End of a pioneer blog

On January 1, 2003, on a new blog simply entitled "The Diary ofSamuel Pepys," a British web designer named Phil Gyford posted the first entry written by Samuel Pepys in the diary that he began on January 1, 1660.  Gyford has been posting one entry a day from the diary ever since.

Samuel Pepys, fearing blindness, wrote his final diary entry on May 31, 1669. Today May 31, 2012, The Diary of Samuel Pepys blog runs out of entries. And stops.

There have been many other “liveblog” daily recreations:  from George Orwell to World War II to my own siege of Quebec 1759, and to the War of 1812 ones just starting up. Gyford's however, may have been the first to capture the pleasures of this new medium, the historical liveblog, and to spark the blogosphere's imagination with its possibilities.

New Constitutional Organization

Duff Conacher, who became widely known as the coordinator and public face of the Ottawa-based advocacy group Democracy Watch, announces the launch of a new organization, Your Canada, Your Constitution.  Its launching event and reception is at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa next Monday, June 4.  Andrew Cohen, André Pratte, and the authors of the recent (and Donner Prize-winning) Democratizing the Constitution, will speak.  (Do prizes matter? The book is temporarily unavailable from both Chindigo and Amazon, so someone's been buying it)

Save Library and Archives Canada

The campaigns over the national archives and the national library -- to defund and diminish them, on the one hand, and to stand up for them as vital cultural institutions, on the other -- are gathering momentum every day.  I'm going to try and track developments in this war in the coming months, because it looks like being a long one.  And it matters.

For starters, you might follow Save Library and Archives Canada, which aspires to be a clearinghouse for information about the issue. The Canadian Historical Association and its new blog are on the case. This past weekend, the Writers' Union of Canada, in its annual meeting in Vancouver, condemned the archival cuts as an attack on culture (though I don't see that yet on the handsome redesigned website.)

More to come, I hope.

Notes on historical live-blogging

With the War of 1812 live tweeting about to begin (see yesterday's post), I'm reminded of the World War II+70 liveblog that I follow intermittently. It's now just over a thousand days into its long campaign, and boy, does it demonstrate the ebbs and flows of a massive historical event like that war.  Weeks go by with only a grim litany of U-boat sinkings and peripheral skirmishes in places like Madagascar. Then suddenly you see a turning-point looming on the horizon: Japanese preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbour last winter, say.

Right now forces are being assembled for another big turning point: American and Japanese carrier groups are preparing for battle near a mid-Pacific atoll named Midway.

Picture source.

Boring technical note (I hope): From blogspot.com to blogspot.ca

I started this blog on blogger software because in 2004 it was about the only blogging platform I was aware of.  I' remain agnostic about the rival virtues and drawbacks of WordPress, Blogger, and the various other blog programs available, and I've stayed with Blogger because it's never seemed worth changing.

But apparently Google, Blogger's owner, is changing Blogger beneath me.  When I signed up, all Blogger account were dot-com, usually as a URL ending in blogspot.com.  But apparently Blogger is migrating to country domains, and you may begin to see this blog's URL showing up as blogspot.ca.

This should make no difference to your reading of the blog (or, as far as I can tell, to our writing of it either).  And by and large I prefer to be on the dot-ca domain anyway.  But if you are interested in the technical details, here's a FAQ from Google about it.

War of 1812 live Twitter feed loaded and ready to fire

Canadianist and historyblogger Andrew Smith, now teaching in the UK, announces a day-by-day Twitter feed of the events of the War of 1812 (+200 years).

Andrew reports: 

Over the next three years, a team of undergraduates working under my direction will be live tweeting the War of 1812, plus 200. Events will be reported exactly 200 years to the day after they took place….  Our tweets will include links to digitised primary sources related to the event being discussed. (For instance, on 18 June 2012 we will send out a tweet to a scanned image of President Madison’s formal declaration of war against Britain). The aim is to get readers to explore that vast number of primary sources that have been placed online in the last decade. Most of the online primary sources we will link to are materials from US, British, and Canadian archives.

