If there is one thing Canadians know about their own history it is that we do not know, or care, much about it.

With depressing regularity, poll after poll reveals that we do not know the name of our first prime minister, or when BC joined Confederation, or yadda yadda yadda. We extrapolate from these dismal surveys to conclude that Canadians consider their past to be one giant yawn and the more excitable among us warn that there is a national crisis of ignorance.

But...

Reading a review of a couple of new books about the assassination of Leon Trotksy brought back memories of a visit I made a few years ago to the scene of the murder, Trotsky's house in Coyoacan, a neighbourhood of Mexico City.

Now part of a museum, it is maintained much as it was on August 20, 1940, when an agent of the Soviet secret police, Ramon Mercader, gained access to the house and struck Trotsky a fatal blow to the head with an ice axe he had concealed in his raincoat...

I travelled to Ottawa last week to conduct Her Majesty's business (and to shiver through the Polar Vortex) and I needed something to read on the plane. My choice, Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk, turned out to be both impressive and depressing.

The book has received quite a bit of attention, rightly so. Subtitled "Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life," it is a bleak history of the impact of disease on the First Nations of the Canadian Plains....

In the latest issue of Geist magazine (#91) my regular column looks at two new books about the fetishization of the canoe in our national mythology.

The books are Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: the Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism by Misao Dean and Bruce Erickson's Canoe Nation: Nature, Race and the Making of a Canadian Icon.

"The virtue of these two new books is that...

Back in November the history department at Simon Fraser University sponsored an interesting panel discussion about Trudeaumania, past and present. You can watch it here.

It brought to mind my own brush with Pierre Trudeau back in the federal election of 1968. (I recently recalled this incident in a talk at Carleton University as one of the events which awoke in my younger self a dormant interest in Canada as a subject of...