Clay Poupart will defend his M.A. thesis, "’When will my turn come?’ The Civil Service Purges and the Construction of a Gay Security Risk in the Cold War United States, 1945-1955”, this Friday, August 5th, at 9:30 in Arts 710.

Women Working, 1870 - 1930 is a fantastically polished and interesting site providing access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard's library and museum collections. This collection explores women's roles in the US economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Working conditions, conditions in the home, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are all well documented. The collection currently contains 3,460 books and pamphlets (including, in the unlikely event you have not already read it, the complete text of Clara Louise Kellogg's Memoirs of An American Prima Donna, New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913), 1,125 photographs, and 7,489 pages from manuscript collections (including a daily assortment of diary entries). Check it all out at: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/.

M.A. candidate Elizabeth Scott is just back from England, where on July 2^nd and 3^rd she attended a conference on Land Questions at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield. Liz presented a very well-received paper based on her thesis research, “Cockney Plots: Working Class Politics and Garden Allotments in London’s East End, 1890-1918.” Congratulations, Liz!

Congratulations to Nora Jaffary and Ed Osowki, both of whom taught in our department in 2000-01, who have just had a baby boy, Luc William. Nora and Ed and Luc live in Montreal, where Nora teaches Latin American history at Concordia University.

Jack Coggins, for many years a sessional instructor in the department and one of our most popular teachers, has been badly injured in a bicycle accident. Jack is in hospital undergoing treatment. He is not receiving visitors just now. Everyone here in the History Department wishes him the very best.

If you would like to send Jack your best wishes, you can do so in a couple of ways. If you send a card or letter to Jack addressed to the History Department, 9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A5, we will see that he gets it. We have also created a special email account just for this occasion: jackcoggins@gmail.com. Jack will have the password to the account, so he will be able to receive any messages you care to send that way.

Written any good books lately? As part of the University of Saskatchewan centennial celebrations in 2007, the Department of History is preparing a list of books written by department alumni (undergraduate and graduate). This list will be part of a larger, university-wide project to identify former students who have authored, edited, and/or translated a book. Bill Waiser is responsible for developing the department list [waiser@duke.usask.ca]. If you know of a former History student who has published a book or books, could you please send the full bibliographic information to Bill. If you are such an author, don't shy about letting us know. And please forward this message to department alumni who can spread the word!

Congratulations to Candice Dahl (BA hons, MA), who will shortly be returning to Saskatoon to take up a position in Library Instruction as the English Liason Librarian in the U of S library. Candice acquired a masters degree in library sciences at the University of Toronto after completing her MA in history, and has been employed in the Brock University Library in recent years. Welcome home!

Congratulations to Mark Meyers, who will spend 2005-2006 in Atlanta, Georgia as a fellow of Emory University's Center for Humanistic Inquiry. While in residence, Mark will begin a new project on the reconstruction of republican political culture in France after World War II and will offer an undergraduate seminar entitled "Gender, Sexuality, and Politics in Modern France."

Devoted readers of What's Up will know that doctoral candidate Brendan Edwards gave a paper in Windsor, England, last month at the Association for Commonwealth Studies conference. His talk caught the attention of John Fraser, Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto and academic affairs columnist for the Globe and Mail. Professor Fraser was moved to consult Brendan's recently published book, Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada Before 1960 (Scarecrow Press, 2005), and in his Globe column of June 18 he referred to it as "an almost ideal example of this phenomenon of academic scrutiny supporting aboriginal values. It takes a seemingly peripheral subject -- the history of libraries in aboriginal-European relations -- and brings it to bear on the larger story with solid research, inexorable logic and often devastating conclusions." Congratulations, Brendan. Click here to read more of John Fraser's review.

Congratulations to Julie Gibbings and Paul Jenkins, who were married on June 10th. They met while doing their MA's at the U of S, and are now pursuing doctorates at the universities of Wisconsin and Glasgow, respectively. Doctoral studies are intense. Paul, captured here trying to get a little work in, was soon coaxed back to the wedding festivities.

Congratulations to Karen Sander (BA hons, M.A. candidate) and Nathan Thomson, who were married June 11th, on a rare and perfect sunny day.

A Richly Deserved Honour:
Peter Bietenholz, Professor Emeritus in History (shown here with his wife Doris) was named the 2005 winner of The Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies Lifetime Achievement Award at the Society's annual conference banquet, in conjunction with the Congress of Humanities and Fine Arts, at the University of Western Ontario, on May 30. Peter was in Europe and unable to attend, but he will receive an engraved plaque at the next conference banquet in May 2006. For Peter this is the latest landmark in a distinguished career in which he has published seven single-authored monographs, including History and Biography in the Work of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Geneva 1966), Basle and France in the Sixteenth Century (Geneva 1971), Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age (Leiden 1994), and Daniel Zwicker (1612-1678): Peace, Tolerance and God the One and Only (Florence 1997). He has also edited the works of Renaissance Latin writers, including poems and correspondence of Mino Celsi (Naples and Chicago, 1982) and four volumes of the Collected Works of Erasmus, the flagship project of the University of Toronto Press. A companion to that project, the Biographical Dictionary of the Contemporaries of Erasmus, was co-edited in three volumes with our own Tom Deutscher (Toronto 1985-87) and was reprinted in a one-volume paperback in 2004. Peter remains active in research (it is impossible to imagine him otherwise) since his retirement, preparing, among other publications, a monograph on radical readings of Erasmus' work from his death to the end of the seventeenth century. As everyone on or about the seventh floor has known for many years, Peter is both a resource and an inspiration to his colleagues in History and the CMRS. (Click on the photo to enlarge)

