Searchable 1911 census temporarily available free

Ancestry.ca, the big pay-for-access genealogical website, is offering free access to its fully searchable 1891 1911 Canadian census data -- only during the July 1 long weekend. (Now if only we all got Friday off to make it a real long weekend, but that's another issue.)

I should disclose I received a membership in exchange for a little work I did for Ancestry, so I'm not out of pocket for my access. But I find it pretty useful to have, not just for impressing relatives and in-laws with all I can find about the family tree, but just as much in historical work. For searching out biographical, birthplace, residence, and family details of all kinds of people, it's very effective.

The sources Ancestry and sites like it offer access to are generally available from public archives, even online. It's not like you can't get this data any other way.  But for the fee, they do add a lot of organization, convenience, and searchability.  But right now you can try out the 1891 material and see what you think.

History of women in the law

Back in 1934, Mary Constance McLean was one of only two women called to the bar of Ontario. In 2010 she marks her 76th year as a lawyer. And she is only a hundred years old. Nice story here.

Rural History and Culture Association shuts down

Saskatchewan's Rural History and Culture Association is folding its big tent. The organization has announced it is closing down this week, mostly because founder and moving spirit, Mike Fedyk, is moving out of the province.

Between 2006 and 2010, the RHCA initiated 12 historical re-enactments, community festivals, concerts and other events in 11 different communities and also published one book. RHCA events attracted over 10,000 people, major media attention and raised over $30,000 for heritage and community organizations in Saskatchewan.

Even from remote Ontario, I was frequently impressed by the original and successful historical events the RHCA created around rural Saskatchewan and how effectively they promoted them. Happily, I got to write up the organization's doings -- all too briefly -- in a Beaver column in 2009.

The RHCA goes out on a high note. publishing their first book, Fort Walsh to Wood Mountain: The North-West Mounted Police Trail, in the next few days. (More info here.) Well done, Mike Fedyk.

Beachcoming Canadian history

A lively British blog, Beachcoming's Bizarre History, picks up on the story of the German robot weather station placed on the coast of Labrador by a U-boat.

Beachcombing suggests the weather wars need a history. It think it already has one: Wilhelm Dege and William Barr, War North of 80, the Last German Arctic Weather Station of World War II, published by University of Calgary Press in 2004. Alec Douglas, formerly Director of History at the Canadian Defence Department accompanied the first party to inspect the remains of the weather station and wrote an engaging account of the trip in Canadian Geographic in the early 1980s. I don't have the article to hand, but I recall the equipment had been seen many times between 1943 and 1981. No one identified it for what it was until mention of it was found in German records.

Drivel Watch: The Globe on Australia and on leadership

The Economist notes the "unhappiness" with Australian exPM Kevin Rudd's management style that helped provoke his colleagues into removing him from office.

A workaholic, he tended to control government as a one-man band, running the civil service in Canberra ragged and shutting some colleagues out of key decisions. One environment minister learned of the ETS's deferral only by reading about it in the press. And Mr. Rudd's short temper won him few friends.

I was going to say, "Gee, sounds like they are describing the Canadian prime minister. But isn't Mr Harper still in power?" Doing a little drivel-watch research, however, I found whoever writes the bottom of the column editorials for the Globe makes the same comparison. But the Globe admires such traits in a leader. Denouncing the Australian "coup," the Globe writes, "[Rudd] was criticized for being too controlling, and a lone wolf, but such characteristics need not be fatal to a leader, as illustrated by Stephen Harper."

The Globe in its own fatuous way, does prove something. Such "leadership" characteristics are only fatal where things like accountability and collective responsibility apply. You know, like in a parliamentary democracy.

Reading Green Gables in Teheran

Questions you maybe never thought to ask, courtesy of a new book from University of Toronto Press.

Is it odd that what readers in Iran celebrate about Anne is so opposite the proto-feminist independence that we celebrate in the west?

... and did she have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, too?

History of Malaria

It's old, it's really old.  Human beings are its only reservoir -- it could not get along without us. And we took it around the world.

Speaking of Heather Pringle, doesn't she have one of the cool jobs?

One of the great joys of my job is to set out armed to the teeth with notebooks, cameras and voice recorder, and join an archaeological crew in some remote part of the world.

