Even the critics of the "old historians" are now viewed as old, traditional, and hopelessly outdated (The Hub)

I studied history at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay in the early 2000s. It was a small yet pretty impressive department that outperformed its size in research grants, publications, and instruction quality. Specialized scholars like Bruce Muirhead and Ron Harpelle were leaders in their fields. Old-school professors like Victor Smith and Peter Raffo were fountains of knowledge and compelling lecturers. 

Perhaps due to its small size, geographical isolation, and the disparate and eclectic interests of the faculty, it wasn’t a polarized place. One would have found the usual Left-Right debates in seminars about Pierre Trudeau or Margaret Thatcher or whatever. But otherwise, the so-called “History Wars” of the 1990s never quite reached Thunder Bay. 

I had barely heard of them when I arrived at Carleton University in fall 2005 to start my master’s degree. It soon became clear, however, that its history department was on the front lines of an unfolding intellectual battle. The main source of the conflagration was Jack Granatstein’s book, Who Killed Canadian History? 

Released roughly seven years earlier, the book had galvanized the history world for its sharp criticism of academic historians’ drift into what Granatstein termed the “new histories” of gender, labour, and “the lives of obscure social reformers.” It precipitated a major debate about the role and purpose of historical scholarship and the tensions between the old and new histories ...

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