“Long live the revolution!”
Don’t you believe it. Eventually the revolution must be tamed. It must be repudiated, institutionalized or in some other way transcended. After Robespierre—Napoleon; after Madero, Huerta, Villa, Zapata, Obregon—Cárdenas and the Institutional Revolutionary Party; after Mao—Deng. After William Aberhart—Ernest C. Manning, under whose anesthetizing leadership Social Credit changed from being a radical populist insurgency to an ultraconservative…
H.V. Nelles
H.V. Nelles, the L.R. Wilson Professor of Canadian History at McMaster University, recently published with his co-author, Christopher Armstrong, The Painted Valley: Artists Along Alberta’s Bow River, 1845–2000 (University of Calgary Press, 2007).
Articles by
H.V. Nelles
The First Northern Magus
Richard Gwyn writes a trustworthy biography of a highly elusive subject November 2007
It takes a talented, hardworking and brave person, if not a foolhardy one, to attempt to write a serious biography of Sir John A. Macdonald. First of all, what a public life it was, beginning in the 1830s and stretching into the 1890s, more than a half century during which he was involved in virtually every aspect of colonial and Canadian…
Transformations, Eh?
How we changed from British subjects to Canadian citizens in two short decades March 2007
It was easier when we were all subjects. Citizenship is a more difficult concept. Many different things could be subjects of the sovereign, but citizenship implies commonality and, since the French Revolution, equality. It also implies adherence. One could be a subject by force or conquest, but not a citizen. Citizenship requires voluntary adhesion. The state must at some fundamental level earn the loyalty of its citizens…