In comparison, it's dull as tombs here in the T.dot.

Henry McCambridge guest-blogs: A Look at the History of Kitchener

[Henry, a student and writer in Kitchener, Ontario, otherwise unknown to me, got in touch to offer the site this guestblog. I like the idea of the occasional guestblog, so....]

Situated in southern Ontario, the city of Kitchener was originally known as the Town of Berlin from the year 1854 until it was renamed the City of Berlin in 1912 and eventually Kitchener in 1916. The area where the city would eventually be established had been originally set aside as a land grant to the Six Nations Indians by the British Crown as a reward for their loyalty during the American War for Independence. Members of the tribe later sold off several thousand hectares of land to a United Empire Loyalist, Colonel Richard Beasley. 

Nestled inland, the land proved to be appealing to a group of Mennonite farmers from Pennsylvania. Concerned that they would not be exempted from military service following the American War for Independence; this group of German Mennonites re-settled in Upper Canada in the 1790s. The lure of the freedom to worship as they wished and cheap land was of tremendous appeal. Members of the Sherk and Betzner families, both members of this group of German Mennonites, arrived toward the end of 1800 and established what would eventually become the City of Kitchener.

As more Mennonites arrived in the area they pooled their funds and were able to purchase the remainder of the land from Beasley and formed the German Company Tract. The land was divided into farms for the purposes of distribution.  By 1816 the German Company Tract had become the Township of Waterloo, further encouraging migration of German speaking families from Europe. The area continued to grow throughout the mid to late 1800s, the growth fuelled by area’s religious tolerance. In 1833, the township was renamed Berlin in honour of the German heritage of the local settlers. Within twenty years, Berlin had become the County Seat for the County of Waterloo and achieved Village status.

Due to the industrial knowledge and skilled trades of the German immigrants, Berlin became a significant industrial centre complete with tanneries, furniture factories, button factories and a foundry. Berlin officially became a city in the summer of 1912 and was largely considered by many to be the German capital of Canada. Berlin was not able to escape the anti-German sentiment that swept the country as WWI erupted. Under tremendous pressure to change the name of the city, Berlin became Kitchener in 1916.

The rapid growth experienced by the City of Kitchener led to the need for an orderly City development plan. The Adams-Seymour Plan was finally approved in 1925, featuring a comprehensive zoning system that allowed for distinctive industrial, commercial and residential districts.

Like many other cities throughout Canada, Kitchener was not unaffected by the Great Depression; however, the wide industrial diversification allow Kitchener to make it through the worst of the depression and quickly rebound beginning in 1936. Unlike during the First World War, Kitchener became an integral part of the war effort during WWII.

Growth of the city continued well after the end of the war and by 1965 Kitchener had become one of the fastest growing cities in Canada as well as a leading distribution, financial and industrial centre.

Today the population of Kitchener is nearing the 200,000 mark and the city has maintained a strong business and industrial base while remaining strongly rooted in its original German heritage.

There are several public high schools in Kitchener, including the Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate and Vocational School, which dates back to 1855. A number of new schools were built throughout the 1950s and 1960s to allow for the rapid expansion of the city. In addition, Kitchener is also home to Conestoga College, one of the premier Ontario colleges. A School of Pharmacy has also been launched through the University of Waterloo, with the campus located in downtown Kitchener. The city will also be home to a satellite campus for the McMaster University School of Medicine.

[Homer Watson House image from City of Kitchener website]

Some days I really wish we had a parliamentary democracy in Canada

Yesterday the Australian Labor Party removed its leader, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, from the leadership of the party and replaced him with his deputy leader Julia Gillard. Today the Governor General of Australia swore her in as the first woman prime minister of Australia. News.com.au has a FAQ on the hows and whys.

It's a great system. A leader, even a prime minister, runs into trouble. And is held accountable immediately. Does he have the support of the caucus that forms a majority of the people's elective representatives? No? Well, he has to go, and someone who does instantly replaces him -- on the same condition of constant accountability.

Imagine how much more effective Prime Minister Harper, Mr. Ignatieff, Premier Gordon Campbell, Premier Danny Williams, and all the other party leaders, in power and out, might be if they had this constant accountability spurring them on to excellence. And if not effective? Gone like Rudd.

