The History Departmental Student Council is not the first organization for history students at Queen’s. During the early twentieth century, students could elect to join something called the “Historical Society.” Wanting to know more about this mysterious group, I consulted the official history of Queen’s, but there is no mention of it. Neither could I find any records relating to the Historical Society in the Queen’s Archives. How, then, do we know about this semi-secretive society?
I first came upon the Historical Society in a list of student clubs in a 1910/11
Queen’s YMCA student handbook about which I wrote in a previous post. From the handbook, we learn that the Society was founded in 1908 “for the purpose of promoting interest in the study of History.” The handbook also suggests that “By bringing to the University lecturers who are familiar with important phases in the study of History, it has done much to foster the interest in historical work.”
The idea for a historical society was first hatched in the fall term of 1907. In early November of that year, the Queen’s Journal, which followed the fortunes of the Society closely, noted that “a proposal to establish a Historical Society” was evidence of the “vitality in the department of history under the energetic direction of Professor Morison” (Queen’s Journal, 5 November 1907, pp. 76-77; all subsequent sources with dates and page numbers come from the Queen’s Journal, unless indicated otherwise).
First hired in the spring of 1907, J.L. Morison came to Queen’s from the University of Glasgow, where he had been an assistant professor. He’d also been involved in forming a “Working Man’s Union,” whose Sunday afternoon meetings attracted over 500 of Glasgow’s mechanics (31 Oct 1907, pp. 28-30). Once at Queen’s, Morison made the creation of the Historical Society one of his first goals, an attempt “to satisfy a genuine want” among students.
Morison had some stiff competition. The Political Science Club, which operated like a debating society, was very popular. Its honorary president was another new hire – O.D. Skelton – described approvingly by the Journal as “one of the youngest professors on the staff of any Canadian university” (2 Nov 1908, pp. 39-41). Skelton, who would later leave Queen’s to become the architect of modern external affairs under Mackenzie King, was a popular speaker on campus. In March of 1910, for example, Skelton addressed the Queen’s Theological Society on “Socialism and its Relation to Christianity” (23 March 1910, p. 421). In order to compete with the energetic Skelton’s Poli-Sci club, the Journal averred that “An historical society cannot hope to be of live interest if purely esoteric and academic.” To avoid such a fate, the Society should address “topics that have a combined historical and popular interest” (5 Nov 1907, p. 76).
Morison may also have had in mind the University of Toronto’s “Historical Club,” if only as an example of how not to organize a student group. Established in 1904 by Professor George Wrong, head of the history department and Oxford fetishist, U of T’s Historical Club was an exclusive group. It held its meetings in the homes of wealthy Torontonians, including Sir Joseph Flavelle and Sir Edmund Osler (on Wrong and the U of T Historical Club, see Donald Wright, The Professionalization of History in English Canada, pp. 36 and 100). Perhaps more in keeping with his experience in the Working Man’s Union, Morison’s Historical Society would not be an elite club. The Society reached out to “the citizens of Kingston not directly associated with the University,” but rather than meet in the homes of the well-to-do, it brought to town speakers whose lectures were open to all (5 Nov 1907, p. 77).
Morison appears to have been less concerned with ingratiating himself with Kingston’s gentry and more focused on students. As the Journal explained, an “historical reading-room will be opened in Prof. Morison’s private room in the college, where his library, books from the University Library on the subjects discussed in class, and current historical literature will be available to history students” (18 May 1908, p. 548). Another ambition of the Historical Society was to produce a publication for student “essays of real merit” (YMCA handbook). Morison also wanted to keep in touch with history graduates by holding “post-graduate reading” courses for those still in Kingston. The Journal thought this “a commendable departure from the policy of the existing college clubs and it is hoped that the efforts of Professor Morison will meet with a hearty response at the hands of the students” (6 April 1908, p. 504).
That response came in March of 1908. Following a lecture delivered by Professor Morison on “the eccentric and ecstatic” poet William Blake, attendees seized the opportunity to formally establish the Historical Society. They drew up a constitution and elected officers. The president was Adam Shortt (18 May 1908, p. 548). Although best known as the Sir John A. Macdonald Professor of Political and Economic Science, it was Shortt who forged a long-standing relationship with Arthur Doughty, the Dominion Archivist, and helped make Queen’s the first English-speaking university to teach Canadian history. In the fall of 1908, Shortt left Queen’s for Ottawa to head up the Canadian Civil Service Commission, a position that also allowed him to continue his work at the Archives.