Proud Moment. As reported earlier, on May 19th Bill Waiser presented Queen Elizabeth (left) with an advance copy of Saskatchewan: A New History (Fifth House Press, 2005), as Marley Waiser and U of S President Peter Mackinnon looked on. Bill's book is the University's official centennial gift to the province. Bill has only so many copies to give away, but the book is now available for purchase, well in advance of the official publication date of September 1. In a ground-breaking reversal, the University Bookstore is selling the book for less than it would normally cost from other vendors: $40 as against the full price of $50. No household in Saskatchewan should be without one. (Click on photo to enlarge).

Congratultations to Michael Thome, who successfully defended his M.A. thesis, "Hon. Sir Frederick W.G. Haultain: A Political Biography 1905-1912", last week.

We here at What's Up have managed to miss the first showings of the hit British tv series, The Worst Jobs in History, a show that puts the antisocial back in social history. Happily, the series is shown on the History Channel, where it is never too soon to repeat things. The next showing is this Saturday at 3pm (5 EST). Check out the schedule by clicking here.

As of today, the British Library has begun to offer British Library Direct, a search-and-order service that allows readers to download or order on paper journal articles from a database of over 9 million articles (the last five year's worth of 20,000 journals). Many articles can be downloaded immediately as pdf files, readable with a standard free Adobe Reader program, but there is a fee for each download. It pays to look carefully, because it can be hard to distinguish a one-page book review from a thirty page article, though each costs £5 ($11.50 CDN) to download. Readers with online access to good university libraries, such as that of the U of S, will already have access to most online articles free of charge, and to interlibrary loan services to gather most of the others. Where time is of the essence, however, or where electronic access to a research library is lacking, the B.L. system may prove very useful. Check it out at http://direct.bl.uk/.

The ever-expanding empire that is Amazon.com, however, now offers downloadable journal articles as well. The selection is vast, though probably not as vast as the British Library offerings. If you must pay for an article download, however, Amazon is at $5.95 US ($7.50 CDN). As with so much of what makes Amazon.com great, this particular service is not available from Amazon.ca (not that the latter isn't sometimes cheaper, all things considered, if they happen to have the item).

One of our own was very nearly elected to the B.C. Legislature earlier this month when NDP candidate Bart Healey lost out in the suburban Vancouver riding of Burquitlam. Bart, now 44, earned a B.A. in History and Political Studies. Bart has been busy over the last twenty years or so, operating a small business, co-founding Burnaby's first Community Policing office, and serving for nine years on the Community Policing Advisory Council. He also sat on the Board of Directors of New Vista Foundation advocating for seniors, and was a delegate to the New Westminster Labour Council. Click here to see Bart's election website.

Martha Smith-Norris was in Montreal earlier this month to participate in the National Roundtable on U.S. Studies, convened by the Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the United States of America (The Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program).

Congratulations to Rob Paul, who on May 13 successfully defended his M.A. thesis, "The Domestic President: The School Desegregation, Welfare Reform, and Environmental Policies of Richard M. Nixon."

Congratulations to Julie Gibbings (MA 2004), now a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), who has just been awarded the U of S Humanities and Fine Arts Graduate Thesis Award for her MA thesis entitled "Becoming Green Citizens and Other Subjects: Community Forests in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala".

On behalf of the entire History Department, What's Up extends its warmest congratulations to all the History Graduates who received degrees this morning at Spring Convocation, and to those who graduated in absentia. It has been a pleasure working with you, we are proud of all you have achieved thus far, and we wish you all the very best for the future.

The M.A. Oral Examination for Michael Thome is set for Monday, May 30, at 9:30 am, in Arts 710. Michael's thesis is entitled "Hon. Sir Frederick W.G. Haultain: A Political Biography 1905-1912."

Among the many History Graduates at Convocation this morning was Bonnie Wagner, who was officially granted her M.A. Bonnie actually completed her degree some months back, and has since been putting it to good use. She is currently working as a Cultural Resource Management/Communications Intern with Parks Canada in their Saskatoon office. It is a nine month position in which she is gaining experience in all aspects of Parks Canada work, and is putting her history skills to good effect in conducting historical research and in writing newspaper articles and press releases on historic sites in the region.

Many congratulations to Bill Waiser, who presented a special advance copy of his forthcoming book, Saskatchewan: A New History, to Queen Elizabeth last Friday at a special private ceremony during her visit to Saskatoon in commemoration of the province's centennial. "This book is the University's gift to the Province in this centennial year. I am honoured that we can now also call it our gift to the House of Windsor," said U of S President Peter MacKinnon. In addition to Bill and the Queen, those in attendance included Marley Waiser and Prince Philip, along with Lieutenant Governor Lynda Haverstock; President MacKinnon, and former provincial finance minister and History Professor Janice MacKinnon; University Chancellor Tom Molloy and Alison Molloy; and University Secretary Gordon Barnhart and Naomi Barnhart. Saskatchewan: A New History will be published in early June. Click here to read the official university press release about Bill, the Queen, and the Book.