From this distance, the specific politics of the Australian change seem complicated. Rudd is said to have been thought too tough on Australia's powerful mining companies, but also judged too weak on fulfilling promises about action on climate change. But here, it's not the particularly policy issues that stand out. It's the accountability.

Could our MPs give us some of that here? Please?

[Photo from The Daily Dish "Face of the Day" which notes the success of women in Auz politics.]

HIstorica-Dominion goes global

The Dominion Institute used to be renowned for its annual Canada Day poll proving that Canadians knew diddly about Canada. Historica-Dominion still polls -- and still promotes its poll results brilliantly -- but its ambitions have gone global. Its enormous new poll is less about what we know of ourselves than what the world thinks of us. It's done in conjunction with Ipsos, the Globe and Mail, the Monk Centre, and other partners, and it's getting tons of coverage in the Globe & Mail. The Institute's own summary here.

Guest blog: Henry McCambridge

I've been thinking of creating some virtual intern positions here. The idea would be to see if there were some history students who might be intrigued to spend a term or so offering the occasional post and otherwise contributing ideas to the development of the blog. Reward? Largely intangible.

More on that another day. But felicitously the Kitchener, Ontario, history student and writer Henry McCambridge offered a guest post on the history of his city out of the blue. We'll be running it shortly.

Meech Lake still dead

We survived the death of Meech Lake, observes Andrew Cohen today. Indeed we survived it so well that hardly anyone else seems to be noticing the 20th anniversary of its collapse.

I recall Michael Bliss saying at the time, "It's a disaster if it passes and a disaster if it fails." But we would have been stuck with the disaster forever had it passed, whereas the disaster of failure turned out to be remarkably survivable.

Andrew calls the accord seemingly moderate, but concedes that the people were right and the political class was wrong. It was always the process that was all wrong. We are represented in legislatures not in first ministers; it was always impossible for a horse-trading gaggle of first ministers to make a legitimate constitutions.

Driving the market place of ideas offline

Ottawa's Northern Blue Publishing offers new options in its History of Canada Online and invites comments and questions.

The whole project, effectively a new interactive textbook history of Canada, is available for public use, and NBP notes:

Under the terms of use, ministries, boards, individual schools and other bodies must licence the product for institutional use.

History of Canada Online would seem to be precisely the kind of digital-savvy, innovative new media product that the recent proposed amendments to the Copyright Act will kill. The proposal is that education will become a copyright-free zone, so that big educational institutionals could simply appropriate materials such as these without licence. The result seems to be to make projects like HCO fundamentally uneconomic. Only agencies (and scholars) that gain official permission and have access to large public subsidies will be able to contribute to the educational endeavour. This kind of top-down control of knowledge seems to be precisely the reverse of what digital culture aspires to be.

But the smart people at Northern Blue are fast on their feet. They may have options up their sleeves.

John A tweets...

here at http://twitter.com/PMJAMacdonald. [I make that 104 characters, including this.]

It's 1936 and the man on the left is illegal

"How much police dictatorship is Toronto prepared to tolerate?"

This is not a G-20 story at all -- though the question is pertinent. The weekly Historicist at the Torontoist site recounts the battle of the 1930s as to whether men could wear topless bathing suits at the beach without facing arrest. A charming story, and another terrific piece of newspaper research by Kevin Plummer.

[Image via the Historicist from City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 6049.]

History of the Law of Torture

The United States Supreme Court, in declining to permit Meher Arar to seek redress from the American agents who sent him to Syria to be tortured, has declared that since the United States does not torture, the court has no jurisdiction over American state torturers.

Some Americans, to their credit, find this appalling, as here and here. At Slate, Dalia Lithwick compares the American reaction to the Canadian one and ponders what the international judicial consequences might be for the United States.

New History website: Acanademics

I disapprove of anonymity on the web, so I was going to leave unpublished a comment about Bloomsday from a correspondent who signed "Acanademics." But 'tseems Acanademics is not just a comment-sender. He or she or they is also a website on Canadian historical issues.