Morison became secretary-treasurer and Duncan McArthur the “convener.” McArthur received his M.A. from Queen’s in 1908. He won a scholarship in History from Harvard, but McArthur passed on it in order to “take up work on original documents” at the Archives in Ottawa (27 October 1909, p. 59). McArthur’s decision may seem hard to believe, but these were early, heady days in the collection and use of archival documents to research and write Canadian history. McArthur’s own archive fever had come on early in his historical studies; in 1907, he wrote a long piece on the history of “The Canadian Archives” for the Journal (5 November 1907, pp. 55-59). Later, during the 1920s, McArthur would be hired in and become the chair of the Queen’s history department, write a Canadian history high-school textbook, and go on to a long career in the Ontario Department of Education. The building that houses the Queen’s Faculty of Education is named after him.
Most of the other members of the Historical Society were male undergrad and grad students in History. However, two of the original members were women: “Miss Girdler” and “Miss Hall.” Winifred Girdler was also active in the women’s Levana Society and in the “Ladies’ Department” of the Journal. This was another way in which the Queen’s Society differed from U of T’s Club, which, under Wrong’s direction, actively excluded women. It was a wrong replicated by other history clubs, including those at McGill and the University of Alberta. As historian Don Wright reminds us, these were moments in a broader “gendered process that posited men as the ideal historian” (The Professionalization of History in English Canada, p. 29). In the Queen’s Historical Society, however, women could join the boys’ club.
In the Society, the YMCA handbook noted, “it is expected that special attention will be devoted to Canadian and colonial history – fields in which much scope is given for original and valuable work.” The special attention accorded to Canadian history was no accident. The foundation had been laid by Shortt as early as the 1890s, but the study of Canadian history got a huge boost when in 1909-10 James Douglas endowed what the minutes of the Board of Trustees named the “Douglas Chair in Canadian and Colonial History.” In “Queen’s Again Takes the Lead,” the Journal boasted, “Queen’s is surely to be congratulated on being the first Canadian university to have a chair devoted exclusively to Canadian and Colonial History” (26 January 1910, pp. 250-51). Not even U of T could match this.
The Journal also announced another coup: the Douglas Chair would be occupied by W. L. Grant, son of the former Queen’s Principal George Munro Grant of Grant Hall fame. Grant came to Queen’s from Oxford, reflecting the colonial veneration for Oxford shared by many Canadian historians. The appointment elicited praise on editorial pages from the Globe to the Journal. Fully endorsing Grant’s appointment, the Journal looked toward a new dawn in the study of Canadian history: “There are some who would still have us believe that there is no history as yet in Canada, and so it has been left to men of large national spirit to spare from their already busy lives [a reference to Douglas] the time to bring this subject before us and to emphasize its increasing interest to and claims on all citizens, and particularly upon students” (2 February 1910, p. 272.)
By contrast, the Oxford Magazine lamented Grant’s departure for “the new Chair of Colonial History at Queen’s University, Kingston,” conveniently dropping the Canadian History half of the position. While the Journal praised Grant as “a brilliant young Canadian,” the Oxford Magazine reassured that he had been “reared in an atmosphere of sane Imperialism” and that he possessed fine “Imperial instincts.” Yoking Grant to “the British Empire” and “the mother country,” the Oxford Magazine made Oxford’s imperial mission clear: “Her sons are upholding Oxford traditions and teaching in Universities scattered over every quarter of the globe” (the Oxford Magazine article was reprinted in the Journal, 23 February 1910, pp. 229-30).
Canada and its historical practice would eventually mature from ‘colony to nation.’ Morison, for one, continued to expand upon the Department’s early strength in Canadian history. The Journal noted that Morison spent the summer of 1910 in the Archives in Ottawa “working on a History of Canada, which is being edited by Prof. Shortt and Dr. Doughty.” The article also noted that “the professors were glad to meet several Queen’s students in Ottawa, and among them D. A. McArthur, M. A., ’08, who is still in the Archives” (27 October 1910, p. 33). In 1919, Morison assumed the Douglas Chair, and, in 1922, he inaugurated a summer school in which Queen’s history students spent six weeks at the Public Archives of Canada, adding to the summer stampede of historians to Ottawa during the 1920s. What happened to the Historical Society in all of this activity is unclear. There are some indications that it, along with other humanities-related clubs, experienced financial difficulty and was under pressure to fold into the Arts Society.
Whatever the case, there are reminders of this earlier colonial and masculine
moment in the field of Canadian history. The Douglas Chair came complete with an actual chair and footstool, carved of Burmese teak by the wife of a colonial official and friend of Douglas stationed in India. A contemporary source describes one of the chair’s carvings as “a strong beautiful woman signifying progress, culture, and strength.” Progress, it would seem, moves slowly; in the over 100-year history of the Douglas Chair, it has never been occupied by a woman. Another carving is of a “North American Indian” in full headdress, as if the relations of colonialism in both Canadian history and historical practice weren’t already clear enough. The chair is on display in Jordan Special Collections in the Douglas Library (yes, the same Douglas). Go check it out.
Steven Maynard is a lecturer in Canadian history in our Department. Students in his classes know all too well his insistence on historiography and the archives.