Andrew hopes the twitter feed will help bring “the great wealth of online primary sources about the war to the attention of the public” (and also give some undergraduates experience in digital public history, “while putting some cash into their pockets.”) 

The twitter feed will be @Warof1812Live. The related blog, Warof1812Live is here. Having looked into this kind of project myself and flinched from the amount of work required, I'm delighted to see Andrew applying his organizational skills to this.  I wish his team well and I'll be looking in.

The war starts June 18. Keep your powder dry.


Update, May 30:  Charles Levi tells me that the Archives of Ontario has begun to tweet from the 1812-era diary of Ely Playter, York-area farmer and militiaman @elyplayter1812

[Image: Wikipedia via Warof1812Live.]

The market for history books

I'm often in awe of the range and quality of both historical programming and historical publishing in Britain. The Guardian Online's history-book reviews section is extraordinarily rich and diverse, for instance --  for having so many books to review, and for actually reviewing them.

Paul Lay, editor of Britain's flagship history magazine History Today, has some thoughts regarding a current discussion on the state of history commentary (too many telly-dons?) and the market for history books.

History of grave robbery

Earle Gray. via the latest page on his blog Sandy's Collected Thoughts, offers an apercu about historical changes in the economics of grave robbery. When the American Civil War ended, a valuable source of dissection cadavers for medical schools also came to an end, it seems. Med students had to go back to the more traditional source -- in the cemetaries.

Two cases, marked glass-ware and containing the bodies of two men and five women, packed in snow, were sized by the police on a freight train from Point Levi. They were intended for the McGill College dissecting room, and taken from the cemetery in the vicinity of Quebec [City], the authorities of which city telegraphed to our [Montreal] police about them. 

Maglia rosa

Details here.

Paul Litt on cultural cuts

The library and archival community is up in arms about the recent cuts to its funding by the federal government. Support is coming in from a variety of people and places including this article by a former professor of mine, Paul Litt, at Carleton University. I appreciate his point about the government's cuts to cultural and research institutions while funding massive military history campaigns.

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/05/26/paul-litt-canada-lite-our-diminished-nation/

You can keep up with the various campaigns and movements within the library/archival community protesting these cuts by subscribing to these list-servs: Arcan-L or the listserv of the Archival Association of Ontario.

Enjoy!

Modernization and the archives

At Active History Ian Milligan considers whether digitization and online access at Library and Archives Canada are modernization, or just a smokescreen for service cuts.

Nostro ragazzo e il Giro d'Italia

Okay, this blog doesn't usually go all Tour de France-y until July.  But I interrupt May coverage to note that our boy Ryder Hesjedal, the Victoria bike racer who has been carrying the flag in the Tour the last several years (with top 10 and top 20 finishes in recent years), currently stands number 2 in another of the big three European bike races, the Giro d'Italia -- and has held the overall leader's Maglia Rosa at two different stages of the race (first Canadian ever -- there, see, this is a history post). That number two is number 2 with a bullet, as the final stages this weekend look to favour him over the other leading contenders.  He was not supposed to be one of the Giro "big" -- but there he is, according to this story. TV coverage early mornings on some Sportsnet channels, I hear.
Photo: Velonews

CHA in Waterloo

If it concerns you, you probably already know this.  But the Canadian Historical Association annual meeting and conference starts Sunday in Waterloo. Program here.

I'm not attending, but if anyone is into live-blogging events and developments at the conference, I'd be delighted to give them a forum on this blog, since it does not look like the CHA website is set up to do so.   Send notes or contact me here.

As ever, the CHA program is a good guide to what's fashionable in historical scholarship.  It certainly looks like the construction of modernity, memory studies, gender history, and race history remain hot. But there is a fair amount of traditional material too:  New France, political history, diplomatic history... no, not extinct.

