This week I focused on really narrowing down the time period I'm focusing on and doing secondary source research on that period, as well as looking through some primary sources. I've decided to look at the period between 1870-1910, because it encapsulates several significant developments. In Canadian history, this is the time after Dominionhood, when Canadians were reevaluating their relationship to the Empire and Canadian nationalism was slowly growing. In American history, this is the post-Civil War era, when American imperialism had its heyday and the USA began its rise to great power status. As a result, we see tensions between the USA and Canada ebb and wane over the course of this period, as Canadians reevaluate whether their southern neighbor is a threat or an ally and Americans slowly let go of the idea that Canada will become part of the USA, and the role of Great Britain in these negotiations changes as the alliance with the US and tendency to let Canadians handle themselves both intensify.
There's a lot of threads to juggle here, as you can see, and I'm still working on developing my Question, which will hopefully become a focal point to tie all of this to. Currently what I have is: How did the usage of romantic and familial metaphors to describe the triangle of Atlantic relations (USA-Britain-Canada) affect the development of national identity at this pivotal time? Which, honestly, I'm seeing more answers for Canada then the US so far in my preliminary research, although maybe I just haven't been reading up on the US history enough. But there's certainly a lot of writing about the development of Canadian identity in this period, and its relationship to Britain and to the US is very important in that, so that's good! My next step is to try to find some works on how American identity was reconstructed in the period of Reconstruction (and imperialism and mass immigration) and see if I can find anything in there about relationships with Canada or Great Britain. I'm also combing through newspapers of the time for political cartoons because I do still want to get the personification stuff in there. My dream source at this point would be to find more cartoons like the one I showed last week, where personifications of Britain and the US and Canada are all pictured in relation to each other, so that I could do some concrete analysis of how the metaphor shifted over time to accommodate changing international relations.
In my meeting with Professor Vider, he brought up concerns that the personification question may not be the right one to ask, and while I am keeping an open mind in my review of the primary and secondary materials, I believe, based on the commonness of these metaphors in various unrelated works I've read through my studies, that there is something of note worth exploring here, and I just need to find the right way in.