No Time Left for You (On My Way to Better Things?)

In June, I got a full-time job as an archivist at a small archives in downtown Toronto.  Sure, it’s great to be financially rewarded for doing the sort of work that I like to do, but this has also limited by ability to do the kind of heritage stuff that I can and want to stick with.

I’ve seen numerous other young(ish) volunteers reluctantly step back from heritage commitments after they found full-time employment, and I swore that I wouldn’t be the same way.  Certainly, I don’t want to turn my back on the community that has been so good to me over the past few years.  After six months, though, I’m realizing just how difficult it is to juggle full-time employment with heritage volunteering.

Historicist

Since last spring, I’ve been contributing to Torontoist’s weekend history column, Historicist.  My responsibility is to think up a subject relating to Toronto’s history, research it, and produce a substantial article, once every four weeks.

Even before I got a full-time job, I found this a pretty daunting responsibility.  Although I was notorious throughout my school years for producing substantial work at the last minute, these articles take quite a lot of time to produce.  Part of it is that I am still finding my popular history voice.  Another part, though, is that it’s not like I just know all of Toronto’s history and pluck a story out of my head; every four weeks I have to think up a topic that I can reasonably do, frantically find source material, familiarize myself with it, find some relevant images, and construct a story.  Whereas in school I was writing essays on topics that were otherwise relevant to the material I was already reading and contemplating for class, I usually don’t know anything about my subjects when I start looking for source material.

If, after starting research, I can’t quickly find enough content to guarantee a substantial article, I’m forced to find a new subject and start all over again, and this time I need to work even faster because I’ve already wasted several days researching something else.  It’s a bit of a miracle that I’m ever happy with the resulting article.  A lot of the time, I’m a little embarrassed by what I submit, feeling it under-researched or under-written.  Thankfully, everything I write goes through editors who help me develop my ideas and fix my most egregious errors.  (Although it doesn’t go through a Toronto history expert along the way, so I’m very much responsible if I get anything factually wrong.)

The Historical Society

I remain on thde executive of my local historical society, although I am not nearly as active as I was before.  I no longer do original research when members of the public ask questions that the group cannot immediately answer.  I’ve stopped submitting content to the newsletter, and have a minimal role in planning upcoming events.  I still do one two-hour shift a month at the archives, and attend both the regular meeting and the executive meeting.

In theory, my executive portfolio includes handling the group’s correspondence, but I find I don’t have the mental energy or time to provide detailed answers anymore.  Most of the time, I just think of who else could answer the question, and forward it along.  Often, I go a few days without reading the correspondence, which isn’t good for the organization’s relations.  Amongst other things I want to train new volunteers to do the sort of things that I had been doing up until June, but again, I find I don’t have the time or energy.  Increasingly, my attitude is just: “I taught myself to do this, so you should be able to teach yourself, too.”  This isn’t a good attitude to have anywhere, but it’s an especially bad one to have with a heritage group, where capitalizing on past experience and encouraging the spread of knowledge is supposed to be the whole crux of the organization’s existence.

Preservation Panel

I remain active on the Etobicoke York Community Preservation Panel.  I don’t yet feel like dead weight, but this involvement now amounts to little more than answering e-mails and attending and contributing during a monthly meeting.  There’s a building in the area which is both worthy of designation and potentially threatened with sale and/or demolition, but even though my knowledge makes me the best equipped person to research it and work with local groups to prepare the designation, I don’t see where I’m going to have the time to make an extra trip to City Archives.  Not with my job and each impending Historicist deadline.

Toronto Historical Association

Shortly before being hired, I joined the executive of the Toronto Historical Association, which is an umbrella group of Toronto-area heritage groups and historical societies.  It is currently in a phase of rebirth and new outreach, which means that the responsibility is theoretically somewhat greater than what I was prepared for.

I was recruited for this position in part because of my youth and connections with other groups, but find I have very little time for much beyond reading the e-mails and attending the meetings.  As it’s an umbrella group everybody involved with it is, by definition, involved with other organizations, which makes it difficult for anybody with a 9 to 5 to give it daily attention.  Those who are retired send significantly more e-mails which tend to sit in my inbox until the weekend, at which point I’ll go through them and decide if I’ll be able to send thoughtful responses or if I’ve got too many other things to think about.

In addition to the things that the rest of the board would like to delegate to me, I’m constantly seeing opportunities in the THA for other things that I could be doing, but these ideas generally go unshared because it’s not reasonable for me to see the idea through.  It is frustrating.

The Rest

And, of course, there are a variety of smaller or unofficial roles out there which have essentially disappeared from my life.  Heritage Toronto has finally launched their new website, so I might get the opportunity to write for them again in 2013, but not unless I cut down on some of the things listed above.  (Last year, I also lead one of Heritage Toronto’s historical walks, through the West Toronto Junction Historical Society.)

I also want to be able to attend other public meetings of interest, or go on walking tours, or see what is happening with other historical societies or museums.  But I’ve done none of these things since getting the job.  My commitments mean that I rarely get to be an ordinary audience member anymore.  And that’s no good because, as I said above, I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Toronto’s history.  I need to go to these things in order to learn and get better at the things I’m doing.

