To shed new light on old events can be no small achievement. The great battles of history, revolutions and civil wars, overseas ventures, religious upheavals, and scientific and technological breakthroughs all lend themselves to telling and retelling, to new interpretations and paradigmatic shifts.
One thinks of the feat of intellectual history involved in rethinking the relationship between Christianity and Islam of Henri Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne. Of the grand fresco of republican thought contained in John Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Or of Barrington Moore’s comparative reflections on agrarian social structures in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World.
To be sure, the subject of Canadian history offers a significantly smaller canvas than the above. Yet it has also been the subject of...
Philip Resnick is a political scientist, long associated with the University of British Columbia. He has published widely on political topics, books such as Letters to a Québécois Friend (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), The Masks of Proteus: Canadian Reflections on the State (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990), Twenty-First Century Democracy (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1997), The European Roots of Canadian Identity (Broadview Press, 2005) and The Labyrinth of North American Identities (University of Toronto Press, 2012). As a poet, he authored a number of collections in the 1970s and ’80s, primarily on Greek-rooted themes. His most recent collection of poems, Footsteps of the Past, was published in September 2015 by Ronsdale Press.
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