After a decade of encouraging academics to exchange thoughts and theses and opinions about early Canadian history (most of which emphatically confirmed there actually is a lot going on in pre-Confederation studies), the blog Borealia/Early Canadian History is doing a controlled shutdown, with just a couple of posts yet to come before it goes silent. The editors say in a closing statement that they need a break "for a variety of entirely normal professional and personal reasons."
There ought to be room for academically-centred blogging, but maybe those blogs sometimes get caught up in academic models of operation: administrative teams, concern for teaching applications of the blog, beset with budgetary concerns, competing with alternate publishing opportunities, etc.
The blogs that survive, I come to believe, depend on having a few logomaniacial egomaniacs who rarely have an unexpressed thought and cannot be prevented from sharing most of them. Some pretty lively blogs have resulted. See Lawyers, Guns, and Money, run by a bunch of history profs in the US. Or Paul Krugman. Blogs do best with a personality or personalities behind them, I suspect. Opening a blog and asking other busy people to provide you with its content may always be an uphill struggle.
But: Type "Borealia" into the search box at top left and you can see how often this blog linked to Borealia, including this first notice posted very soon after Borealia launched ten years ago. So I'm sorry to see it go. Well done, editorial team. I'll miss Borealia. Is someone seeing a space open up for a new entry in the CanHist blogging world?