Jacqueline Smith-Norris, at age five one of the younger members of the extended History Department family, presented flowers to Queen Elizabeth on Friday, during her (the Queen's) brief walk-about prior to a scheduled tour of the Canadian Light Source facility on campus. Interviewed afterward by CTV and other media outlets, Jacqueline recounted that the Queen said "Thank you" for the flowers.

Log Me In! We here at What's Up have been impressed of late with the ease and utility of LogMeIn.com, a free downloadable program that enables you (with permission and by prior arrangement) to access and operate a designated computer from afar: your office computer from home or an internet cafe in Papua New Guinea, for example, or your father-in-law's computer in Connecticut. With the free version of LogMeIn, you can work on documents and check email -- even send yourself an attachment of the file you forgot to bring. You can help distant friends and family sort out software problems by taking over temporary command of their computer. With the Pro version ($12.95 US per month) you can also transfer files from one computer to another efficiently and in bulk. If you are planning a research trip, you can (upon request) arrange for a Pro subscription for just a month at a time. Security is an obvious concern, but LogMeIn allows only designated users access to designated machines. The program is fast and remarkably easy to set up, and helpful and efficient support staff are just an email or 1-800 call away.

GoodNotes is a free open source FireFox browser extension for group online research. It allows faculty and students to categorize, leave notes on, and share web pages without leaving the browser. Have a look at http://www.goodnotes.org/.

Doctoral candidate Brendan Edwards recently returned from England after delivering a paper at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park as part of the Association for Commonwealth Studies conference on "The Literatures of the Commonwealth."

Historian Wanted: The Association of Professional Community Planners of Saskatchewan is sponsoring a centenary project involving the research and compilation of the history of planning in Saskatchewan. To that end, the Association is looking to hire an individual or individuals to undertake the project (for which a majority of the background material has already been collected). The person hired will have expertise in Planning, History, Geography, Local History, or a related discipline. The project entails organizing the materials collected, compiling a series of timelines, and writing a 10-20 page report highlighting the landmarks in Saskatchewan planning. The person hired will receive an honorarium of $1,000. The project deadline is September 15, 2005. Deadline for applications is May 31, 2005. For more information, contact Paula Kotasek at paula.kotasek@city.saskatoon.sk.ca or at (306) 975-7723.

Congratulations to Erika Dyck (MA 2000), who in addition to preparing to defend her Ph.D. at McMaster University this summer, has just landed a tenure-track appointment in Medical History at the University of Alberta. Erika's position is cross-listed, and she will be dividing her time between the departments of Medicine & Dentisty, on the one hand, and History & Classics, on the other.

M.A. candidate Rob Paul was among those offering testimonials at Man Kam Leung's retirement party last week. This Friday, May 13th, at 9:am in Arts 710, Rob has the opportunity to testify on his own behalf during the oral examination of his M.A. thesis, "The Domestic President: The School Desegregation, Welfare Reform, and Environmental Policies of Richard M. Nixon." The room is small, but anyone who wishes to attend may do so. Good luck, Rob!

Man Kam Leung, seen here at his retirement party last Wednesday, May 4th. The Faculty Club was thronged for the occasion. Colleagues, friends, family, and past and present students assembled from far and wide. There were a great many testimonials (prose and poetry), along with Chinese music, dragon dancers, much food, and a huge cake in MK's honour. Safe to say that a good time was had by all. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

Advance notice: The official Saskatchewan Centennial Conference will be held in Regina next September 8-10th, next September, co-organized by our own Bill Waiser with help from several other members of our department. Click here for more details, and an invitation for you to attend.

Before you charge off to the library, know that as of today the materials in the Main Library Stacks catalogued within the "C" classification range [Auxiliary Sciences of History] have been moved from their accustomed place on the 3rd floor to their new location on the 5th floor. The new location should appear in the individual catalogue records.

Valerie Korinek has just published "'Mrs. Slobs' Manifesto: A Case Study in Critical Reading of Chatelaine Magazine", in Gendered Intersections: An Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2005). The book is edited by Lesley Biggs and Pamela Downe, our near neighbours in the U of S Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

Late breaking news... CRC postdoctoral fellow Lissa Wadewitz has just been awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University's Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. Lissa came to us from UCLA, and this award allows her to return to California in style. What's Up wishes her all the very best.

For the record, over the first two years of the Canada Research Chair Postdoctoral Program in Native-Newcomer Relations, all four Fellows who came here to work with Jim Miller (Myra Rutherdale, Whitney Lackenbauer, Angela Wanhala, and Lissa Wadewitz) have secured prestigious appointments in Canada, New Zealand, or the United States during the first year of their two-year awards.

This just in.... John McCannon is one of three recipients of the College of Arts and Science Teaching Excellence Award for 2005. John was nominated by his departmental peers for his outstanding work as a teacher, but it was the overwhelmingly enthusiastic responses of his students over the past few years that sealed the deal. Congratulations, John.

Congratulations to M.A. candidate Chris Clarke, who has been awarded a Coca-Cola Bursary from the College of Graduate Studies.

Our busy friends at CMRS are hosting a major conference here next year. The preliminary program for the 2006 Meeting of the Classical Association of the Canadian West, to be held in Saskatoon this coming February, is now available, along with abstracts of the papers to be delivered, at:http://www.usask.ca/classics/cacw/. Those interested can contact conference organizer John Porter (<porterj@duke.usask.ca>) for more information.