This blog has also taken a bit of a hit.  I have about ten different posts in various states of completion right now, including book reviews, opinion pieces on various topical heritage issues, and odds and ends I’ve found while working on other projects.  Finding the time to carefully choose my words, however, is my biggest challenge, as is motivating myself to use a computer in the evening after spending most of my day staring at spreadsheets on screens.

Finding the Time Outside of Work

I’m not a complete dreamer/idiot.  Obviously, I expected to have less time available once I became employed, and warned all of my groups that my availability was about to become a lot more precious.  But the hardest part for me is letting go and seeing necessary work go undone.  It seems like everywhere I turn, there are things that aren’t being done that I know that I could do if not for the lack of time.

What makes this the most frustrating, though, is that when I don’t do this work, there’s no guarantee that anybody else will.  A huge amount of heritage work in Toronto is being done by volunteers.  A worrying amount, when you think about it.  When I used to tell my friends what I was up to, they naturally assumed that I must be doing very well out of it, financially.  The general public tends to think of heritage advocacy and history research and writing as vital, and assume that our society is somehow structured in such a way that those doing the work are being paid for it.  And while they sometimes are, so much of what happens in Toronto’s heritage community only happens because some dedicated people are willing to sacrifice their time to see it through.  Volunteers are preparing heritage designations, attending public consultations, sitting on committees, creating and leading walking tours, offering public lectures, promoting heritage in schools, performing original research, and providing information to journalists, to name but a few of the roles.  And when these people stop, their work isn’t necessarily picked up by somebody else.

Right now, it seems like Toronto’s heritage community is really on the hunt for the next generation who will one day take over the reins.  Well, we’re out there, but there’s only so much an employed person can do in their spare time.  I thought I found a fair compromise in June, but it looks like I need to massively pare down my heritage commitments in 2013.

It is, of course, vitally important that we continue to cultivate younger volunteers in heritage, and keep them engaged and poised to inherit our local legacies; it just isn’t reasonable to hand over all of the reins right away.  For a historical society executive looking for successors, or for other major volunteer heritage roles which seem like full-time jobs in themselves, we need people who actually have the time to do the job right.

I have a lot more to say on this subject, but as I don’t want to end on a pessimistic note, I’m going to save it for another time.  In the meantime, I would love to hear from some other heritage volunteers who have had to scale back their involvement following employment.  What other barriers have you found to your history/heritage participation?  How did you decide what commitments to keep, and what do you tell organizations or other people who want you to do more?

It’s All Been Done Before: On Plagiarism

The director of the Toronto District School Board, Chris Spence, has resigned after revelations that he plagiarized multiple articles that he “wrote” for the Toronto Star.

This gave me reason to consider the subject of plagiarism, and how my thoughts on the issue have developed as I’ve aged.

I first became aware of the concept of plagiarism as a student in the Toronto District School Board system, or rather, its forerunner, the Toronto Board of Education.  As a high school student, I initially saw plagiarism as a simple issue involving cheating and morality.  Plagiarism is a form of cheating, and cheating is wrong; children should learn honesty.

Admittedly, I was never really tempted to plagiarise a school essay, probably because I liked writing too much.  If anything, I used to have the opposite problem, in that I often found it difficult, as a student, to find room in which to incorporate the minimal number of sources required by my teachers or professors.  I was excited by my own ideas, and sources were annoyances which got in the way and clogged up the flow of my writing.

In my first two years of university, it would not be uncommon for me to hit the target word count before being able to cite even half the number of required sources.  I had to work at learning how to economize with words, which meant learning how to orient my writing around the source material, rather than around my own ideas.  But eventually, I did learn this skill, and it’s had a profound impact on the way I write history as an adult.

What helped me was the realization that I’d rather read something that’s good and interesting than something that’s making an original or profound point.  I don’t necessarily want to read original opinions or analysis; often, I just want facts.  In books, I tend to gravitate to the sections where the author has assembled their primary source material and quotes from a variety of other sources.  The other sections just seem like fluff, and I want to get to the substance.  In fact, many of my favourite history books are ones in which the writers seem to step back and allow me, the reader, to think that I’m doing all the analysis myself.  (Of course this is an illusion, because these writers have carefully chosen sources which fit within a certain perspective, and have also provided the reader with necessary context.)

Academic writing tends to put a lot of emphasis on analysis and original ideas, but the goal of popular history is simply to convey information in an engaging fashion.  In terms of popular history, I think that if the source material is genuinely interesting, there’s nothing wrong with just filling up the copy with properly sourced statements and attributed quotations.  Yes, it can seem aimless or thin, but when the audience doesn’t already know the story, an interesting narrative is plenty.

The thing is, it’s completely legitimate to create a piece by cutting and pasting all the best bits from other people’s work, provided that you put these sections in quotations marks and attribute them to their creators.  Chris Spence could have re-framed his articles by saying “here is an interesting collection of thoughts on this subject from a variety of other people.”  He’d already done the hard work by finding and compiling all these great quotations.  All he needed to do was curate these great passages by explaining who had said them, then adding some original words to link them together and provide context.

