David Tough

If I cite Frank Tough in something I write, should I specify that we are not related? (We necessarily share some ancestry, as it's an uncommon name that comes from a tiny village in Scotland.)

Don't tell them you can make calculators say BOOBS

Economists and public service people, does it make sense to say that Canada's Department of Finance deals with the economy as a whole macroeconomically while Treasury Board manages government expenditures microeconomically? Or is that too simplistic?

Bilson's history of the cholera epidemic in Lower Canada in the 1830s is all about Irish immigration, the way the numbers overwhelmed existing facilities, how disease fed into xenophobia, etc.

I lived in Manor Park as a child (1976-1986), in a house like the top left one, but with the addition on the right instead.

There are of course well-worn phrases or wordings - like "first as tragedy, then as farce," or "they cannot speak, they must be represented" (both from Marx) - that would show up over and over, but the multiple ways even these can be deployed makes exact repetition unlikely.

If a humanities scholar uses the exact same phrasing as another humanities scholar, it is probably more likely that they plagiarized it than happened to land on the exact same wording. There are just too many variables.

This is very different from the humanities, especially philosophy and literary theory, as well as a social science like anthropology, where it is nearly impossible to separate a scholar's ideas from their writing.

Use of passive voice, highly specific words that can't be replaced with anything truly equivalent, and minimal adornment or even prepositional relations - all of these would conspire to create a sameness of wording, but one that no expert who read both would be troubled by it.

Re plagiarism, I'm pretty convinced by the argument that when your scholarly work is mostly relating what happened with a given statistical/computational model or even lab tests, it's very likely you will use the exact same wording as many other people doing the same work.

Any French historians know of a graduate student (ideally of the 18th C) who would like a chance to practice their paleography skills?

I’m looking for someone to help me with a little project—compensated of course!

Please share widely and feel free to reach out.

My roses? Stone!

It's an unavoidable occupational hazard, but the number of times I have Bobby Gimby's Expo67 song ("CA--NA--DAAA!") playing on a loop in my mind is ... a lot.

I'm not 100% on this, but I think what people miss when they say historians should do counter-factuals and we don't, is that contingency - which historians do discuss - is a similar concept, bit much more open-ended and epistemologically rich.

It's fine if, out at a café with your friends, you ask whether the British Invasion of 1964 would have happened without the Beatles. But don't ask Mark Lewisohn to do that work, in addition to, or at the expense of, telling us, with great care and imagination, what did happen. FIN

(Whether we were aware of it or not.)

Changing one fact is both too little and too large an ambition, and would tell us little. We don't have any documents to show us what would have happened, and if we try to take into account all the possibilities involved in another set of events, our imaginations would quickly fail us.

If we are alert to contingency, though, we understand that the causes and effects of every detail of every story are unique and literally unfathomable. We can, with great care and effort and imagination and hubris, tell a story of what happened, but it is impossible to account for it all.

A counter-factual is a different outcome of an event, or a different action by a major player - what if the Nazis had waited to invade the Soviet Union, putting all their resources into the Africa campaign, for example, or what if Henry VIII and Catherine had had a son instead of Mary in 1516?

I'm not 100% on this, but I think what people miss when they say historians should do counter-factuals and we don't, is that contingency - which historians do discuss - is a similar concept, bit much more open-ended and epistemologically rich.

Hey @kellyb.bsky.social TRU is hiring someone to do an open online BC history course. It's a paid position - your favourite! - and potentially fairly easy to adapt existing course content.

A few times when I've retweeted something with an agreeing phrase, I have wondered who it was for.

I've been thinking lately about the Princes in the Tower, 12-year-old Edward V and his 9-year-old brother Richard, who were imprisoned in the Tower of London "for their protection" in 1483 and never heard from again, while their uncle Richard III took the throne.

Each of these is wrong of course, but over and above these objections, everything that happened after the state removed kids from their communities and families happened because of the state's authority and action. Whatever specifically caused those deaths, the ultimate cause was the Canadian state.

Some historians who were unfamiliar with the history of residential schools insisted that not enough was known to make a determination based on the graves. Were they really graves or a different grave-shaped anomoly? How do we know whose remains they were? We can't just assume what happened etc

The reaction to the identification of graves in the summer of 2021 was a different situation. Again, it confirmed a hypothesis, but it was a hypothesis that was not widely known in Canada at the time. Remarkably, it seems the vast majority of settlers took the new information seriously. However ...

What is striking is that everybody knew the story of the princes, so when the remains were found, it CONFIRMED a hypothesis, rather than opening a new set of questions.

In 1647, during the reign of Charles II, two small skeletons were found in the Tower. They were immediately assumed to be Edward V and his brother Richard. Their remains were moved to Westminster Abbey, with their families.

If you set up an environment where kids aren't safe, you force parents to hand them over to your care, you may or may not want them to come to harm, but if they disappear, and you benefit from their disappearance, and don't seem concerned about their deaths - do you deserve the benefit of the doubt?