Erin Millions (BA.Hons, MA), currently completing the first year of her doctoral studies in Canadian History at the University of Calgary, has been awarded a prestigious Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS) Doctoral Scholarship from SSHRC (the upper echelon of SSHRC's doctoral awards). Congratulations, Erin!

Congratulations to Teresa Redlick, who has been awarded a SSHRC/CGS M.A. Scholarship for her work in Russian History.

Very many congratulations to Pamela Jordan, currently on maternity leave, who has received a SSHRC Standard Research Fellowship for her work on evaluating Russia's membership in the G8.

Paul Jenkins (MA 2004) has been awarded a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship for his work in Early Modern Scottish History at the University of Glasgow. Congratulations, Paul!

Bradley Coates (BA hons 2004) reports that he is winding up his MA at the University of Toronto, and will be commencing a Ph.D. in 20th Century European History at McMaster University in Hamilton starting in September. Congratulations, Bradley!

The research and writings of Keith Carlson inform a new documentary film, The Lynching of Louie Sam, which is premiering at the Toronto Hot Docs film festival. The film tells a story from 1884, when a mob of 100 American men rode across the B.C. border, kidnapped a 14 year-old Stó:lo boy falsely accused of murdering a U.S. storekeeper, and lynched him. Canadian investigators promised justice, but delivered none, despite knowing the identity of the killers. The film debuts in Toronto on April 26th at 6:45 at the Royal Ontario Museum. Keith Carlson will be arranging a Saskatoon viewing in the months to come.

No sooner do we celebrate one student's success at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, than news of another arrives. Laura Mitchell (BA hons, shortly) has been accepted into the M.A. program starting in September, where she will be chasing the heels of Jennifer Gilchrist. Congratulations, Laura!

The latest trove of fantastic material to make its way to the web comes from Earlham School of Religion in Richmond Indiana, where a team of scholars and technicians has compiled a digital library containing full text and page images of over 500 individual Quaker works from the 17th and 18th centuries. These include major tomes by George Fox, Margaret Fell, Robert Barclay, William Penn, and Joseph Besse, among others. The volumes are searchable, browsable by author or title, and free to everyone. Check it out at http://esr.earlham.edu/dqc/.

It seems like only a year ago (March 17, 2004, in fact) since we reported that Jennifer Gilchrist (BA Hons, 2004) had been accepted into the one-year MA program at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. That year is up, more or less, and Jennifer informs us that she has been accepted into the Ph.D. program in the very same Centre for Medieval Studies. Congratulations, Jennifer.

Going places? Avid What's Uppers may recall that Google Maps offers maps of North America (http://maps.google.com/) that can get you from door to door almost anywhere on this continent. Now the same service extends to Great Britain. Check it out at http://maps.google.co.uk/. Don't, by the way, be put off by the southernist bias of both the North American and U.K. map homepages, such that neither Saskatoon nor, say, Aberdeen (Scotland) are shown on the initial maps. Thankfully, both of these critical destinations are, in fact, fully mapped.

Ph.D. candidate Rebecca Brain presented "'A White Man's Disease': The 1870-71 Smallpox Epidemic on the Canadian Prairies", at the annual conference for the American Association for the History of Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier this month. Alabama, she reports, was beautiful and the flowers were already out. Rebecca also reports that she has been hired to write the centennial history for the Saskatchewan Medical Association.

New Ancient Texts! Classicists finally have something new to read. A vast heap of ancient papyri, (known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri) that have sat illegible in an Oxford library for over 100 years can suddenly be read, thanks to new infra-red technology. As was reported in yesterday's edition of the Independent, "In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament." Click here to read the full story.

Rob Scott (M.A., 2004) recently presented the paper "Land and the Politics of Agrarian Reform in a Mayan Highland Village (1952 - 1954)" at the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies Annual Conference in Tucson and hosted by the University of Arizona's Centre for Latin American Studies on March 30 - April 2.

Texts in Context is a rich and unusual collection of over 400 British Library texts. You can find menus for medieval banquets and handwritten recipes scribbled inside book covers. You can browse the first English dictionary ever written and explore the secret language of the 18th century underworld. You can study the East India Company's shopping lists and practise sentences from colonial phrasebooks. You can learn smugglers' songs, listen to rare dialect recordings, and examine the logbooks of 17th century trading ships. Click here to check it out.

World Exclusive! First on-line pics of the adorable Miranda Jordan McCannon, born Thursday, April 7th. Seen here in a contemplative mood, Miranda will be moving home on Monday. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Miranda, the newest member of the History Department family, seen here on the left, with her thrilled and exhausted parents Pam Jordan and John McCannon. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

SHE'S A GIRL! Pam Jordan and John McCannon are the proud parents of a baby girl, Miranda Jordan McCannon! Miranda, born Thursday April 7th 2005 at 3:52 pm, weighed in at 7 lbs, 10oz, and stretches out to a full 19 inches long. Pam and Miranda are both doing well and expected to be going home on Monday. Happy Birthday, Miranda!

Say it ain't so! Man-Kam Leung, seen here with his last group of honours students mere minutes before the end of his last class on April 6th, 2005, is retiring after a forty year career at the University of Saskatchewan. The seventh floor will never be the same.

Grad Colloquium coming up! Tuesday, April 12, 7:30 pm in the Faculty Club (Club Room downstairs). Appetizers will be provided. Cash Bar available, as always. The speakers will be
Jennifer Hamel, on "Conservative Histories: Preliminary Musings on the Writings of George Grant and Donald Creighton"; Luke Wadel, on "Irony in Origen"; and Liz Scott, "Cockney Plots: Working Class Politics and Garden Allotments in London's East End, 1890-1918".