This is, in fact, largely what I do as a popular historian.  I don’t have a lot of the city’s history locked away in my head, and I can’t just dash off a piece based on something I already know.  Every piece I write starts with a lengthy research phase, which involves looking for books and articles on the subject I’ve chosen.  My finished product invariably includes a lot of quotations from the work of others, which I attribute accordingly.

A simple example is a piece I wrote for Torontoist on the last night of legal alcohol sale in the Junction before the passing of a temperance by-law.  The only primary sources I know of which cover this event are the newspaper accounts.  After reading them, I selected and quoted from my favourite passages which formed the basic structure of my piece.  The finished article repeatedly notes the source material, allowing for the possibility that the reported facts could have been wrong, or that the journalists of 1904 might have been having some fun at truth’s expense.  My job as a historian was to assemble this material, arrange it coherently, and to supplement it with context, such as explaining the issues with prohibition in Ontario at the time, outlining local geography, and drawing on what others had said about the overall history of the area and subject matter.  I made a lot of editorial decisions, but most of the best phrases come from the unidentified Toronto journalists of 1904.

Writing around the source material is a different kind of writing from the manic, passionate essays I wrote when I first entered university.  There’s certainly a place for this other style of writing, which stems from opinion and personal experience.  When someone is resorting to plagiarism, though, it’s a good indication that they probably aren’t that into this kind of personal writing, and they probably shouldn’t be forcing themselves to do it.

I really believe that Chris Spence would have been fine if he simply collected quotations from relevant articles, attributed them, and published these collages of other people’s insight as what they were.  If Spence thought that somebody else had already said something better than he ever could, it would have been fine for him to have said “I really agree with this other person’s comment or opinion.”  Spence’s article about the value of school sports has valid points in it that are worth reading, regardless of whether the points originated in the head of Chris Spence or in the heads of several other people.  In fact, on most subjects, I’d really like to read a collection of some of the best points made by a variety of people, rather than something that just contains one man’s opinion.

Of course, a glaring problem with the Spence debacle is that the head of a school board should be more aware than anyone about the problems with plagiarism, given that the school board itself tends to be harsh on students who plagiarise.

It’s not just that the school board preaches against plagiarism, though, or that plagiarism is simply dishonest.  A fundamental part of my formal education involved reading things written by other people, and learning how to interpret and write about them.  This is, I think, a core aspect of education.  The lesson from Chris Spence’s resignation shouldn’t be that it’s wrong to use other people’s ideas, but that it’s wrong to use other people’s ideas without crediting them.  Or, more properly, that it’s right to attribute other people’s ideas to their original sources, because reading other people’s work, manipulating it, and incorporating their ideas into our own thoughts, is how we learn.  It’s what learning is.  Kids go to school to learn how to do this.

Plagiarism isn’t just about dishonesty.  And it’s not just about being lazy, because it’s really easy to put quotation marks around something and say that it’s actually somebody else’s phrase, experience, or idea.  This is what baffles me about plagiarism.  It doesn’t seem to save much time or reduce the workload.  The only reason I can think of why somebody would repeatedly and colossally plagiarise is that they don’t realize that it’s okay to quote somebody’s work if you just say that it’s somebody else’s work and that you’re quoting it because it’s worth repeating in a new context or worth sharing with a different audience.  A serial plagiarist must be oblivious to just how close their cut-and-paste job is to legitimate writing.  

Chris Spence’s plagiarism suggests that he doesn’t understand that education is about learning how to consider and manipulate the words of other people (with a few simple rules), which makes me wonder just what he thinks education and learning actually are, and also how he was able to become the director of the TDSB in the first place.  Spence was the head of an organization whose mandate is to teach children how to think and how to consider the ideas of others, yet he doesn’t seem to have these skills himself.

Toronto in Time

Those with smartphones may be interested in the new (and free) Toronto history app, Toronto in Time.  The app combines narratives, images, and physical space to present Toronto’s history across a variety of subjects, themes, and neighbourhoods.

I can’t really do an impartial review of Toronto in Time, as I was privileged to be paid for writing a handful of the nodes.  Also, I don’t own a smartphone, so while I can readily access the content online I’m not really interacting with the content in the way that the curators have intended.  (Although all of the content is accessible on the Toronto in Time website, so anybody with internet access can still full access to the stories.)  Still, I do have a few thoughts about it that I’d like to share.

First, looking at the map, you’ll probably notice a definite bias towards downtown.  It’s worth pointing out that this is only the first phase of the Toronto in Time project; the website notes that they are soliciting suggestions for additional nodes, which hopefully will be rolled out in the future.  History, like so many other things, is never really “finished,” and I think it’s important to bear that mind when looking at this app.

