Empire Man

Toward the end of his career, the Canadian historian Donald Creighton began to think “that I will be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as a pessimist, a bigot, and a violent Tory partisan.” Conservatives are usually right when they are wrong. That is, they sense the direction of change and cry out that a way of life is fading into history. They are often right about what is threatened, but wrong to think that anyone will care.

So it was with Donald Creighton.

He is remembered, when he is remembered at all, for all of those things: as a conservative historian who wrote the wrong kind of history, as someone who was unsympathetic if not outright bigoted toward French Canadians, the Métis and aboriginal peoples. He wrote Great Man history, long character-driven accounts of the nation itself—not the subjects or the...