Most of the scholarships and awards for undergrads dispensed by the department do not require that students apply, but there is one major exception, as follows:

Kathleen R. McKenzie Scholarship
Value: $1700
Number: One
Conditions: Awarded annually to the student with the highest cumulative percentage average in all courses who is entering the fourth year of an Honours program in History. Selection is made by the Department of History.
Donor: Established in memory of Kathleen Rose McKenzie (B.A. '31), of Regina with funds from her estate.
Apply: Students must apply to be considered for this award. Click here for the online application form.
Deadline: April 29
For information on other departmentsl scholarships and awards, click here.

We here at What's Up have been using the web browser Firefox (the latest and best version of Mozilla, and a superior close cousin of Netscape) for some time now, and highly recommend it. It is stable, safer from spyware and viruses, faster than Internet Explorer, and just as free. When you use Cntl F to search for text on a Web page displayed in Firefox, the search results are displayed without blocking your view of the page itself! That alone is a major improvement over Internet Explorer. Firefox can coexist on your computer with other browsers, and will retain your existing bookmarks or favourites. Click here to learn more about it.

What historian can resist the opportunity to start a new archive? Another advantage of the Firefox web browser is that various free add-on features are available. One that might be of particular interest to historians is called Scrapbook. A free download that sets itself up swiftly and automatically in Firefox, it allows you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. Scrapbook is almost as simple to use as the "bookmark" or "favourites" facility for saving favourite web sites, but instead of linking to the current site, Scrapbook archives particular pages you have chosen to save. So whereas a bookmark or favourite would take you to the very latest front page of a newspaper, Scrapbook allows you to save a particular day's headlines or story: "Liberals Have Nothing to Fear From Gomery Commission", "Bush Says Iraq Has Weapons of Mass of Destruction", "Boston Down and Almost Out", etc. You can save all of a web page or just a snippet. Scrapbook archives the pages in folders you set up, and has a built-in search facility. This could prove a very valuable tool for instructors and students. Click here for the New York Times article on Scrapbook, here for the Scrapbook homepage, and here for an example of how it works.

The Umpteenth Annual Grad Students Book Pub and Auction was a huge success on Friday night. Attendance was high, fewer of the books were duds, and ace auctioneer Keith Carlson kept the prices up. Over $800 was raised for the History Grad Students' Council (HGSC). Congratulations especially to organizer extraordinaire Jean Ruiz.

Scurrilous rumour confirmed! In a world exclusive, What's Up can now confirm that Jim Miller and Bill Waiser were in fact more actively involved in the pursuit of the perfect beer while visiting England recently than they have hitherto admitted. (See What's Up, March 30th edition, below.) This action shot sent to us by a reliable source, captures Miller and Waiser in the very act. Their accomplices to the right are Marley Waiser and Steve Hewitt, a U. of S. Ph.D. now ensconced in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, near the top secret location captured above. Click on the picture to enlarge it.

Congratulations to Jim Handy, who has just been voted Best Professor in Saskatoon in a Readers' Choice Poll conducted by Planet S, Saskatoon's city magazine.

The Umpteenth Annual History Grad Student Book Auction is upon us. Great books way cheap. Friday, April 1st (no kidding), Louis' Pub. 7 pm book perusal, 7:30 auction. Everyone welcome.

Impending graduates and others may wish to check out the following site from Channel 4 television in the U.K.: The Worst Jobs in History, presented by Tony Robinson (the immortal Baldrick of Blackadder fame). Click here to check it out.

Bill Waiser and Jim Miller spoke to a symposium on the history of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan sponsored by the Canadian Studies Programme at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies of the University of London, on Friday, March 18. On March 22nd, Jim gave a paper in the Canadian Studies Seminars series of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, also at the University of London, on "Compact, Contract, Covenant: Canada's Treaty-Making Tradition with Aborignal Peoples." Meanwhile, on March 21st, Bill gave a seminar on his forthcoming Saskatchewan centennial book in the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham. Jim and Bill both insist, in a suspiciously strenuous fashion, that there is no truth to the scurrilous rumour going around that a great deal of time was also devoted to the continuing search for the perfect beer and the perfect Indian restaurant.

The Library is pleased to announce the availability of the The ARTFL Project. The Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) is a cooperative enterprise of Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française (ATILF) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Division of the Humanities, the Division of the Social Sciences, and Electronic Text Services (ETS) of the University of Chicago. The collection includes a large collection of French language texts and reference works, including a searchable version of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie. This is currently available from the A-Z list of Databases and from the Languages & Linguistics Subject page; it will also soon be added to the History and WGST Subject pages.

John Porter has a busy spring lined up, in which he will deliver three conference papers. On April 1st, he will be discussing "The Lustful Alcumena" at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Madison, Wisconsin. On May 14th, he will address the issue of "Speaking to the Point before the Areopagus and in the Ephetic Courts" at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of Canada in Banff. And on May 23rd, he will travel to Crete to present "A Tomb with a View: Petronius' Widow of Ephesus and the Comic Adultery Tale" at the 3rd Rethymnon International Conference on the Ancient Novel.