My understanding is that the initial phase was deliberately limited to a manageable number of stories, and that they tried to choose stories in close geographic proximity to one another,  so that users might be able to use the app to improvise self-guided walking tours.  Hopefully, some of the future upgrades will fill in the Toronto map, and share more of the history of Etobicoke, Scarborough, and other so-called “outlying” parts of the city.  As there are still many great stories absent from the project, why not contact Toronto in Time and suggest some?  The notice on the website advises contacting them via Facebook, but they also provide an e-mail address at the bottom of this page, which I presume may be used for this purpose by those of us who don’t use Facebook.

Second, as a web user, the content can look tantlizingly brief.  Clicking on a node provides some images and some text, but compared to some other websites it may look a bit thin in terms of content.  It’s certainly very different from the kind of history writing I’ve grown accustomed to doing for Heritage Toronto or Torontoist.  (Incidentally, the other two regular Historicist writers, Kevin Plummer and Jamie Bradburn, also wrote content for this app.)

What’s important to remember is that not all history writing is designed to be read in the same way.  I like to imagine that most of my other history pieces get read on a weekend afternoon by someone who is sitting at home, drinking tea; I am pretty sure that this is not how smartphone apps tend to get used.  I think of these Toronto in Time stories as being like virtual plaques.  Like a plaque, they cannot hope to convey all of the complexity that Toronto has, nor all the nuances of history.  What they can do, though, is present the tip of a history iceberg, and hint at the grand substance underneath.  Just like physical plaques, each of these nodes serves to introduce some intriguing aspect of the city’s history, and hopefully inspires the reader to learn more.  And I think Toronto in Time does a pretty good job at succinctly reminding us that a physical place, a subject, or an idea is not as permanent or as one-sided as we may assume.  One of the strengths of Toronto in Time, I hope, is that it presents history for people who like history, but who either don’t realize it, or who otherwise find it a bit overwhelming.

Toronto in Time is, in essence, a fun way that curious people can learn for free, and that’s makes it a pretty great thing.

I should also point out that projects like this, especially ones that are free to the general public, don’t just happen on their own.  It costs money to set up things like this, and a lot of people put a lot of work into this.  Please take some time to note the organizations who funded and co-ordinated Toronto in Time, in particular The Canadian Encyclopedia and Heritage Toronto, and let them know if you like it.

Book Review #2: Canada Cycle & Motor: The CCM Story

Canada Cycle & Motor: The CCM Story
By John A. McKenty
Epic Press, 2011

For many generations of Canadians, the letters “CCM” conjure up strong memories, either through the bicycles and sporting equipment made by the company, or through the employment of friends and family.

John McKenty’s book tells the history of CCM, from its complicated origins during the late-nineteenth century bicycle craze, through its forays into automobile manufacturing and hockey equipment, until its ultimate demise in the 1983. At times, CCM was an innovator and an industry leader; in other years, it was a struggling competitor, plagued with labour disputes and a poor reputation. As someone with little personal knowledge of CCM, I found this book to be an engaging profile of the company’s fortunes (and misfortunes), as well as an intriguing look at some of the changes in Canada through the twentieth century. CCM also has a strong Toronto connection, with its manufacturing operations based for many years in the northern end of the Junction, and later on in Weston.

This book features many images, the most interesting of which tend to be the old CCM advertisements. Like McKenty, I have found advertisements to be an excellent means of illustrating a narrative, as one does not have to navigate the copyright issues that can prevent the republication of photographs or newspaper articles. The advertisements are not, however, mere illustrations; in themselves they are valuable parts of Canadiana, and present a side of the company’s story which can be easier for everyday readers to relate to than, say, corporate structure or sales statistics.

That said, this book is not an advertisement for the company. While there is certainly a whiff of nostalgia about parts of it, McKenty is intent on presenting CCM with a sense of balance. I have read histories of other companies which read like protracted, indulgent advertisements, dwelling on the glory years and refusing to say a bad thing about the company or its associated personalities. Sometimes, a company history is written by a nostalgic ex-employee who fills a jumble of casual and irrelevant anecdotes with company jargon and slang, with the end result making little sense to anyone who didn’t work there and know the people being written about. McKenty’s narrative, however,  is well-balanced and presents a complicated subject in an engaging and accessible way. Rather than focus on one specific aspect of the company, he gets into the owners, the employees, the products, and the customers, indicating how each influenced the other. The result is an interesting book which looks at several different facets of Canadian history including labour relations, marketing, and popular culture, demonstrating how varied aspects of Canada’s past came together in CCM.

What I found particularly interesting is McKenty’s willingness to point out some of CCM’s villainy. I do not know enough of the facts to know if he is pulling any punches, but there are times in Canada Cycle & Motor: The CCM Story when CCM seems to be severely mismanaged, or when it seems to treat its employees quite shabbily. When the company is managed well, CCM seems to be symbolic of local and national pride; when the quality of products is poor, the company seems like an embarrassment.  And when the company is neglected and the employees made to feel the burden, CCM comes across as an enemy.

