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Urban History in North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Zane L. Miller ,
Clyde Griffen  and
Gilbert Stelter
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Extract

History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 4 , May 1977 , pp. 6 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

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18. ‘Histoire de la ville de Maisonneuve, 1883–1918’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Montreal, 1975).Google Scholar

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20. ‘The evolution of architectural styles in Toronto’, in Stelter and Artibise, op.cit.

21. Saving the Canadian City (Toronto, 1974).Google Scholar

22. ‘Approaches to the history of urban reform’, Urban History Review, ii (1976), 3–11Google Scholar; ‘Tomorrow's metropolis revisited: a critical assessment of Canadian urban reform, 1890–1920’, in Stelter and Artibise, op.cit.

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25. Others to appear shortly are Armstrong, F. H., Toronto to 1850 (1978)Google Scholar; Linteau, Paul-André, Montreal since 1850 (1978)Google Scholar; Wallace, Carl, Saint John (1978).Google Scholar

26. Some examples of those published are: Artibise, Alan, Winnipeg, the Growth of a City (1974)Google Scholar; Copp, Terry, Poverty in Montreal, 1897–1920 (1974)Google Scholar; Careless, J. M. S., Urban Development in the Canadas to 1850 (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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