In February of 2006, the Classical Association of the Canadian West will be holding its annual meeting in Saskatoon. The theme will be Household and Society in the Ancient World, and the keynote speaker will be Lisa Nevett of the University of Michigan. A call for papers describing the nature of the conference can be found at: http://www.usask.ca/classics/cacw/. Further information can be obtained by contacting the conference organizer, John Porter at porterj@duke.usask.ca.

Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) is for the first time offering an Intensive Summer Latin Program which will credit students with first year Latin (Latin 112.3, Intersession Terms 1 & 2; Latin 113.3, Summer Session Terms 1 & 2) upon successful completion of 14 weeks of study at 2 hours per day. Second year Latin will as usual be taught in the Winter Session (202.3, Term 1 and 203.3, Term 2). This means that summer Latin students, starting in May, will be able to do the equivalent of two full years of Latin in one calendar year; note that a minimum of two years of this language is generally needed to acquire a “reading knowledge” of Latin.

For all of you Latin-starved readers out there in the wider universe, this represents yet another reason to come to sunny, leafy, affordable Saskatoon to attend summer school at the U of S.

Don't get around much anymore? Maybe you need better maps. Check out the new Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/), which will lead you door-to-door just about anywhere on the continent, with maps notably more legible than some rival sites offer. Say, for example, you needed to get from the history department to the Saskatoon Travelodge for reasons explained below. In the search box on Google Maps, type "9 Campus Drive Saskatoon", which will quickly show where we are. When prompted for a "to here" or "from here" address, type "106 Circle Drive W. Saskatoon". Was that hard? You have no excuses now.

History Students Graduation Banquet. The graduation banquet will be help on Saturday, April 9th at the Travelodge Hotel (Circle Drive). Beverages at 6:30, food at approximately 7pm. All students, faculty, and family of students and faculty are invited to celebrate not only the graduation of one more wave of students but also the end of a successful year for the history department. Tickets are $20, available from a friendly HUSA rep in the tunnel from March 29 through April 8th.

Valerie Korinek gave a plenary session, entitled "Fighting for Equality and Justice: An overview of gay and lesbian activism in the Province of Saskatchewan,1970-the Present" for Breaking the Silence--2005: Issues in Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, College of Education, University of
Saskatchewan, March 18-March 19, 2005.

Call for papers: The 2005 Western Canada Undergraduate History Conference will be held at Red Deer College on May 13 and 14. The Conference provides an excellent opportunity for History students from all across Western Canada to share their work and ideas in an exciting and supportive environment. No papers will be refused, all papers will be adjudicated by our distinguished panel of Historians and prizes will be awarded to the top three papers in two categories: Junior (1st & 2nd year students) and Senior (3rd & 4th year students). There is a registration fee of $40 per paper (cheque or money order please, no cash) which will cover each student’s registration package and an awards dinner on Saturday May 14. Please forward submissions along with registration fee to: Dr. James Martens, Box 5005, Red Deer, AB, T4N 5H5. Deadline for submissions is Friday April 8.

The conference The Eighteenth Century: Current Research and Future Perspectives was held this past weekend at Luther College, University of Regina. The conference provided a chance for faculty and grad students from a number of departments at the U of S and the U of R to meet and present their work. Our department was represented by Clay Burlingham, who spoke on Louis XVI, Lisa Smith on medical patients and pain, Gordon DesBrisay on women and church seating, Warren Johnston on the prophet Anne Wentworth, and Karen Sander on women and debt litigation.

Brent McFarlane will present his paper, "The Roman Wore Bowling Shoes: Plautine and Terentian Devices and Resulting Reflections of Society in John Hughes' Uncle Buck," in a CMRS Undergrad Colloquium at STM 344B on Thursday, March 17th (gathering at 3:30, with the talk to commence at 4:00). Brent is currently an undergraduate at the University of Saskatchewan. His play, The Secret of All Literature, was produced on campus last term and will be playing at this summer's Fringe Festival. The paper he will be presenting was recently awarded first prize in the Classical Association of Canada's Junior Undergraduate Essay Contest. Click here for an online copy of the paper. The talk will be accompanied by clips of John Hughes' film and dramatic readings from the works of Plautus and Terence. Everyone welcome.

Google today released the finished version of Google Desktop, a powerful search engine that scours your hard drive for files or snippets of text, at lightening speed. There is simply no comparison to the utterly lame search facilities built into Windows. It now searches pdf files as well as Word, Powerpoint, and most popular e-mail programs. Google offers add-in bits to allow for the searching of Open Office files, as well. Google Desktop is free and powerful and simple to install and use, and will make you wonder how you ever got by without it. Click here to learn more.

And yet. Good as Google Desktop is, we here at What's Up still prefer the equally free and swift and easy and polished Copernic Desktop, which does all the same stuff while also searching WordPerfect files, which Google Desktop still does not. Both programs work fine with Windows XP, but Copernic is said to be the best choice for Windows 98 or ME. Click here to learn more, or here for a useful review.

Call for Papers. A reminder that The College of Graduate Studies and Research and the Graduate Students’ Association invites grad students to submit a paper for the 13th Annual University of Saskatchewan Graduate Student Conference. This year's theme is “Interdisciplinarity: Methodologies and Practices in Academia”, and presenters are encouraged to organize and develop their research and arguments through the vein of interdisciplinarity; considering questions such as: how does an interdisciplinary approach enhance or decrease specific research, is interdisciplinary studies beneficial to research, or does it diminish the product? What is interdisciplinarity? Are some disciplines more open to interdisciplinarity than others? Having said all that, the organizers are disarmingly honest (would that other conference organizers were so honest) in admitting that "Submissions need to be only marginally related to the theme."

