The purpose of this discussion is to examine the contributions that various disciplines have made and are making to the study of the urban past in terms of subject matter, conceptualization, and methodology. It is my task to outline the role of the historian (narrowly defined) in this venture. The question which immediately arises is: as the historian does not have exclusive jurisdiction over the study of the urban past, either as subject matter or as a dimension of urban studies, what does he have to contribute beyond a rather amateurish approach to the increasingly technical methodology employed today? In general, I think the contribution might be described as a special sense of time and place. In the context of other approaches, it falls somewhere between that of the social scientist interested in discovering general patterns and that of the local historian concerned only with the unique and particular. This rather nebulous middle ground perhaps is best defined by describing what historians think they are doing and by a selective look at what they have done.
History is a tricky business, if only because history, as a phenomenon of the present, subject to scrutiny and manipulation, does not exist: it is, in a very real sense, made up. The study of the history of historical writing is a doubly tricky business because it is not merely what really happened in the past which determined the way people acted and wrote history, but also the way in which people perceived what happened. These complications require that one not only take into account what historians have said but also their perceptions of reality in their own times and the way that perception defined their conception of what was real in the past. Definition becomes the crux of the matter, for the way our predecessors wrote urban history depended upon their definition of their subject matter.
Le présent exposé traite de la planification et du développement des villes du Haut-Canada, région frontière de l’Amérique du Nord britannique. Les fonctionnaires de l’Empire, se fondant sur l’expérience acquise par les Britanniques en Irlande et dans les colonies américaines, se servirent sciemment des villes pour favoriser le peuplement de cette région. Au milieu du XIXe siècle, les entrepôts coloniaux étaient devenus des centres de commerce ambitieux, tandis que l’organisation sociale se reflétait dans une conception traditionaliste du gouvernement local; par exemple, les objets fabriqués ressemblaient énormément à ceux des États-Unis.This paper describes the planning and development of the towns and cities of Upper Canada, the frontier region of British North America. Imperial officials consciously used towns as agencies for the settlement of this region, based on the British experience in Ireland and the American colonies. By the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial entrepôts had become ambitious commercial centres. While the social system was reflected in a conservative approach to local government, for example, the physical artifacts closely resembled their counterparts in the United States
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