Why any Canadian academic would seek anonymity escapes me (academic freedom, hello?), but indeed this is not the only anonymous historyblog around. Proof of the pudding will be in the eating, I guess, and there are not so many CanHist bloggers around that we can discourage even the timid.

History of the future of textbooks?

Mike Green, follower of this blog, has created a website history of Canadian confederation. Take a look here.

History of yes (history I said history history history)

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

A shocking book, Ulysses. Happy Bloomsday.


[Image from compositiongallery.com, which has details.]

HIstory of law firm names

The legal website Slaw thinks legal historians need to do some work categorizing the endlessly changing names of law firms.... which sounds pretty dull, except to support the point Slaw and its commenters proceed to get into various weird law firm names. I like the intellectual property law firm named Smart and Biggar, but they have a lot more to offer

Now, if we could just get the professors thinking this way...

"If it is good enough to publish, it is good enough to pay for."

As the Globe & Mail trumpets the success of a decade of its "Facts and Arguments" personal essay feature, Canadian Magazines publishes the letter the Globe would not, from Jean Mills, who stopped contributing essays when the newspaper stopped paying for them.

What were we blogging about five years ago?

Well, it's only roughly five years; we were not blogging daily back then.But we offered this, which still makes me laugh.

File this under: Things That Make You Laugh Out Loud In The Archives, So That The Other Researchers Wonder If A Nut Is In Their Midst.

From a letter by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald to one P. King, November 20 1885
"I am extremely sorry that I have not been able to provide for you in the North West. I thought I had done so but an untimely accident threw me over for the time.… The office I had thought to get for you was the postmastership at Calgary…. I thought it was all done and you had been notified when I found to my horror that another Mr. King who was strongly recommended had by mistake been appointed. He now holds the office. I now must try to repair the error and be on the lookout for another vacancy."

Four years ago, with a World's Cup on, we were blogging sports history.

Three years ago, the history of sushi.

Two years ago, parliamentary democracy.

One year ago, well, parliamentary democracy again.

Stan Persky on nonfiction

Stan Persky is only one of many contributors to the essay and criticism website called Dooney's Cafe, but he's consistently the most interesting. Example: a brief apercu on nonfiction writing, in the midst of an essay about T. F. Rigelhof's Hooked on Canadian Books:

Even if I restrict myself to national writing (and I must admit to being a little suspicious about the very notion), if somebody asks me, “Read any good Canadian books lately?”, my first thought isn’t necessarily going to be about Canadian fiction. I’m more likely to name Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007), Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 (2002), Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night (2006), Terry Glavin’s Waiting for the Macaws (2006), or any of a half dozen other non-fiction works. Not to be coy about it, I think that one of the crucial critical judgments about Canadian writing of the last quarter-century is that its non-fiction, including that undefinable genre-bending writing that goes by the unsatisfactory name of “creative” or “literary non-fiction,” has been more relevant to our understanding of ourselves, and less subject to the industrial orders-of-the-day than most (but of course not all) of our fiction.

Persky does not mention it, but his own work -- he's prolific, but Then We Take Berlin comes to mind -- ought to be part of the non-fiction shortlist he offers.

Rigelhof's "books" actually means "novels" which is another of Persky's reservations about it. (Hat tip: Merna Kostash.)

Parliamentary life in British Columbia

I've always been cool to recall and initiative procedures in Canadian politics. They usually come forward as part of a populist, anti-parliamentary, let's all-vote-on-everything-all-the-time agenda. Under Canadian conventions, backbenchers are already subject to dismissal if they disagree with their leaders. Recall processes seemed designed to weaken them even further -- double jeopardy.

But maybe it has some merit. The initiative/recall process churning up in British Columbia does seem to have the potential to put some backbone into the provincial Liberal party caucus there.

The premier, following the usual backbenchers-are-cattle habits of unaccountable leaders, announced last year, soon after campaigning successfully gainst the Harmonized Sales Tax, that BC would implement it. Clearly there was a lot of caucus dissatisfaction then, but it is the popular uproar that seems to be fuelling some stirrings of caucus dissent.