Submissions are welcome from graduate students in Master’s, Doctoral, Post-Doctoral, and related graduate student programs, and from either full-time or part-time graduate students.

The deadline for submissions has been extended to April 10, 2005. Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words, and may be submitted by e-mail to bsa_admn@duke.usask.ca.

Tuesday, March 8. Whelen Visiting Lecture. John Borrows, Professor and Law Foundation Chair of Aboriginal Justice and Governance, University of Victoria. "Creating Canada: Constructing an Indigenous Country." 7:00 PM, Delta Bessborough. Everyone welcome. Public reception to follow. Click here for further details.

The March Graduate Student Colloquium will feature papers by Liz Scott, Kim Duong, and Jillian Staniec. Thursday, March 17th. Faculty Club downstairs, 7:30 - 9:00 pm. Faculty, Grad Students, and Honours Students.

Our friends at CMRS are crazy busy these days, with the following events imminent:

Thursday, March 3, CMRS Colloquium. Annabel Robinson, University of Regina. "The Falling Apple, the Fixed Stars, and the Circling Moon: the Creative Imagination of Jane Harrison". STM 344B, refreshments 3:30, talk at 4:00. Everyone welcome.

Friday, March 4. CMRS Research Workshop Seminar. Alan Reese, STM/History Department, "Erasmus' Christian Anthropology and the Correction of the Ascetic Tradition," Boffins, 3:30-5:30. Faculty and invited guests.

Thursday March 10. CMRS Colloquium. Joanne Rochester, Dept. of English. "'This my Poor Image': Renaissance Sculpture and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale". STM 344B, refreshments at 3:30, talk at 4:00. Everyone Welcome.

Friday, April 1. CMRS Research Workshop Seminar, Peter Burnell, Department of History, "Just War and Pacifism in Early Christianity". Boffins, 3:30-5:30. Faculty and Invited Guests.

Jenn and Whitney Lackenbauer had a baby son, Harrison, last month. Mother and child are reported to be doing well, and Harrison is a good-as-gold baby, proving, Whitney says, that he takes after his mother. Congratulations to Harrison and his folks.

The George Grantham Bain Collection of photographs at the Library of Congress contains images from one of America's earliest news picture agencies. The collection documents sports events, celebrities, theater, crime, strikes, disasters, and political activities, mainly from 1900 to the mid-1920s, but including some images from as early as 1860. Catalog records and high resolution digital images have recently been added for 11,000 glass negatives, joining the 1,200 photographic prints already represented online. More negatives will go online in the coming months. Click here to check it out.

Congratulations to Steve Hewitt (MA 1992, Ph.D. 1997) who has landed a permanent position in the Department of American and Canadian Studies, at the University of Birmingham, England. See what Steve is up to or contact him at http://www.uscanada.bham.ac.uk/staff/hewitt.htm.

Congratulations to Bill Waiser, whose t.v. series Looking Back has just been released on DVD for use in Saskatchewan schools, as part of the Social Studies curriculum. The DVD is not available for sale to the public, but the book of the series, Looking Back - True Tales from Saskatchewan's Past was published by Fifth House in 2003. Click here to learn more about the book.

Aware the Ides of March! Our good friends at the Museum of Antiquities are sponsoring an Ides of March Classical Quiz Night on, of course, March 15th, at 7pm in room 12 of the Main Library. Test your knowledge of the ancient and medieval world amidst a raucous evening of fun and friendly team competion. Cost is $10 per person with advance registration (before March 4th), and $12 thereafter. Click here for more details.

Congratulations to Dr. Angela Wanhalla, Post-Doctoral Fellow in Native-Newcomer Relations, who has accepted a tenure-track position in History at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Fortunately for us, Angela will be able to stay here until the end of August.

History Graduate Student Colloquium. This month's colloquium features papers by Karen Sander on "Women and Debt in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: Giving Credit Where Credit is Due", and Jean Ruiz, whose title will be announced on the night. Thursday, February 24. 7:30 pm, Faculty Club basement. Faculty, grad, and honours students.

History Department Research Workshop Series. Angela Wanhalla will present her paper, "Mapping, Contesting and Trangressing Boundaries at the Taieri Native Reserve, Otago, New Zealand, 1844-1868". Friday, February 25th, Boffins, 3:30pm. Faculty and invited guests.

CMRS Colloquium. Taneli Kukkonen, University of Victoria will be presenting "Creation in Greek Philosophy, Medieval, and Renaissance Perspectives." Monday, February 28th, STM 344B, refreshments 3:30, talk at 4:00. Everyone welcome.

HUSA Film Night. This year's wildly successful history film series continues with director Agnieska Holland's acclaimed Europa, Europa, winner of the Golden Globe for best foreign film of 1991. Based on an autobiography by Solomon Perel, the film concerns a Jewish-German boy who manages to conceal his identity from the Nazis and ends up a member of their Youth Party. Introduced by Mark Meyers. Wednesday, February 23rd, 6:30 pm, Arts 242 (Place Riel Theatre). Free. Everyone welcome.

ECCO: The University Library is offering trial access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), which delivers the full text of every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in Great Britain during the eighteenth century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. Subject areas covered include history, geography, fine arts, social sciences, medicine, science, technology, literature, language, religion, philosophy, law, and general reference. To try out this latest treasure trove, click here. Note that the trial ends March 5th.

