Canadians, on the other hand, stare southward, are bombarded with American news, and are extraordinarily conflicted about what they see. Feelings of admiration and contempt, superiority and inferiority, gratitude and anger, swirl ambiguously through Canadian perceptions of Americans. The United States not only plays a major role in the Canadian economy, it plays an equally important role in the Canadian mind. Canadians cannot avoid thinking about the United States and cannot avoid having opinions on American power, government, foreign policy, race relations, cultural institutions, and social problems. And because English Canada looks so much like the United States, the process of discovering what makes Canada the not-America is difficult and hidden beneath the surface of the visible similarities.
History becomes one of the best places to look for the elusive, deeper meanings of the two nations.
I began teaching American history at the University of Winnipeg in 1970 at the height of the student revolt in the United States and at the high tide of an invasion by American academics into Canadian universities. Ironically, students vented little of this hostility on the new American professors and tended to see them more as romantic expatriate radicals than as cultural imperialists. Aside from the need to be sensitive to Canadian nationalism, I did not realize at first that the teaching of American history to these students required a different set of reference points than I had used as an instructor at the University of Connecticut. Like many American travelers, I had been misled by the similarity of sight and sound into thinking I was in familiar cultural territory. Professors on both sides of the border whine about student ignorance of history, but I soon realized that all ignorance is not the same nor is it only students who are ignorant.