Already one cabinet minister has resigned -- to oppose the HST implementation, but also to save his seat. The Globe & Mail's Gary Mason gives the details here. Most of the BC backbenchers, however, have the stunned look of chimps trying to get fistfuls of peanuts out of a narrow-necked jar. They don't want to support the HST and don't know how to oppose it. They don't want to die for Gordon Campbell and don't know how to replace him.

They are joined by Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer, who declares that Campbell must remain as leader for at least a year (!) and that the caucus has no choice but to support him.

In a functioning parliamentary system, the caucus would a) never have permitted a leader to make such a fundamental choice without consulting them, and b) would be able to remove a leader who produced this sort of crisis by next Tuesday at the latest. In the Canadian system, sadly, BC gets this extraordinarily constipated process that can neither, ah, produce nor get off the pot.

The BC caucus suddenly has a opportunity either to deliberately rally behind its leader and his HST program. By declaring they freely supported the HST, enough to put their careers on the line for it, they could give it (and Campbell) a tremendous shot in the arm. Or they could put an end to the HST and, if necessary, Campbell's leadership simply by saying so. It's because they simply do not believe they have such authority that they are so stuck. If they will not learn, serves 'em right.

Drivel Watch: Spector on parliament

Contrary to Canadian practice since 1925, prime minister Gordon Brown did not immediately resign after it became clear that the Conservatives had won the election.

Well, no, that's not the case. Weeks after the Ontario election of 1985, Premier Frank Miller met the house and resigned only after losing a confidence motion in the Ontario legislature. So the relevant Canadian practice is as recent as 1985 -- and runs directly contrary to what Norman Spector is pretending here.

In any case, the British Conservatives had not won the election. They had won some seats; it remained up to the Commons to determine who should form a government.

One is never sure with Norman Spector's commentary. Is he just retailing Conservative talking points, or is he genuinely that ignorant? If we are to take this column seriously, Mr Spector must actually believe that governments are not accountable to Parliament and that Parliament has no right to make and unmake governments -- unless the party with the largest number of seats remains in cabinet. Britain, he says, "flirted with illegitimacy" when there was a possibility that Labour and the Liberal-Democrats might form a government

Illegitimate, he means, because the Conservatives had the largest single bloc of seats. But the hapless Frank Miller had the largest bloc of seats in 1985 Ontario, and that did not make the rather successful Peterson government, holding securely to power with support from the third-party NDP, less than legitimate when it supplanted his inept and unpopular administration.

But perhaps we should not bother with close reading of parliamentary government according to Spector. I suspects he would be -- will be -- arguing precisely the contrary when that serves his party's shortterm interests.

Historypin: Flickr for historical images?

I don't really understand yet just what Historypin offers that other photosites don't, but History Today Online thinks it's a pretty cool system. Worth a look if you work with historical images?

Time Machine becomes Word on Nothing

One of my go-to bloggers, Heather Pringle, the archaeology journalist who's been running Time Machine, has closed that blog and jumped to a new site she's sharing with science journalists Anne Finkbeiner and Josie Glausiusz.  They call it The Last Word on Nothing.  I'm going to be keeping an eye.

New history of piracy

Sean Kheraj and Active History get things precisely backwards in their comments on the new copyright-amendments bill. It's a reversal we are likely to see a lot.

The changes to copyright law, they tell us, have significant benefits for historians. Actually, the changes have significant benefits for universities, ministries of education, and school boards that may employ historians as teachers. That's a very different thing, except for historians who primarily think of themselves as loyal civil servants.

The amendment saluted by AH proposes that using copyright material for educational purposes will now be "fair dealing" -- that is, universities and schools may now appropriate copyright material for use in their workplaces without permission or payment. This has no real relation to access to materials, it's simply a budgetary saving for the administrators, who can now expropriate what they used to license. For historians who are employed by educational institutions there is no change, except that their employers will now be even more free to expropriate all the copyright material these historians may create in the course of their intellectual lives.

It's Big Education's new freedom to steal that explains the thing Sean most abhors in the legislation: the acceptance of digital locks. Big Education has declared that it must be entitled to take all the copyright work it can get its hands on, absolutely free. Obviously, some content holders respond despairingly, in the only way left to them: by trying to put their work behind locks. And Sean thinks he's the one being robbed!

