Stephen R. Bown Transcript

Hi. I'm Stephen Bown, the author of eleven books on history. In the past I've tended to focus on historical narratives having to do with explorers and Russian shipwrecks. My last several books have been exclusively about Canada and Canada's history in the past, and particularly I dealt with the Hudson Bay Company and the fur trade in general, and my most recent book is about the construction of the CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway). When I like to — these big canvas stories about Canadian history have really taken my interest lately and I'm going to continue on that vein.

When I set out to tell a story what I — you know — it's, of course it's all entirely based on facts and research which I spend years doing, but I want, what I want to do is tell a big canvas story, almost like a giant adventure story where I bring in the various strands of the story leading them in as if it were a novel so that it's a very readable approach while — while continuing — you know — to ask the big questions and providing a factual basis for understanding the world. But really what I want is a readable book that incorporates multiple diverse perspectives from all sorts of different people who wouldn't normally find themselves present in — you know — a dominant narrative history. So I want this to be — I want my work to be a little bit different in the sense that I want different perspectives from different people and different points of view to people can get a greater understanding of the good and the bad and the ugly of everything that happened.

I think without a common knowledge about what happened in the past it's very easy for, you know, extreme points of view or semi-historical, semi-accurate, semi-false narratives to become the basis for which people just tend to argue over things. And one of my approaches I — you know, what I really hope that my work would accomplish is to help to create a foundation of knowledge that can be appreciated by great numbers of people, and people can see themselves in these narratives and just to get a better understanding of how the nation came to be founded.

I really want people to not look at Canadian history in isolation from the rest of the world. We were very connected to the world even back then, even back in the late 19th century. With the technology and the politics and being so close to the Americans and the development of dynamite and the development of steam power, these are the things that transformed the world. They also transformed Canada, and Canadian history only exists within that greater global context, and so I want people to — you know — take from it that our nation is not an independent island of thought and behaviour and ideas. We are plugged — we were plugged into the world back then just just like we're plugged into it now.

The world back then was just much more complex than people realize, and the people who lived back then, who made decisions that are impacting us now down the ages. I mean, these people weren't heroes, but they weren't devils either, they were just — they were us just informed by a different level of technology, a different knowledge, a different political situation, and so a more nuanced approach to understanding just the difficulties and challenges and complexities of the world that people lived in back then.

I think — I mean — wherever you are — just stop, look around, think where you went today or last weekend or whatever you went on the drive, stuff happened here, people have been living here for ten thousand — tens of thousands of years. How can we not have any interest in the ghosts that are around us in the world? I mean everywhere we go there — stuff has happened, it is informing our modern society right now. It is because of all the debates that we are having about whether it's Indigenous perspectives, about how to go ahead with the future, political differences between the provinces, whatever it is, those issues that we deal with now had their origins in the past. How can we not have an interest in how those stories have affected us? I mean — we live in the world that was created by our ancestors and we still live in that world right now even as we try to navigate a different future, and I don't really think we can have a proper national discussion of many of the big issues in our society without understanding the origin of those issues. It's just — it's vitally important that we have a shared base of knowledge from which we can have nuanced and reasonable discussions rather than just extreme points of view.