The book is self-published through Epic Press, which may account for a few of the typographical errors and a handful of awkwardly written passages, although none of these are so major that they really detract from the narrative. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call these elements “charming,” but they do remind the reader that this book is, like so many books on the history of Toronto, effectively the product of a single, dedicated researcher.  And, unlike so many other self-published Toronto history books, there is a sizeable section of endnotes where one can find McKenty’s source material.

While the title and subject matter may suggest an attempt to appeal to those with an interest in business or industrial history, the accessible language and varied subject matter make Canada Cycle & Motor: The CCM Story an interesting look at Canadian popular culture, and indeed a look at a side of Toronto life that doesn’t always get written about. My favourite features are the plentiful advertisements, along with some of the descriptions of cycling culture. This includes not only the late nineteenth century cycling boom, but also a look at some of the racing heroes of the 1930s. If you’re curious about this aspect of the book, I would very much suggest starting with McKenty’s CCM website, in particular the archives section, which includes a look at type of stories which appear in the book.  He hasn’t given everything away on the website, and of course the book’s real strength is tying all these anecdotes into a complex narrative.

Toronto’s First Automobile, Probably

City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 56. As for what this depicts, well, that’s the whole premise of this post.

My latest Historicist article is the story behind what is believed to have been the first automobile in Toronto. I’m not the first to have written about this subject, and some readers might notice that the information in my article contradicts some of the other articles out there. A lot of these discrepancies stem from the above photo, which accompanies many articles about Toronto’s first car including mine. It is a photo from the William James collection at the City of Toronto Archives, and it’s pretty cool-looking. And the handwritten caption seems to supply some useful information. Or does it?

First Steps

I first learned about this subject through my position on the Etobicoke York Community Preservation Panel.  Some buildings on Lake Shore Boulevard recently went though the heritage designation process, buildings which were originally part of the Fetherstonhaugh Estate. Aside from being one of the first people to build a swanky estate in Mimico, F.B. Fetherstonhaugh is generally known as the man who owned Toronto first automobile. The Canadian Mint even depicted the vehicle on a coin in 1993.

The City’s background file on the Fetherstonhaugh property [pdf] says that Fetherstonhaugh’s car made its debut in 1896. The problem is that the handwritten caption on this photo clearly says it was in 1893. So I started looking to see what others had written.

The first account I found was in Mike Filey’s More Toronto Sketches (Dundurn, 1993). In an article originally written in 1979, Filey gives the year of Fetherstonhaugh’s car as 1893, and adds that it was displayed in the same year at the Exhibition. I looked at newspaper accounts of the 1893 Exhibition to find a description of the car’s demonstration. If this was the first automobile in Toronto, surely it must have caused a sensation, right?

Newspaper Research

Only I didn’t find anything about motor vehicles at the 1893 Exhibition. What I did find was a description of an exhibit by Dixon’s Carriage Works, which was the Toronto business which supposedly built (and tested) Fetherstonhaugh’s car. The article mentioned all the horse-drawn carriages Dixon had on display, but nothing about a motor vehicle.

I hunted through other newspaper articles and had a look at the sources cited in the City’s report on the Lake Shore properties. I eventually read an 1896 Globe article which describes what was, or so the reporter believed, the first running of this vehicle. The article mentions Fetherstonhaugh and Dixon, and also William Still, the engineer who designed the motor vehicle. The unnamed author of the article seems to think this event in late 1896 was the first example of an automobile in Toronto, although I have been burned by mistakes and typos in old newspaper articles before. Information simply wasn’t as available to the general public back then in the way that it is today, and sometimes newspaper accounts are wrong. (Also, sometimes newspapers deliberately lie, but that’s another story.) Maybe an automobile had been on Toronto streets earlier than December of 1896, and the Globe just hadn’t known about it.

The problem was that I kept finding other history articles about this vehicle which gave the year as 1893. Like this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And this one. And there were other books which gave the year as 1893, too. Is there another source out there that I just can’t find? Or had the writers of all these other articles simply taken the year from either the photo caption or Mike Filey’s 1979 article, and not looked for any confirmation in primary sources?

Primary Sources

Anyone who has taken a history class at the university level probably heard a lot about primary sources and how important they are. You were probably told to cite a minimum number of primary sources in your essays. I certainly had this experience, but the significance didn’t really sink in for me at the time, perhaps because at Queen’s I mostly studied western Europe during the Renaissance and Reformation years and couldn’t do all that much with primary sources given that I do not understand Italian or Spanish or German. In my essays, my primary sources tended to be translations of Dante.

Popular history, of course, isn’t academia. The language and tone changes. Popular historians are often eager to make their writing more fun and engaging, and this is great; what is the point of history if you aren’t aiming to share it with more people? Some Toronto popular history writers, however, also throw away the academic need for citations and crediting sources, and when this happens, the readers don’t know where the information is coming from. Few, if any, of the contemporary pieces I found about the Fetherstonhaugh car indicated what the source material was.

The Sign Hanging on the Front of the Car

As I got increasingly frustrated with my inability to find any clear evidence that this car existed in 1893, I took a trip to the City of Toronto archives to have a closer look at the original photo. As you can see from the image (it is perhaps clearer in this other copy of the same photo), there is a sign hung on the front of the car, and I wanted to know what it said.

