In honour of the publication (this week!) of Death in the Peaceable Kingdom: Canadian History since 1867 through Murder, Execution, Assassination, and Suicide, the author, Dimitry Anastakis, provides some background on how the textbook came into existence. It all starts with Louis Riel….
Louis Riel has to be one of the most fascinating figures in history—and I mean anybody’s history—within the last two centuries. Charismatic, erudite, and a poet, the messianic Manitoba Métis leader led two uprisings against the Canadian state (one of them successful), shaped half a continent, and was one of nineteenth-century Canada’s most polarizing and controversial figures before and after his 1885 execution. Riel, as I like to tell my students, still reaches from the grave to profoundly shake Canadians’ complacency about their history: astonishingly, a pivotal 2014 Supreme Court of Canada ruling about Métis land rights was a direct consequence of Riel’s Manitoba negotiations with the Canadian government, more than a century after his hanging.
I mention Riel because he was, in part, the inspiration for the textbook (and Trent University course upon which the book is based) Death in the Peaceable Kingdom: Canadian History since 1867 through Murder, Execution, Assassination, and Suicide. A few years ago I started thinking about re-working my second-year post-Confederation history course; I had already decided that one of the books I would use was Chester Brown’s famous and captivating Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Drawn and Quarterly, 2003). At the same time, I had also been teaching a module on the assassination of Pierre Laporte during the 1970 FLQ crisis in Trent’s first-year history survey, “10 Days that Shook the World: Terror” which had been well-received by students.
I had always thought it would be cool to create a sort of “10 Days of Canadian Terror” course, and it came to me that there were quite a few episodes like Riel’s—incidents of murders, or executions, or assassinations, or suicides, and that such a gruesome and dramatic litany of events really belied the notion that Canadian history was staid. In fact, as I thought about what could go into such a course, I realized that there were so many instances of captivating violence and tragedy that could be used to teach the history of the Canadian experience that I could fill a full-year course. As I began to develop the course, it became clear that virtually every significant development in Canadian history since (and including 1867) was tied to an episode of violence, and the course effectively wrote itself. When Natalie Fingerhut of UTP’s Higher Education Division approached me to consider turning the course into a book, I was delighted, since I thought it would make a great addition to, and a bit of a departure from, the existing Canadian history textbooks on the market.
Death in the Peaceable Kingdom is not just about violence in Canadian history. It simply uses episodes and incidents to get at the major developments, themes, people, events, and issues that make up the story of the Canadian peoples and their nation state since 1867. So, it is a useful way to interest students in Canadian history, another approach that takes the traditional narrative and adds a unique element to it. The book takes a few liberties by including incidents that are not actual deaths (for example, the demise of streetcars, or the “killing” of the National Policy) to provide a broad scope for the book. Also included are short vignettes, called “Tragic Tales” and “Murderous Moments,” that could rightly be chapters on their own; each one illustrates a particular point or simply tells a less well-known story about Canadian history. One great example is the little-known 1966 bombing of the House of Commons by a mentally ill man who wanted to kill Lester Pearson and John Diefenbaker but who only succeeded in blowing himself up.
As a teaching tool, the book provides “Suggestions for Further Reading” as well as “Active History” exercises for students, both located at the end of each chapter. The “Active History” features include a wide range of activities, from primary document analyses, online exercises from a host of educational and other websites, explanations about certain aspects of history and historiography, and traditional questions to consider based on readings. My students particularly enjoyed examining the online Cabinet Minutes and exploring the decisions around capital cases from the 1940s to the early 1960s. Another favourite student activity is the debate around the cause of Tom Thomson’s death as it is presented on the Canadian Mysteries website.
Death in the Peaceable Kingdom provides instructors with great flexibility, since the book can be assigned as a replacement for traditional textbooks, used as the basis for tutorial instruction or additional assignments, or simply assigned as an additional reader. Thus, instructors can add this book to their current courses, or even go so far as to redesign their course around the “hook” of murders, executions, assassinations, and suicides. I have used most of the “Active History” assignments in my course in the last couple of terms as I worked on the book, and I can say with confidence that the material and exercises in the book have been very effective in engaging students in Canadian history.
In fact, over the last few years, as I have taught the course in this manner, quite a few students have remarked that they never realized Canadian history was so interesting. Hopefully, the textbook version of Death in the Peaceable Kingdom can convince even more students, as the course has, that Canadian history is compelling, dramatic, and yes, sometimes bloody.
Reaching from his grave, Louis Riel does it again.
-Dimitry Anastakis, Trent University