Some interesting sessions, judging by the program (and my own interests, no doubt).  A stellar panel on Treaty 9. An extensive series of sessions on Historians and Archives.  A demonstration of a confederation role-playing simulation. A session on applying Geographical Information Systems to historical research.  A look at how the centennial of the War of 1812 was observed in 1912. Active History's mini-conference on "Whose War was 1812, Anyway?"  And, no doubt, Cliopalooza, the president's reception at Wilf's pub on the Wilfrid Laurier campus

History of the monarchy

Future monarchs? 17% of Canadians hope so

In Britain recently, I was impressed by the way that many British people seemed to have adopted the Queen's Jubilee as their own festivity.  It seemed a big event there.  I don't think it is anything like the same here in Canada, despite pro forma efforts to recognize the event.

As if to confirm that comparison comes an Angus Reid poll reporting that about a third of Canadians say it is their preference that Canada should remain a monarchy (and about half of those are rooting for Prince William over Prince Charles -- though surely the point of monarchy is you don't get to choose). Support for an elected head of state stands slightly higher at 37%.  But only 20% say the debate is of no importance to them.

In Britain, supporters of preserving the monarchy outnumber supporters of an elected head of state by four to one: 54% to 13%.

Photo: Globe and Mail

Somewhere Diefenbaker and Gould are smiling...

...though I bet Diefenbaker is also giving Gould a dirty look. In an essay in this months issues of The Literary Review of Canada Adriana Craciun explores the search for the Franklin expedition as part of the federal governments strategy in claiming the North as Canadian and for Canada.

New biography of John Turner from Carleton University Prof.

I just heard news that a former prof. of mine at Carleton just published a political biography of John Turner. It's in an article in FASSinate (Carleton University Faculty of Arts and Social Science newsletter) "Reflecting on Turner:  By looking at the past, Litt’s  biography helps us understand the present political context."

The Vimy Foundation Presents: Vimy Real

Since last September I've had the pleasure of being involved with the Vimy Foundation in researching and consulting for a online interactive experience on the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Just recently we released the final project to the world! 

The experience, Vimy Real is a bi-lingual,"...interactive, multimedia game that you can play in class or at home. Explore the Battle of Vimy Ridge through four different lenses – People, Tactics, Technology, and Legacy. See how this helped Canada earn its place on the world stage. By the end of the game, see if you can answer the question: “What makes Canada a nation?” Learn how the actions and accomplishments of the Canadian military played a major role in the allied successes during World War One."

The project serves two purposes, the first, as a project of the Vimy Foundation it seeks to, "preserve and promote Canada’s First World War legacy as symbolized with the victory at Vimy Ridge in April 1917, a milestone where Canada came of age and was then recognized on the world stage." Secondly, we worked closely with teachers to develop the game and a subsequent Teacher's guide. With the recognition that most elementary and high school teachers have precious little time to teach students Canadian history- let alone the place of Vimy Ridge in it - we sought to create an experience that would both interest students and be a ready-made resource for teachers to present an accurate and engaging lesson on the battle, Canada & Canadians during the first world war and the war/battle's place in Canadian history.

Prize Watch: To the Edge of the Sea wins!



To the Edge of the Sea by Anne McDonald wins the Saskatchewan Book Award for First Book

 At the big gala on Saturday April 28 I'm thrilled to say that my novel, To the Edge of the Sea, set during the Confederation Conferences of 1864, with John A Macdonald and Mercy Coles, daughter of the PEI delegate and Father of Confederation George Coles, won the First Book Award. (I've blogged on Mercy's take on the conference goings on in this blog in October and Nov.)

Judges Joan Barfoot, Christine Cowley and Katherine Gordon said:
      In the mid-19th century, three young Prince Edward Islanders explore their disparate futures at home and away, in a debut novel that is lyrical and precise in its descriptions of land, sea and people, and powerful in its accounts of both personal and political histories of the province and country. 