The College of Graduate Studies and Research and the Graduate Students’ Association invites grad students to submit a paper for the 13th Annual University of Saskatchewan Graduate Student Conference. This year's theme is “Interdisciplinarity: Methodologies and Practices in Academia”, and presenters are encouraged to organize and develop their research and arguments through the vein of interdisciplinarity; considering questions such as: how does an interdisciplinary approach enhance or decrease specific research, is interdisciplinary studies beneficial to research, or does it diminish the product? What is interdisciplinarity? Are some disciplines more open to interdisciplinarity than others? Having said all that, the organizers are disarmingly honest (would that other conference organizers were so honest) in admitting that "Submissions need to be only marginally related to the theme."

Submissions are welcome from graduate students in Master’s, Doctoral, Post-Doctoral, and related graduate student programs, and from either full-time or part-time graduate students.

Abstracts of no longer than 250 words must be submitted by Monday, February 28, 2005. Abstracts may be submitted by e-mail to gsa_admn@duke.usask.ca.

Congratulations to John McCannon, who has just published "The Pole Is Ours! The Dilemmas of Exploration, Development, and Science in Arctic Siberia during the 1930s," in The Siberian Saga: A History of Russia’s Wild East, ed. Eva-Maria Stolberg. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005. Click here and then scroll down to read more about the book.

Kalamazoo Bound: Frank Klaassen and Sharon Wright offer the following astounding opportunity to students:
"A number of students (grads and undergrads) have expressed interest in going to the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo Michigan Thursday-Sunday, May 5-8, 2005. The atmosphere is comfortable and the congress is huge (3-4000 attendees and 40 concurrent sessions over 4 days). The program is posted on the web site (link below). For any student centrally interested in topics between 300 and 1600 AD this is a very good conference to attend. In fact, we believe it is CRUCIAL that any graduate students at the U of S working on medieval topics go [and return - ed.]. Sharon and I plan to drive down with any students who want to go (yes, you heard that correctly). We assume the trip will take about 25 hours each way. The savings should be relatively substantial as a result. We also expect to be able to have some of the trip subsidized by the university under programs for grads and undergrads. The cost of registration is $80US for students and accomodation can be had for $26US/night (double occupancy). (Students may, of course, wish to bring sleeping bags and sleep 4 to a room, reducing that cost to $13.) You can eat in the cafeteria (see web page) or at nearby restaurants. We often bought cheese, bread, and fruit and had picnics in our student days. We should have more information about the possibility of subsidies and the cost of transportation at the meeting."

For more information about the congress click here

All faculty, grad and undergrad students interested should attend the Organizational Meeting for the Trip to International Medieval Congress. Monday February 7, 2005, 4:30 p.m., Arts 710.

The Psychology Department is sponsoring a talk by Ulrich Teucher, University of Nottingham, on Community, Self, & Place: Cultural knowledge in Native and non-Native Youth, on Monday February 7th, 4-5pm at STM Room 344B. Dr. Teucher is a candidate for the advertised position in Culture & Human Development.

Call for Papers: Histories of editions. European Society for Textual Scholarship (ESTS) Conference, December 16-17, 2005, Amsterdam. The conference will focus on the ways in which specific texts have been edited throughout history. The aim is to chart tendencies that mark different periods in the history of scholarly editing by examining the evolution of editing older and classic texts such as the Divina Commedia, the Nibelungen sagas, the Canterbury Tales, Esopet, the Bible. Interested scholars are invited to write an abstract for papers that follow the editorial tradition of a text, either within a specific historical period or leading up to the present day, including new developments in electronic editing. Abstracts (300 words) for 20-minute papers can be sent to the chairman of the academic programme committee: herman.brinkman@chi.knaw.nl. Deadline for abstracts: March 1, 2005. Click here for further details.

The University of Saskatchewan library has acquired a subscription to the full-text catalog of Proquest Dissertations and Theses (formerly Proquest Digital Dissertations). For U. of S. library users, this means that most M.A. and Ph.D. dissertations produced in North Amercan universities (and many written at U.K. universities) since 1997 are available immediately and in their entirety as .pdf files. Having opened the file, the search facilty in Adobe Reader can provide a de facto index. Note that some older dissertations have been made available as well: What's Up found a still-relevant Yale doctoral dissertation from 1939, in its entirety. Faculty and grad students will find this a treasure trove of vital scholarly work, much of it state-of-the-art, and advanced undergrads will also want to avail themselves of this latest remarkable addition to our university holdings. U. of S. users can click here to see for themselves. (What's Up tip #314: having searched and found a likely item, click "Page Image pdf" to open the dissertation. If you double-click on the title, however you will be taken to a page inviting you to pay $38 US for the same privilege. Try to resist the impulse to pay.)

The University of York (U.K.) will open a Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies on 1 October 2005, under the directorship of Professors David Wooton (History) and William Sherman (English). The Centre will sponsor two international conferences in the summer of 2006: '"Shrews" on the Renaissance Stage' (26-27 May 2006) and 'Rethinking the Baroque'. The Centre is also inviting applications for three-year doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships. A dedicated website will follow shortly. In the meantime, click here to learn more about the doctoral fellowships, and here for the postdoctoral (deadline for the latter is 17 February, 2005).