. The Bar U is the first close examination of a ranch community to include its aboriginal and Chinese members along with the whites, women and children along with the men, disgruntled cooks along with the cowboys and outlaws. It moves beyond the kind of vague nationalism and romanticism that often permeates the historiography of ranching to answer such questions as how did the large ranches like the Bar U function in the early ranching economy of the region, what was necessary to keep a workforce in place from one season to the next, what kinds of labour were required and who performed it, when and how did aboriginal and Chinese workers enter the picture, and what was the physical signature of ranching on the southern Alberta landscape? Extending the case study from the ranchs beginnings in the 1880s to its re-incarnation as a National Historic Site in the 1990s puts the Bar Us famous cattle kingdom days under George Lane and Pat Burns into perspective, and reminds readers that for a while the ranch was as well known for its Percheron horses as for its cattle. The rich and extensive visual material adds far more than just illustration to the text and brings a unique dimension to the analysis. Superimposing the Bar Us holdings over a modern highway map, for example, conveys just how large the home ranch was at its peak. Evans asks in his Preface whether the study of a single ranch can claim to throw light on Canadian ranching history (xix) and The Bar U does that and more. In the recent flood of scholarship on ranching this book stands out.
British Columbia
Matthew Evenden. Fish vs. Power: An Environmental History of the Fraser River. (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Environmental history is still a new field in British Columbia historiography, and this well-researched, well-written and highly original study is a most welcome addition to British Columbian, as well as to Canadian, environmental history. In this study Evenden does a fine job of exploring and explaining the competition of interests, historically contingent actions and environmental factors that led to a significant non-event in the provinces environmental, political and social history: the remarkable failure to dam the Fraser River. The study is original within both the local context and the wider field of environmental history, and successfully pushes beyond the particularities of the topic to reflect more widely on the relationships among different peoples, power (and not just of the hydro-electric variety) and the environment.
The North
Robert McGhee. The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World. (Key Porter Books, 2004)
Robert McGhee has devoted his career to explaining the early human history of the Canadian North. His insightful and impressive scholarship has provided both specific studies of aspects of polar archeology and accessible overviews of human adaptation to the Arctic. The Last Imaginary Place, perhaps his most impressive work to date, builds a number of bridges: between history and archeology, between studies of the Canadian North and the broader developments of the Circumpolar world, and between the presentation of academic research to scholarly and general audiences. McGhee has written a superb account of the early human history of the circumpolar world, doing so in a fashion that commands attention from historians and other scholars. He describes the rich and complex adaptation of indigenous peoples to the Arctic without deprecating or romanticizing their experience. Making effective use of maps and illustrations, he demonstrates that historians have much to learn from practitioners of archeological science. His writing is accessible and compelling, making the book a tremendously valuable addition to the northern studies library.
The Clio Award for northern Canadian history has, as befits a field of scholarship that has been greatly enriched by contributions from scholars in other disciplines, been given several times to authors whose disciplinary home is other than history. Recognizing the significant accomplishment of Robert McGhee marks another example of how the understanding of the human history of the North is a truly multi-disciplinary endeavour. The Last Imaginary Place is a worthy recipient of the Clio Award in Northern History, recognizing both the continuing contributions of Robert McGhee to northern scholarship and this important addition to the understanding of northern Canada’s past.