Education is said to be a $40 billion undertaking in this country.  You know what, it's worth it. It's worth paying for.  But it's as reasonable for schools and universities to pay for the intellectual content they depend on as to pay the teachers who expound upon those texts.

Despite this legislation, we cannot build an intellectual culture on piracy any more than on plagiarism. Historians will have to decide if they will defend intellectual property or shill for the boss.  So far, it looks good for the bosses.

I don't have a lot of faith in digital locks. The war between lockmakers and lockbreakers is way too expensive for people like me. I'd much rather put my work out there, and rely on educators to deal honestly and fairly with it. But now we should know who the thieves are, and they all have big offices in academic administration buildings.

Update, June 7: Sean responds:

Thanks for pointing out a huge hole in my recent post about the proposed Copyright Modernization Act (Bill C-32). I had, unfortunately, not considered the impact this might have on historians who publish with commercial publishers and rely on the income from those books. I also hadn’t considered the impact this would have on custom coursepack printers and textbook publishers. I’d have to take a finer look at the details of the bill to be sure, but I suppose it might be possible for a university instructor to assign a PDF copy of 1867: How the Fathers Made a Deal or Louisbourg Portraits without having to order a class set of books for sale at the university bookstore. Or it might allow instructors to by-pass custom coursepack printers like Canadians Scholars Press Inc. by scanning digital coursepacks. In these cases the costs, as you know, are often actually absorbed by undergraduate students and not universities. [Chris:  Students will still be charged for coursepacks, and when the licensing fraction of the cost is removed, it's likely universities will still charge students the same price and simply pocket a little more revenue.] 

I do, however, completely agree that this may be exploited by cash-strapped school boards under pressure from provincial education ministries to do more with less for high schools and elementary schools. This indeed could be a big loss for commercial publishers and possibly for their authors (depending on the particular royalty agreements between authors and publishers).

While I’m not certain that this legislation would usher in a new era of piracy, it could certainly disrupt current commercial publishing business models that rely on course textbook orders or even software licensing to get a slice of that “$40 billion undertaking in this country,” we call education. I’m inclined to agree with your point that “it’s as reasonable for schools and universities to pay for the intellectual content they depend on as to pay the teachers who expound upon those texts.” However, this does raise the question of whether publicly-funded universities (or other schools) and their instructors have any obligation to support the existing business models of private commercial publishers that have been built upon the public education system.

In the end, most of the textbooks upon which educators rely are produced by commercial publishers and universities, school boards, and ministries of education should recognize and pay for the intellectual labour put into these works. Whether we like it or not, the publicly funded school systems in Canada are integrated in the commercial education industry in a similar manner to the way public health insurance systems in this country are integrated into the commercial health industry. Unless this changes, I would have to agree with your final point that when it comes to the intellectual work of authors such as yourself educators must “deal honestly and fairly with it.”

Thanks again for adding your commentary to what is a critical issue for history educators, researchers, and authors.

A polite, thoughtful discussion on copyright -- not something we see too often!

Man, I feel like an historian

Spent some time in two of my favourite Canadian rooms.  One was the third floor archives reading room of Library and Archives Canada, a big gracefully proportioned space with a view of the Ottawa River that can't help but make you think Creightonian thoughts.  I wrote a thesis and most of my first book in that room, so I have good feelings about it. It's rather more complicated today. Document requests that used to take twenty minutes now take days, and you can't work all night anymore, not that I tried. But it's still a candystore of sources... wish I spent more time here.

Also went over to the House of Commons to watch a bit of Question Period, always pretty terrific. Oddly enough, in the archives I was reading an anonymous journalist who came to Ottawa in October 1864 to look at the new parliament buildings rising in the midst of the scrawny lumber town and was terrifically impressed.

The parliament buildings ... rise so grandly on the bold headland overlooking the junction of the Rideau [the Rideau canal actually] and Ottawa; … These splendid structures will stand a prophecy and an invitation to a Union of the Canadas and these unfinished halls may yet resound to eloquent voices from Newfoundland and from Vancouver’s Island.

They still look pretty terrific when you walk up under the Peace Tower to sit in the Commons chamber galleries. We did hear a Newfoundlander, and someone from Vancouver Island too. Though I'm not sure either actually rose to eloquence today, the principle holds.

