In this newspaper article, Daniel Francis responds to Jack Granastein’s claim that military history is being ignored. [Jack Granatstein] knows this, but he is concerned about something else. The kind of history he thinks is dead is national history, political history, the kind of history that breeds patriotism and civic virtues. He wants a return to the old-fashioned, "colony-to-nation" approach to history that many of us learned in school in the 1950s. In a phrase, Granatstein is an Old Curmudgeon, and not ashamed of it.

It is simply nonsense to argue, as Granatstein does, that military history is being ignored. I am familiar with many of the textbooks in use in classrooms today (I have even written a pair of them) and all of them dedicate ample space to the world wars and Korea. Not to mention the wall-to-wall CBC coverage of important military anniversaries, and the endless war documentaries on television. If Granatstein thinks the world wars are being forgotten, he and I are not living in the same universe.

The social-history approach adopted by the schools in the 1970s was not a conspiracy hatched by a generation of Marxist/feminist/regionalist historians. It was a response to some of the exact same worries Granatstein has: kids were bored by history and alienated from the subject. The "new" history was a vast improvement over the outmoded political approach that privileged a male political elite, ignored events outside of central Canada, and marginalized minority groups. Any plea for a return to "national" history has to come to terms with the fact that it has already failed as a model for teaching our young. Granatstein does not.