The full text of that sign is as follows:

The first motor vehicle made and operated in Canada.  Built in 1893.

This carriage was built for F.B. Fetherstonhaugh in 1893 by John Dixon, and equipped by the Still Motor Co. Limited with motor and batteries made by W.J. Still.

It was exhibited in the Toronto Exhibition in 1893 and created quite a sensation in front of the old grandstand on account of it being the first horseless vehicle made or operated in Canada.

Alright, so this sign indicates the year of the vehicle’s debut as 1893. But how reliable is this sign?

Well, for one thing, it claims the Fetherstonhaugh car was the first automobile in Canada. I haven’t looked into this too closely (I was writing this article on a deadline), but none of the other sources I’ve checked seem to repeat this claim. For what it’s worth, the Canadian Encyclopedia says Canada’s first motor vehicle was as early as 1867, almost thirty years before the Fetherstonhaugh car.

If this was wrong, could the rest of the sign’s text be wrong, too?  If so, though, this would seem remarkable. The photo is dated 1912, and supposedly from an automobile exhibit at the Toronto Armouries, meaning that the details of Toronto’s first car could have been forgotten a mere twenty years after its construction. Fetherstonhaugh was still alive at this time. To be fair, though, think of recent innovations. When was the first e-mail sent in Toronto? Who was the first person in Toronto with a PDA?  People didn’t realize just how important cars were going to be, and thus hadn’t busied themselves with documenting their development.

I talked to a staff person at the archives about the photo and the William James collection. She informed me that the captions on the photo were added many years after the photos were taken. If I recall rightly, they were added by the photographer’s son, who was going by what he remembered his father telling him, so there’s certainly margin for error. In fact, the photo might be earlier or later than 1912. All we really know is that this car was at some time put on display, and that this sign hung in front of it.

So where the hell did this leave me? Well, I had the Globe article describing the supposed first test of this vehicle in 1896. I found a Star article from 1901 which says Fetherstonhaugh’s car made its debut in 1896. It turns out that Mike Filey wrote a later article, published in Toronto Sketches 10 (Dundurn, 2010), which also gives the year as 1896. But some times in the early twentieth century, all the sources started giving the year as 1893. (The earliest newspaper article I could find which gave the year as 1893 is a Star article from 1936.) Did everyone just trust the sign in the photo? And why did whoever make the sign choose the year 1893?

Automobiles at the CNE

I decided I might have more luck tracking down accounts of the vehicle being displayed at the Exhibition. I started by contacting the CNE Archives. Their staff got back to me almost right away, which was superb of them. The first reference to automobiles at the CNE that they have is in an 1897 program. So far, I have been unable to find an actual newspaper account of such an exhibit in 1897, but that does not mean that one does not exist. The closest thing I have so far is a Globe article from 1897, from just before the Exhibition, which says that somebody is “negotiating for an exhibition of horseless carriages at our great fair.” The tone of the article certainly suggests this would be the first such exhibit. The 1898 account I found of an automobile display at the Exhibition neither says it was the first automobile display at the Exhibition, nor says there had been such an exhibit in previous years.  Maybe the 1897 exhibit somehow flew under the radar.

It probably seems incredible that automobiles could fly under the radar, but it would not really surprise me. Although there is interest in automobiles throughout the 1890s, they are mostly seen as an amusing novelty, as opposed to something that people actually expected to own for themselves. The early motor vehicles were not especially fast or practical, especially not for Torontonians, given the state of Toronto’s roads at the time. The 1896 Globe article I found about the test of the Fetherstonhaugh car is buried halfway down on page eight (the Globe only had twelve pages back then), under a Reverend’s description of a locust cloud he saw. This wasn’t front-page news.

Google Patent Search

Then, I had another breakthrough.  Poking around on Google, I discovered that you can use Google to search patents. Searching for patents issued to William Joseph Still (who designed the motor in the Fetherstonhaugh car), I found two different motors which he had patented in 1893, including one where the patent had Fetherstonhaugh’s name on it. Pressing on, I found other patents with both Still and Fetherstonhaugh’s names on them in later years. It looks as if Still’s initial inventions may have been patented in 1893, but that it may have taken the remaining few years to invent the other necessary components and to design and construct a vehicle, which was then first tested in 1896. Somebody may have seen the year of the patent and assumed it was the year that the car first ran.

There’s not much that I can do to test this theory, and as I had a deadline to make with Torontoist, I had to stop my research here. I am pleased to at least have a working hypothesis, but of course this could all be disproven by somebody having an actual primary source from 1893 describing the vehicle as running.

Wheels

There is, however, still one nagging discrepancy. Take another look at that photo. The 1896 Globe article announcing the new motor vehicle’s existence says “this is carriage is a tricycle.” And that car definitely has four wheels. Oh, hell.

