Which comes first, the biographer or the subject? That is more than a chicken and egg question, for biographers bring their own personalities, ambitions and baggage to the people they write about and it affects the way they approach and analyze the material. Case in point: these two biographers, Mark Abley and J. William Galbraith, one experimental and the other…
Roger Hall
Roger Hall is a member of the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, a senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto and the general editor of the Champlain Society.
Articles by
Roger Hall
A Storyteller's Story
An academic examines the life and times of Canada’smost successful popular historian December 2008
“Who is this Pierre Beartawn I keep hearing about?” The Globe and Mail’s editor, Englishman Richard Addis, is reputed to have asked early in his tenure (1999–2002). The response is unrecorded, but the question indicates that the newcomer had plenty to learn about the society he was to join. Pierre Berton, by the turn of the last…
From Propaganda to Scholarship
A new book tracks the development of Canadian military history November 2006
The novelist E.M Forster understood the challenge pretty well.“The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave,” he wrote of Edward Gibbon in Abinger Harvest. “Otherwise,” he warned, “he will move in a world of the dead.” (judiciously avoiding a frightful world composed solely of dead historians)?
Of…