In July 2011 Toronto Blue Jay’s second baseman Roberto Alomar and general manager Pat Gillick were inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame, making it a first for Canadians in baseball history. This marks the first time Canada’s only major league team will have a place to call its own in baseballs Hall of Fame in Cooperstown NY. While there are already four other Blue Jays in the hall, but neither Phil Niekro, Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor nor Rickey Henderson were inducted as Jays. Plenty of Canadians made the trek south of the border to watch Alomar and Gillick be inducted.
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Whatever pride we are supposed to draw from the various and often-contradictory definitions of our identity and history, let’s face it, nothing inspires us so much as our own people rising out of this defensive culture to universal stature. We have been lucky in this, even outside our sports heroes, except perhaps in politics where the Diefenbakers and Trudeaus have been precious few.
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“Significant: expressive, suggestive, with unstated or secret sense, inviting attention; noteworthy, of considerable amount or effect or importance”
- Oxford English Dictionary
One of the words that recurs in the making of reference works is “significance.” While the word “encyclopedia” either means or implies “all the knowledge in the world,” and one might call a Canadian encyclopedia “everything you wanted to know about Canada,” of course this was never literally possible. So when you make a reference work you have to make choices and hope that in the final product at least...
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There were celebrations that first day, July 1, 1867, for the new “Dominion of Canada.” But neither the date, nor the name nor the designation was a sure thing even a few months before. The celebrations were hardly a spontaneous public outpouring of nationalistic fervour.
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“It is clear that the electronic world will force changes not only in the delivery of the information, but in the very nature of the information itself.”
The Canadian Encyclopedia recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication of the printed volumes in 1985. It is in fact 30 years since I began work assembling The Canadian Encyclopedia in Edmonton, Alberta (see my history of The Canadian Encyclopedia).
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It was my good fortune on October 26 to attend the final lecture on Adam Gopnik’s tour to deliver this year’s Massey Lectures on the theme of “Winter.” It took place in the beautiful Koerner Hall at the Royal Conservatory, University of Toronto. Gopnik of course is the famous New Yorker writer, with a number of bestselling books, including Paris to the Moon. On “winter,” this most Canadian of themes, the author is careful to point out his bona fides, that though born in Philadelphia, he grew up in Montreal.
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The encyclopedia genre has played a significant role in the digital world. Even before the World Wide Web, encyclopedias were among the most successful products of the CD-ROM interim. Microsoft’s Encarta was the prime example (though it was a second-rate text licensed, not created, by the software giant), while World Book and others sold hundreds of thousands of copies to schools. Our own Canadian Encyclopedia appeared throughout the 1990s and was successful in retail as well as schools and libraries.
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I had the most remarkable sense of historical context while reading Deborah Lipstadt’s book The Eichmann Trial at the very time President Barack Obama announced that American forces had invaded Pakistan and killed Osama Bin Laden. Lipstadt recounts the remarkable reaction in the United States to Eichmann’s abduction from Argentina.
On May 20, 1960 a team of Israelis drugged Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina to stand trial in Israel for war crimes. The abduction caused a sensation around the world. No-one blamed the Argentines for being furious at the violation of their sovereignty....
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Grant wrote his book so that “posterity may know that we have not loosely through silence permitted [our independence] to pass away as in a dream.”
is essential reading for any Canadian interested in the question that he posed in his introduction to the Carleton Library edition in 1970: “in what ways and for what reasons do we have the power and desire to maintain some independence of the American empire?”
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“I am lost to the world.”
I spent much of my reading time this past November 2011 with a new biography Gustav Mahler (English translation 2011), written by Jens Malte Fischer. It was an unsettling, otherworldly experience.
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