I can think of a few different solutions to this problem. One is that the vehicle was tinkered with after it was first tested, with the design altered until they found one that seemed to work. Another is that this is only the rear of the vehicle, and the motor and batteries could have been in a separate unit up front which pulled it like a locomotive. Another is that the Globe article is wrong about the carriage being a tricycle; maybe the person writing the piece hadn’t personally seen it, and got it confused with another design. And another, of course, is that the vehicle in the photograph is not actually the car that they tested in December of 1896 at all.

The Challenges of Public and Popular History

These sorts of things happen when researching, especially in Toronto history when one is frequently in uncharted territory. One of the challenges with popular history is being able to write engaging text when you don’t have all the facts available. When I am uncertain of a fact, I either have to qualify it with terms like “believed to be,” or else allow for the possibility of an unreliable source, with phrases like “according to an article in the Globe.” That way, if somebody else uncovers another source (and there’s an excellent chance that they will!), the new information will still fit with my article instead of completely discrediting it.

And the information that I cannot reconcile, well, I often have to leave it out. I didn’t mention anything about secondary sources citing the year as 1893, and cropped the caption out of the photograph. I didn’t mention the gold coin, which was issued in 1993, presumably for what was believed to be the car’s centennial. And I left out any mention of the number of wheels. Sometimes, if I think it might be interesting to the layperson, I mention the discrepancies. For example, in this article I wrote about Festival Express, I note that the newspaper descriptions of the violence leave a different impression than that presented by Ken Walker in the documentary film. Usually, though, if I can still tell a coherent narrative without such things, I leave these bits out.

So, for any researchers or aspiring public historians out there, be careful and diligent in your work. Don’t blindly trust the captions on photographs or the articles written by other historians (not even mine!), and question what you read. If you’re going to claim something that you cannot personally prove, that’s fine — you can’t be expected to look up every single little thing — just leave some information as to where you got your information from. I usually avoid footnotes because they can make a piece look like a university essay, and that can turn off readers who mentally associate footnotes with boring history. But when I can, I try to mention heavily used sources in the body of my text, and I usually leave a list of sources at the bottom of the page. And I keep all my notes and sources for myself, so that if anybody wants to question a specific point or do more research on their own I can also supply readers with more detailed information.

Anyway, this post turned out far longer than my actual article (which, again, you can read here). I hope at least one of the two is actually interesting. I don’t expect to get into the regular habit of doing “behind the scenes” posts for all my articles, but this seemed like a great opportunity to highlight some of the issues one runs into when doing social history, while also explaining why some of the information in my article might contradict what people have read elsewhere.

Historicist

I am delighted to announce that I am going to be contributing historical articles on a regular basis to Torontoist, one of Toronto’s leading online media outlets.

If you are from Toronto and aren’t familiar with Torontoist, then you should know that it is one of several online, Toronto-themed websites that have emerged in the last decade.  It is difficult to pigeonhole these websites, as evidenced by Torontoist‘s own efforts to describe itself.

And, if you are reading this, are interested in Toronto history, and aren’t familiar with Torontoist, then I very much recommend having a look at their historical content (and the rest of the site, of course).  Torontoist covers a lot of issues related to Toronto and, like many of the newer Toronto media outlets, frequently runs historical interest pieces.  I’ve found that many older members of the city’s heritage community look at me blankly when I mention Torontoist, blogTO, or the Toronto Standard to them, and this is a shame because all of these sites are making great efforts to share Toronto’s history to their sizeable readership.

Much of Torontoist‘s  history-based content comes in the form of their Historicist column, which appears every Saturday at noon.  I am now the third regular member of this column’s team, and have started by writing a piece on how a professional matchmaker named Nelle Brooke Stull ran afoul of the Toronto law in 1936.  (I did, in fact, contribute twice to this column in 2011 as a guest contributor, with pieces on ice-cutting on Grenadier Pond and the unveiling of the new SickKids building in 1951.)

There are several reasons why I am excited about joining Torontoist, including the reputation that Historicist has developed for thorough, well-researched articles.  But one of the main things that excites me is getting to write for a broad audience of Torontonians.  In the past, most of the historical pieces I have written have been aimed at history or heritage-themed publications, where the readers self-identify as history fans and/or heritage professionals.  Torontoist is read by people who are simply interested in Toronto.

As such, I feel like I am writing about Toronto history for people who don’t necessarily go out of their way to read about such things.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that people need to be “tricked” into reading about history, but I think it’s important to recognize that a lot of people will like history when it’s brought right to them, but for whatever reason aren’t going to seek it out.  I think it’s important to integrate historical content into other content about news, culture, or politics.  It is the same reason why we put plaques and sculptures in public places, instead of tucking them behind closed doors.  This is presumably true for many cities, but I feel it’s especially important in Toronto where, for years, there has been a popular attitude that our city doesn’t have any heritage worth preserving, and no history interesting or old enough to be worth telling.

While I believe that many young Toronto history fans are missing out by not supporting their local historical societies and learning about the city’s vast heritage community, I also believe the veterans are missing out by not knowing about the great work being done and published online.

