Inventing the Loyalists : : The Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation of Usable Pasts / / Norman Knowles.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Knowles, Norman,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

The Loyalists have often been credited with planting a coherent and unified tradition that has been passed on virtually unchanged to subsequent generations and that continues to define Ontario's political culture. Challenging past scholarship, Norman Knowles argues that there never has been consensus on the defining characteristics of the Loyalist tradition. He suggests that, in fact, the very concept of tradition has constantly been subject to appropriation by various constituencies who wish to legitimize their point of view and their claim to status by creating a usable past. The picture of the Loyalist tradition that emerges from this study is not of an inherited artefact but of a contested and dynamic phenomenon that has undergone continuous change. Inventing the Loyalists traces the evolution of the Loyalist tradition from the Loyalists' arrival in Upper Canada in 1784 until the present. It explores how the Loyalist tradition was produced, established, and maintained, delineates the roles particular social groups and localities played in constructing differing versions of the Loyalist past, and examines the reception of these efforts by the larger community. Rejecting both consensual and hegemonic models, Knowles presents a pluralistic understanding of the invention of tradition as a complex process of social and cultural negotiation by which different groups, interests, and generations compete with each other over the content, meaning, and uses of the past. He demonstrates that in Ontario, many groups, including filiopietistic descendants, political propagandists, status-conscious professionals, reform-minded women, and Native peoples, invested in the creation of the Loyalist tradition. By exploring the ways in which the Loyalist past was, and still is, being negotiated, Inventing the Loyalists revises our understanding of the Loyalist tradition and provides insight into the politics of commemoration.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. 'Chiefly landholders, farmers, and others': The Loyalist Reality -- 2. 'An ancestry of which any people might be proud': Official History, the Vernacular Past, and the Shaping of the Loyalist Tradition at Mid-Century -- 3. 'Loyalism is not dead in Adolphustown': Community Factionalism and the Adolphustown Loyalist Centennial Celebrations of 1884 -- 4. A sacred trust': The 1884 Toronto, Niagara, and Six Nations Loyalist Centennial Celebrations and the Politics of Commemoration -- 5. 'Fairy tales in the guise of history': The Loyalists in Ontario Publications, 1884-1918 -- 6. 'Object lessons': Loyalist Monuments and the Creation of Usable Pasts -- 7. 'A further and more enduring mark of honour': The Middle Class and the United Empire Loyalist Association of Ontario, 1896-1914 -- Conclusion -- Appendices -- Notes -- Select Bibliography -- Picture Credits -- Index