Update, June 7: Jordan Kerr writes:

I must agree with you on the lofty thoughts about the third floor of the archives building. I just finished my first 'serious' archival work there for a 3rd year history class. I'm sure that seems trivial in comparison to your thesis and book research...but hey we all have to start somwhere. Overall it was a wonderful experience but I can't help but feeling quite amateur when people are researching around me that have YEARS of experience and knowledge under their belt. I must give credit to the wonderful consutation and reference staff, they're always very helpful and quite patient with people, like myself, who really don't know what they're doing yet! Also, the security staff are always ready for a chat as you're both stuck there well into the night. The wait time for documents can be frustrating, but it works if you time it right with your schedule. I consider LAC, without sounding too idealistic, almost sacred, and yes, it quickly drums up feelings of academic and nationalist idealism. I'm sure more than one budding and experienced historian alike share the same thoughts. It's strange, I've been in Ottawa for 3 years and have yet to sit in on Question Period, though I've watched it probably hundreds of times on that most cherished yet 'tries too hard station'...CPAC. It's been said that the more Canadians learn about their history the less patriotic they get. I find that the each time I walk up towards the peace tower a little bit of its grandeur seems to fade away.

Here's who's bloggin'

Whoops, now I find that Mark Reid, my editor at Canada's History, has been blogging the CHA conference at the Canada's History website. Okay, Mark, I will hit that bookmark more often.

The Canada's History website also features material from the current print issue. My own column in that issue, as you would know if you subscribed, looks at the history of cycling in Canada and (fanboy alert) includes comments from Tour de France competitor Ryder Hesjedal of Victoria. B.C.

My piece for the next Canada's History will profile the historian Elizabeth Abbott and her recent A History of Marriage. Abbott's book is also reviewed (online, not in the print mag) in June's Literary Review of Canada, just out.  Addendum: and she's appearing at Moses Znaimer's pricy/fabulous IdeaCity conference in Toronto later this month.

(This post has been corrected.)

Who was livebloggin' the CHA meetings?

You would think that a lively, opinionated, and digital-savvy crowd like the historians of Canada (yes?) would have been liveblogging and posting from the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, which ended Sunday.

Well, no, it seems. The CHA's own site still reports the meeting as forthcoming. But Matt Hayday has a comment at his blog.

HNN wants you

History News Network, the fairly terrific American aggregation of websites, articles, commentary, gossip and more on historical themes, is celebrating its achievements and looking for new subscribers to its email newsletter

History News Network is pleased to announce that June will mark HNN's nine year anniversary and the beginning of our year-long celebrations to commemorate a DECADE on the Internet! To kick off the festivities, we are holding our first ever subscription contest for the HNN newsletter! Our goal is to DOUBLE our subscription list in the next twelve months in the countdown to our tenth anniversary! (Rest of message here.)

Newslettter subscription here.

Libris Awards: not much history this year

The Canadian Booksellers' Awards, the Libris prizes, were awarded last night in Toronto. History titles were pretty thinly represented, perhaps confirming the occasional suggestion here that we have not seen a huge production of big eye-catching books on Canadian history in recent years.. John English's much honoured Trudeau biography, Just Watch Me, was the most "historical" nominee, but lost to Wade Davis's The Wayfarers. Details at the CBA site.

Something new to spend the research-trip budget on

Here's one you might not expect. Pope Benedict has opened the Vatican, or at least its Secret Archive, to public.

Here you can find accounts of the trial of the Knights Templar held at Chinon in August 1308; a threatening note from 1246 in which Ghengis Khan’s grandson demands that Pope Innocent IV travel to Asia to ‘pay service and homage; a letter from Lucretia Borgia to Pope Alexander VI; Papal Bulls excommunicating Martin Luther; correspondence between the Court of Henry VIII and Clement VII; and an exchange of letters between Michelangelo and Paul III.

There are also letters from Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, St Bernadette, Voltaire and Abraham Lincoln.

And here too – depending on how much faith you have in the novels of Dan Brown – lies proof that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and continued their own earthly line.

Story from The Daily Telegraph. Hat tip: Bookninja