As one of the winners I will read at the Saskatchewan Legislative Library this coming Wed May 9 at noon! Keep this in perspective all historians - the Sask Leg Library holds and uses everyday the table from the Quebec Conference in 1864 - can you imagine - there will be John A and I at the Quebec Conference table - geeky or not, I'm / we're thrilled. See more here

Lest you think I've forgotten this is a history blog I'll also point out that the Sask Legislative Building will be celebrating it's 100th birthday this year and it had a lucky start. Not only did it get the Que conference table, it narrowly missed being blown down by the F4 tornado that hit Regina June 30, 1912, known as Canada's deadliest tornado and also 'celebrating' its 100th birthday. (Both the Leg and the Tornado are being celebrated in dance, art, literary events this year and I'll be posting more on these later.)

My book was not the only winning book with a historical perspective:
Darren Prefontaine won Book of the Year for Gabriel Dumont: Li Chef Michif in Images and in Words and you can read about it here. The Gabriel Dumont Institute won the Publishing Award for this book also.

Curtis R McManus won the Non-Fiction Award for Happyland: A History of the 'Dirty Thirties' in Saskatchewan, 1914 - 1937. Read more here

and Seeing Red A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers by Mark C Anderson and Carmen L Robertson won 3 awards: City of Regina, Scholarly Writing, and First Peoples' Writing read more here

 Mark Abley in the introduction to his talk on 'Stop Tweeting and Start Reading' spoke of how Saskatchewan has developed since he's been gone - how its support of writers now includes Grain Magazine, the Wallace Stegner House for Writers, Sage Hill Writing Workshops (when I was there last in 2009 I was the only person from Saskatchewan, the rest came from across the country - Halifax, Ottawa, Montreal, London, Vancouver), the St Peters Writing Colonies sponsored by the Sask Writers Guild. I've been here 12 years now - and have taken part in all of these programs. Saskatchewan's support for its writers is legendary and spans the country. You can read my interview with the Regina Leader Post here

Hiatus not quite started -- prize watch

Allan Levine's Mackenzie King biography wins at the Manitoba Book Awards:

Allan Levine's King wins Manitoba Book Award

Douglas & McIntyre is delighted to announce that Allan Levine's King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny has won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction.
Established in 1988, the Manitoba Book Awards celebrate Manitoba writers, publishers and books. The winners of the thirteen diverse awards were announced at the Manitoba Book Awards gala, organized by the Manitoba Writers' Guild, on Saturday, April 28, 2012. Allan Levine was awarded $3,500 for winning the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award.

Talk among yourselves... a blog holiday

In the next couple of days, the statscounter thingee on this blog should roll into six figures: 100,000 views.

That seems like a great time to take a …. hiatus?

No, no, I  expect to be back.  I’m just going to be travelling in the next week or two, and probably there will be no blogging from me. Sorry, friends, you will have to be responsible for wasting your own time for a while. Try some other historyblogs -– maybe from the links at right. If you are desperate, explore in our blog archives, accessible just below the links list. Mostly this has been a file-and-forget blog, but here's a few faves from a quick lookback: the first day of 2009's daily live-blogged siege of Quebec here, the very first posts back to 2004 here, a representative sample of my parliamentary-democracy meme here, and a "weird stuff from the archives" post here.   

The big round statscounter number of 100,000 hits is completely arbitrary, even leaving aside what a “hit” may means. We started a new counter at zero in June 2010, so the 100,000 does not include all the readers of the previous five or six years.  But whatever these hits mean, we are now running at better than 50,000 of ‘em a year.  


That is miniscule compared to any substantial blog, for sure, but not bad for its restricted subject and audience. It’s also about 50,000 more a year than I anticipated when I began this. 

Look for fresh postings around the May long weekend. 

Historians on the move

Not the Florida place

It is announced that the historian Conrad Black, known for his biographies of Maurice Duplessis, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and himself, will soon be taking up residence in Toronto.  Mr Black, a citizen of Britain, has spent most of the last several years in Florida.