And I am especially proud that my work will be on Historicist alongside that of Kevin Plummer and Jamie Bradburn, whose history pieces I have been reading and enjoying for the last few years.  These two historians have helped give Torontoist the solid reputation that it enjoys today, and deserve to be recognized for their efforts and achievements.

Book Review #1: The Natural City

The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment
Edited by Ingrid Leman Stefanovic and Stephen Bede Scharper
University of Toronto Press, 2012

 

The Natural City explores, with particular attention to Toronto and its environs, the relationship between urban and so-called “natural” environments.  Structurally, it is a collection of eighteen essays, written by contributors whose areas of expertise include urban planning, environmental studies, philosophy, engineering, and theology.  Each essay uses a different perspective to explore an aspect of “nature” in cities.

Given my strong ties to heritage advocacy, the idea of nature and cities is one that I find quite interesting.  In Toronto, one often thinks of heritage as something which is limited to architecture (referred to as “built heritage”), but heritage is about all aspects of our shared cultural experiences, including natural elements.  Our notion of natural heritage is not limited to the elements of wilderness which pre-date European settlement, as evidenced by this heritage tree in Roncesvalles which is less than one hundred years old.

With all this in mind, I was hoping that The Natural City would include some good passages about the interconnectedness of built and natural heritage, and indeed, there are some excellent ideas to be found in this book.  Unfortunately, The Natural City also has some problems with it which make it difficult for me to recommend the book to others.

Many of the essays seem to be written in overly academic language.  It’s been seven years since I sat in a university classroom, and thus I don’t know what to do when confronted with this sentence, from the book’s first essay (by co-editor Ingrid Leman Stefanovic):

“Phenomenology has always aimed to avoid lapsing into a reified description of either a solipsistic subjective world or an apparently ‘objective’ reality that is said to subsist independently if interpretive structures of understanding.”

Here’s another sentence, taken from an essay by Robert Mugerauer:

“In fact, current research and reassessments in complexity theory, self-organization, phenomenology, and enactivist approaches to cognition correlate with Developmental System Theory (DST), constructivist interactionism, emergence, and co-evolution in their development of an epigenetic position, in contest with the performatist view (wherein development is understood to ‘be performed by genes’).”

The entire book is not this impenetrable, but there are considerable parts of The Natural City which go on like this.  And that’s too bad, because amongst these obtuse passages are some very interesting ideas (including many in Mugerauer’s own essay, which I otherwise quite enjoyed).

While I personally indulge in abstract thinking about what cities are and what nature actually is, I found the philosophy-themed essays – clustered together at the front of the book – the most difficult of all to make sense of.  These essays expect me to have a familiarity with concepts and vocabulary which, as a non-academic, I do not.  Anyone about to read The Natural City may want to skip over these, or to ease themselves into the book by reading essays out of sequence.

The last two essays in the book were, I think, my favourites.  Gaurav Kumar and Bryan W. Karney’s essay Natural Cities, Unnatural Energy? raises some fascinating points about energy and the difficulties that people today have in comprehending the scale of it use.  Sarah J. King and Ingrid Leman Stefanovic’s Children and Nature in the City describes a study in which Toronto children were observed interacting in a city park; of particular interest is the difference between what the children were observed to do and what the children made of their own experiences.  Other essays I particularly like are Richard Oddie’s regrettably brief essay on city sounds, and Trish Glazebrook’s Ecofeminist ‘Cityzenry.’ 

It is easy to dismiss my criticisms by saying that The Natural City is not aimed at me, but then, who is the intended audience?  It had a book launch at City Hall and was promoted on Metro Morning, suggesting that the editors hoped it would find its way to all interested Torontonians.  The objective of The Natural City seems to be to change or augment the reader’s perception of the relationship between cities and the natural environment, which is definitely something I want to read about.  And the back cover includes endorsements by David Miller and Jane Goodall, exactly the sort of people whose endorsements carry weight with me.  And yet I very nearly gave up on this book after fighting my way through the first three essays.

While some of the contributors define their unfamiliar vocabulary, many do not.  As such, I worry that this book may only be appreciated by a handful of people who are already engaged in the discussion.

The idea that civilization and nature are compatible and not competing ideologies is an important one, and one with nuances which I think are of growing interest to our society, and to Toronto in particular.  Reading about these subjects can help us change our whole way of thinking about nature and cities, and that doesn’t just mean looking at trees or putting stuff in the recycling bin.  Toronto has a tradition of seeing urbanization and nature as uneasy bedmates, a tradition which has included the burying of many of our rivers, hiding old farmhouses amid residential developments, and of course the perceived need for cottages away from the downtown bustle.

As our society continues to feel the effects of extreme specialization, however, I feel like it is more important than ever to take the excellent work being done by front-line academics, and to translate it into words that everyone else can understand.  The language used in much of this book suggests that the editors are not particularly interested in sharing their ideas with the general public, and I think this does their work a disservice.  Nearly every essay in The Natural City contains something which I think the average Torontonian can take on board and incorporate into how they understand their home city but I don’t know that, in this package, the rest of Toronto will get the opportunity to join in the discussion.