After reading Breastplate and Buckskin in grade 7, I did not encounter another history book until I became editor of a university textbook, called Unity in Diversity, at a Toronto publishing house. The book had four authors, three of whom wrote their sections as narratives and one of whom, Fernand Ouellet, wrote a social and economic analysis. Since two editors had gotten fired trying to get Ouellet to “tell a story” and add some characters, I was not about to ask him to change his text. Editing that book was my course in Canadian history as well as an introduction to the new history.

When I became editor of the Carleton Library Series (CLS) in 1970 I also enrolled in a part-time history degree. In those days students and younger historians were keen to debunk the staid old “narrative” history. Talk in the archives and pubs was all about social history, demographics, feminism, material history—all showered with the “ism” shrapnel left over from the Marxist explosion.

Traditional historians sniffed at the trivialness of these “fads” (some still do). The advocates gloated and got published and tenured. We students dutifully tried to digest E.P Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and the whole French Annales School, which eschewed mere “events” and biography for grand “conjunctures.” By co-incidence, one of my greatest challenges as editor of the CLS was to clean up a literal translation of Fernand Ouellet's “Social and Economic History of Quebec.” I tried to sort out the arguments of how the price of beaver pelts and the spread of weevils shook the foundations of society far more than mere events such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

While editing this magnum opus I canvassed a dozen historians at Carleton to ask them how they would translate the words “conjuncture” and “longue durée,” which appeared a thousand times. No-one had plausible translations, so I left the words in French and put them in italics. (For a discussion of Ouelett and his method see Serge Gagnon, Quebec and its Historians)

Few would dispute that the social historians broadened our understanding of history. I enjoyed the youthful tut-tutting across the generation gap and the barbs at Donald Creighton, W.L. Morton, J.M.S. Careless, George Stanley and others, with their outmoded accounts of character and circumstance. But in truth social history is generally not the kind of history that I read now. However much the social historians may have the academic world in their grip, I rarely encounter them in my reading, however right they might or might not be in their understandings. Fact is, I don’t think that they do much publishing of history books at all.

I look at the history books that I read last year. Tony Judt’s Postwar (reviews) shows how much can be accomplished in a narrative filled with almost exhausting discourse and explanation. I particularly liked Judt’s cultural insights. “Mediocre times,” Judt quotes Camus as saying, “beget empty prophets. The 1970s offered a rich harvest of them. It was an age depressingly aware of having come after the big hopes and ambitious ideas of the recent past.”

Talk about mediocre times recalls another of my favourite history narratives from last year, The Vertigo Years by Philipp Blom. Part of the purpose of Blom’s narrative is to challenge the accepted thesis that the 20th century began with the First World War. It was changes in the years before the war, “the vertigo years,” Blom argues, that set the century in motion from Freud’s uncorking of the unconscious, the poisonous spread of racial and religious bigotry, horrifying outrages in the Belgian Congo, the weakness and sexual ambivalence of men as women become the pioneers in politics, arts and also in the sciences. I am sure that a litany of disruption and discontent can be found in any era, but I look in vain in our new century for the "the creative ferment" and enduring innovations in art, literature, music and science that erupted early in the last.

I want to mention one last example of a narrative, one with a narrower focus. Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America was published some years ago (1992). I re-read this before Obama ascended and all the Lincoln analogies spawned, but it is of course relevant. Aside from that it is a marvelous book, a brilliant invocation of how those 272 famous words still resonate.

Historical narrative is an enduring and popular form, not only full of the storytelling and character that interests us so, but also with the power to offer explanation, put forward or challenge ideas, and to depict change over time, from a few days (John Lukacs’s Five Days in London), to a year (Margaret Macmillan’s 1919), to an era (Postwar) and beyond. As history, though, it has its problems and its critics. Inevitably, our judgment of the effectiveness of narratives depends as much on the literary abilities of the authors as on the evidence that is mustered to fit an admittedly “linear” model of time.

I started by asking is the history that we study the history that we read? For the moment I am putting aside my narratives, biographies and poetry and wading into an example of the other kind of history book. It is an imposing tome (brilliantly illustrated) called Europe Between the Oceans, by Barry Cunliffe. Using archaeological evidence from Turkey to Iceland, Cunliffe seeks nothing less than an explanation of some 10,000 years of history from 9000 B.C. to 1000 A.D. For Cunliffe, reminiscent of the Annales approach, geography and climate are the shaping forces of history. Events and personalities are mere “flittings on the surface,” or as Braudel called them, “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs.” It is humbling, for example, to be told that the entire epic of the Roman Empire was a mere interlude (Braudel’s longue durée encore).

Now I remember echoes of the “Laurentian Thesis” of Harold Innis and Donald Creighton (Canada exists because of the river patterns of the Shield) and I am thinking again, perhaps geography is destiny. Is there some comfort in this for us to think of the current economic catastrophe as a mere bubble of foam and of the bankers and politicians as no more significant than a plague of weevils?