Seriously, I have no objection to Black's return to Canada.  It is hypocritical of the hard-on-crime, hard-on-immigration government we have to bend so far in his favour. But I see no harm risk to the country in his being here, and maybe he will even repent of that self-hating Canadian schtick he was running a decade ago when he was pursuing foreign titles.

The best thing about Mr Black's incarceration was that he used his time to write quite a lot of interesting things that did no one any harm,  and he had to stay out of business, where his activitie  seem to cause constant grief for all concerned. Now if only he can write biographies and commentary as prolifically in his Bridal Path mansion as in his Florida cell -- and stay out of business ventures...
[Photo source MyandMyToronto]

Conferences sooner and later; black history, public history

Contributing to the many and diverse events of the War of 1812 bicentennial, Brock University in St. Catharines  -- in cooperation with York University's Harriet Tubman Institute, the Central Ontario Network for Black History, the St. Catharines Museum, and others -- is hosting a workshop entitled We Stand on Guard for Thee: The African Canadian Experience in the War of 1812.


It's May 10 and 11, 2012 and I'm told that due to late funding, they have been slow to publicize and would welcome later registrants.  More information is available from the Tubman, and the links for online registration are there too. 

Meanwhile, Michelle Hamilton of the public history program at Western University in London reminds me of the (American) National Council of Public History's annual conference, to be held in Ottawa in April 2013:

The NCPH is a membership association of museum and archivist professionals, consultants, teachers and students, cultural resource managers, government historians, film and media producers, historical interpreters, policy advisors, and many others. While academics do come to our meetings, it is wonderfully open atmosphere and all types of historians, teachers and the interested public attend and find camaraderie. We hope that many Canadians interested in history will attend.

All the details will be on the conference website. 


Update: Active History, noting its third anniversary with a thoughtful retrospective on historyblogging, also launches a series leading up to another 1812 conference, the "Whose War Was It, Anyway?" sessions in Waterloo May 30.

History of the blockbuster museum show

The Picasso exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario is the hot cultural thing in Toronto now, with vast crowds mobbing the building last weekend after the opening.  (Relax, it'll be there a while.  The Musée Picasso in Paris is closed for renovations, so its collection is on the road.).

The exhibit, virtually without text, is a history of Picasso.  It shows how in his first few decades, even long after the "Demoiselles d'Avignon" and other key works of Cubism, he pretty much painted in any damn style he liked.  It's really only from about the 1930s (he was born 1881) that all his works start to look like Picasso. Not that that is a criticism, or even that they all look the same, but the stylistic continuity is definitely there.

In another part of the AGO, there's a different Picasso history. The AGO is planning regular exhibitions drawing on its own history, surely a good idea.  Right now, they have a little archival display on the last time the Picassos were in town, for a big show called "Picasso and Man" in 1964.  It has photos of Mad Men era Toronto luminaries at the launch party, correspondence with the Soviet Union to borrow some works, memoranda on media planning, right down to the Girl Guide troops who would do babysitting while the grownups looked at the art (!).  Apparently Robert Fulford went through the exhibit the other day and saw a photo of himself in it.

The AGO's retrospective calls the 1964 Picasso and Man exhibit "the first blockbuster."  The designation is probably contestable -- surely the Salon des Refusés was a pretty big deal in late 19th century Paris, and wasn't there a big Group of Seven show or two in 1920s Canada?  But you can see their point.  The way the 1964 Picasso show was organized and marketed -- to become the big cultural buzz of the day, the show the city talked about, the exhibit you were going to go to -- surely points all the way forward, the Henry Moores, the Tut spectacular, the Frank Gehry redesign, and to everything cultural institutions do to bring in the big numbers.

What's with Harper's war on history?

Just the other day, they were hot for commemorating the War of 1812.

Now it's 600+ job cuts at Parks Canada, with particular focus on historic sites (120 jobs at Fortress of Louisbourg alone, it seems), and over 200 positions to be cut at Library and Archives Canada.