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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/02/2024

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.)

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 13/01/2024

Don't tell them you can make calculators say BOOBS

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 12/01/2024

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?

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 09/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 08/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/01/2024

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.

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Jakob Burnham @jakobburnham.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 05/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

(Whether we were aware of it or not.)

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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?

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 03/01/2024

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 28/12/2023

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

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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 ...

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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?

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

Everything and anything that happened to the princes after they were taken into the Tower was Richard's responsibility. Did he kill them himself or order one of his people to kill them, did an overzealous underling act rashly, did they kids slip and fall or eat bad food? It makes no difference.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

The kids were taken from their families, no matter how reluctant or terrified their parents were, and in many cases simply did not return. They were malnourished and mistreated, given perfunctory medical care if that. People in charge of them had did not make safety a priority.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

The reason this has been on my mind a lot is because I think of it as a good analogy for people who insist on casting doubt on the intent and effect of residential school.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

Officially no one knew what happened to them. But after Richard took them from Earl Rivers and the Queen, he was responsible for their safety. If they came to harm under his authority, among people who would benefit from their deaths, it didn't matter if he ordered them killed or not.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

Once the boys were in the Tower, isolated from the people who had raised them and protected them, Richard cancelled Edward's coronation and crowned himself. The boys were never seen again. T he assumption that Richard murdered them undermined his support, setting the stage for the Tudor victory.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

The terrified former Queen Elizabeth Woodville took her remaining children to Westminster Abbey, under the protection of the church. Eventually the Archbishop and Richard convinced the Queen to also hand over her next-eldest son, 9-year-old Richard, ostensibly to prepare for Edward V's coronation.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

Somewhat ominously, Richard moved swiftly on hearing the news of his brother's death, taking his nephew from his life-long guardian (another uncle, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, who was swiftly executed), and putting the boy into the Tower of London, ostensibly until his coronation.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

When Edward IV died, his eldest son and heir was 12, and became Edward V upon the death of his father. But the king had asked on his deathbed that his brother Richard, Duke of Glouster govern the kingdom for a few years until the boy was older.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

This happened at the end of the Wars of the Roses, a struggle between rival factions of the ruling Plantagenet family, the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The presumed fate of the princes is deeply entwined with the rise of the House of Tudor, ending the Wars of the Roses, in 1485.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

I will do that! Thanks Matthew

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cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

the most insidious thing that any politician or media or cruel, malicious stranger can convince you of is that there are people who are not people in the same way you are. and i want to bring them to my job and shake them and tell them look, look at this grief, tell me this person is not my people

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 10/12/2023

Does anyone know a grad student or underemployed historian in the Waterloo area who would want to do a small amount of paid archival research?

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 08/12/2023

And that's that. There's more to the story of me and Jim Struthers, but that's the unlikely origin. Who knows what I would be doing now if I had been able to take History of Night instead?

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

My previous courses didn't prepare me very well for that work, and neither, to be honest, did my intellect, which was impatient with detail. Jim commented extensively on my essays, pointing out what I had misunderstood or ignored in my drive to score political points or craft an arresting phrase.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

As it happened, Mike Harris won the provincial election that summer. By September, I was writing articles about welfare and homelessness for Arthur, the student paper, and Jim's course was hugely meaningful. He seemed to have a learned and thoughtful answer to everything I was passionate about.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

Dejected, I Charlie Brown walked down the old railway path to Traill, and went to the Canadian Studies Office. There was no changing the History of Night situation. The only course I could register for, at this late hour, was Jim Struthers's history of social policy course.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

I ran across the lawn at Sadleir House and into the History office (where the OPIRG office is now?), and breathlessly announced that I had Prof Walden's approval to take the course. The dept admin looked at me blankly, having no memory of our earlier conversation. The course was now completed full.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

Professor Walden asked me about the courses I had taken, to try to get a sense of my background, and also quizzed me about cultural history. I think I knew about Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, plus I had read Discipline and Punish (on my own initiative, not in a class), so I was in.

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David Tough @davidtough.bsky.social · 07/12/2023

I could be added to the course if Professor Walden himself approved my candidacy, though. I tracked him down in his office, where he was eating something pungent for lunch, and I realized as I sat down that I hadn't eaten anything and felt vaguely sick. Anyway ...

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