Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
[...] However, the story Bacon wants to sell is how the explosion served to transform two countries, one with aggressive aims and the other a resentful and fearful object, into friends. At best, he grossly overstates this. I see it as exploitative, again, of a tragedy and his way of making the story about the US in order to sell to the US market. But it's erroneous history, where he inflates passing emotions and posturing into policy. The last serious American designs on the British territory to its direct north dated a century earlier than Bacon claims and the US never planned an annexation of Canada.
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There's a whole Clive Cussler novel based on the merging America/Canada thing. Don't tell me he made it up!
I'm happy to buy a large part your explanation - particularly that Bacon overstates the situation rather than makes it up - but his reasoning is not all based on bombast by politicians. There are both immediate and historical reasons for some level of - let's call it - disagreement between the two countries at the time, which is why the situation as Bacon presents it does not seem unreasonable. Sure, things may not have been as a strong as Bacon would have us believe, but his presentation is not totally without substance.
I am more curious about your strength of feeling with this exploitation of history when you seemed much less offended (than I was anyway) with Kate Moore's exploitation of readers' emotions in
The Radium Girls, suggesting (if I remember correctly) it was suitable for popular historical fiction. Doesn't the same excuse apply here?
I might also ask myself the same question in reverse: why do I not find this book as offensive as I found
The Radium Girls? And I've been trying to figure that out. It may be that Bacon has simply been cleverer in his deceptions, you need to read outside his book to discover where he has been exaggerating or misrepresenting, whereas Moore was more upfront, with most(?) of her manipulations obvious in the text: upfront annoying rather than belatedly annoying. ... Or it may be that I think Bacon's misrepresentations are incidental, they don't really affect the history being presented (the Christmas tree thing is an emotional hook but has nothing to do with history - which is, of course, the problem; and the political situation between America and Canada is insignificant against the backdrop of the Great War and Halifax's role in that.) Whereas Moore annoyed me because her representation threatened to distort and obscure the history she should have been trying to illuminate.