Don't tell them you can make calculators say BOOBS

Bilson's history of the cholera epidemic in Lower Canada in the 1830s is all about Irish immigration, the way the numbers overwhelmed existing facilities, how disease fed into xenophobia, etc.

I lived in Manor Park as a child (1976-1986), in a house like the top left one, but with the addition on the right instead.

There are of course well-worn phrases or wordings - like "first as tragedy, then as farce," or "they cannot speak, they must be represented" (both from Marx) - that would show up over and over, but the multiple ways even these can be deployed makes exact repetition unlikely.

If a humanities scholar uses the exact same phrasing as another humanities scholar, it is probably more likely that they plagiarized it than happened to land on the exact same wording. There are just too many variables.

This is very different from the humanities, especially philosophy and literary theory, as well as a social science like anthropology, where it is nearly impossible to separate a scholar's ideas from their writing.

Use of passive voice, highly specific words that can't be replaced with anything truly equivalent, and minimal adornment or even prepositional relations - all of these would conspire to create a sameness of wording, but one that no expert who read both would be troubled by it.

My roses? Stone!

It's fine if, out at a café with your friends, you ask whether the British Invasion of 1964 would have happened without the Beatles. But don't ask Mark Lewisohn to do that work, in addition to, or at the expense of, telling us, with great care and imagination, what did happen. FIN

(Whether we were aware of it or not.)

Changing one fact is both too little and too large an ambition, and would tell us little. We don't have any documents to show us what would have happened, and if we try to take into account all the possibilities involved in another set of events, our imaginations would quickly fail us.

If we are alert to contingency, though, we understand that the causes and effects of every detail of every story are unique and literally unfathomable. We can, with great care and effort and imagination and hubris, tell a story of what happened, but it is impossible to account for it all.

A counter-factual is a different outcome of an event, or a different action by a major player - what if the Nazis had waited to invade the Soviet Union, putting all their resources into the Africa campaign, for example, or what if Henry VIII and Catherine had had a son instead of Mary in 1516?

A few times when I've retweeted something with an agreeing phrase, I have wondered who it was for.

Each of these is wrong of course, but over and above these objections, everything that happened after the state removed kids from their communities and families happened because of the state's authority and action. Whatever specifically caused those deaths, the ultimate cause was the Canadian state.