It is with profound sadness that we inform you that Mary Miller died suddenly on December 19th. Mary was the wife of Jim Miller, mother of Andrew and Christian, friend of countless people including everyone in this department, and director of the Diefenbaker Centre. Mary's funeral will take place Thursday, December 23, at 2:00 pm in St.Thomas More College Chapel. A reception in the College will follow the service.

Memorial donations may be made to UNICEF or the Canadian Cancer Society and would be appreciated in lieu of flowers. Condolences may be sent to mail@saskatoonfuneralhome.com.

The Diefenbaker Canada Centre will post memories of Mary on their webpage at http://www.usask.ca/diefenbaker/. If you have any stories that you would like to share, and/or photographs, please e-mail the Diefenbaker Centre's webmaster, Robert Paul at paul@admin.usask.ca.

Brent R. MacFarlane has been awarded first prize in the Classical Association of Canada's National Junior Undergraduate Essay Contest (for students in introductory courses in Classics) for his essay, "The Romans Wore Bowling Shoes: Plautine and Terentian Devices and Resulting Reflections of Society in John Hughes' Uncle Buck," written for John Porter's Classics 121: Roman Culture and Civilization. As the awards committee notes, "the author demonstrates convincingly that the satirical devices used by Plautus and Terence work equally well when applied to the neo-conservative movement of the 1980s."

Congratulations to Roger Carpenter, whose book The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade:The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650 has just been published by Michigan State University Press. Roger is a term appointment in our department, and taught previously at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Click here to learn more about the book.

Congratulations to M.A. candidates and new parents Jennifer Hamel and Darren Friessen on the birth of future history student Benno Thomas Friessen, born early in the morning on December 7th, a few weeks early, at 6 lb, 10 oz. And congratulations to you, too, Benno.

Those interested in prying into the lives of dead English and Welsh people are in for a treat. MyFamily.com and The National Archives in London have come together to launch a new co-branded (read: "for profit") online service. For the first time, fully searchable indexes and scans of original documents from the 1881 and 1891 censuses for England and Wales are now available. And over the next two years all historic censuses from 1841 to 1891 will be made available online in the same way, providing a wealth of information, including ages, occupation and place of birth. The press release neglects to mention that the prices run $14 Canadian to view an individual record, $59.95 for a quarterly subscription to the whole set, and $139.95 for a year's subscription. Click here to find out more.

John Porter’s article, “Nicolaus Reads Euphiletus: A Note on the Nachleben of Lysias 1,” has just appeared in Ancient Narrative vol. 3 for 2003, pp. 82-87. The account of the Lydian king Gyges’ ascent to the throne offered in Nicolaus of Damascus’ Universal History (1st C. BC) has been traced directly to the work of the fifth-century Lydian historian Xanthus. This study examines Nicolaus’ clever manipulation of narrative motifs derived from the Bellerophon myth and the first speech of the 5th/4th-century Attic orator Lysias. The use of the latter, in particular, suggests that the relationship to Xanthus’ account is far from straightforward and tells against the view of Nicolaus as a mere redactor.

The winner of the November moustache contest was Jennifer Hamel, for tolerating her husband Darren's lovely Tom Selleck style 'satche for a whole 30 days. The runner-up was Chris Clarke for his biker-like 'handle-bars.'

The Eighteenth-Century Studies at the U of S group is hosting a dinner talk on Tuesday November 30. Professor Jessica Warner (research scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health & Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto) will talk about "John the Painter: An Eighteenth-Century Everyman". The subject of the talk went by various aliases and attempted to burn down Portsmouth and Bristol in support of the cause of American independence. He was hanged for that in 1777. The talk offers thoughts on why certain young men become terrorists, and how best to catch them. 6:30PM, Faculty Club bar, faculty, grad and honours students welcome.

Professor Warner will also deliver a talk the next day, Wednesday, December 1, on "The 'Gin Craze': The Story of the First Modern Drug Scare". The talk promises to offer unflattering remarks about the American "War on Drugs". 4pm, ARTS 101, everyone welcome.

Coming to a Tunnel Near You: This year, as in the past few years, HUSA is offering a wide variety of History Department & HUSA clothing. These T-shirts, bunny hugs, zip up fleeces, and sweater vests are hot, hot, hot! OK, quite warm. Still, you can bet Posh Spice will want the whole set. Order this fine gear in the tunnel from HUSA volunteers who will be manning and womanning their table from 10:30-ish to 2:30-ish this Monday through Friday.

A new exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., offers a glimpse at correspondences four centuries old. Letter Writing in Renaissance England, which runs through April 2005, includes letters penned in invisible ink, sealed in wax and embroidery silk, and sent to and from some of the most famous figures in English history. Click here and here to learn more.

Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, Israel, will bring online its historic new Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names on November 22, 2004. The database, which will allow online public interaction and contributions of new names and materials, seeks to capture the names of as many Jewish Holocaust victims as possible. The sophisticated technology allows users worldwide to access a treasure trove of millions of personal, historical and genealogical documents archived in 14 languages using cutting-edge Web search systems from the convenience of almost any computer. See it at http://www.yadvashem.org.

The National Archives in the UK presents Gallery of Victorian Prisoners Online - Two volumes of photographs and case details of prisoners inWandsworth Prison dating from 1872 to 1873 are now online. Each case gives the prisoner's physical description, as well as a photograph, their date and place of birth, the crime they committed, their sentence, the place of conviction and often their place of residenc. This is all fabulous, but, like many UK archives, access to the images promised and other information beyond the catalogue is actually available only on a pay-as-you-go basis. A family historian tracking one or two kinfolk through the prison system might find it a good deal, but for researchers hoping to survey a series of records, it can get very costly. See for yourself at: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news/stories/47.htm

Don't forget: HUSA is sponsoring a Beer Night, TONIGHT, November 18, from 7-9 pm at Winston's Pub in the Senator Hotel (21st and 3rd downtown). Admission is $8 and all proceeds go to the Dave De Brou Scholarship Fund. Everyone of drinking age is welcome.

The British Library has launched the Endangered Archives Programme. Unless action is taken now, much of mankind's documentary heritage may vanish - discarded as no longer of relevance or left to deteriorate beyond recovery. This website explains what the Endangered Archives Programme is, and how it can help: http://www.bl.uk/about/policies/endangeredarch/homepage.html

Google continues to issue products that can change the way we work (for the better, that is). The newest addition to their stable of search tools is Google Scholar, a staggeringly efficient search tool that enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Early testing in the What's Up labratory revealed that, on campus at least, many of the links Google finds will go directly to the article in question. Check it out at http://scholar.google.com.
Or, thanks to our library friend Peter Scott, you can consult the good people at Google right here:

HUSA is sponsoring a Beer Night this Thursday, November 18, from 7-9 pm at Winston's Pub in the Senator Hotel (21st and 3rd downtown). Admission is $8 and all proceeds go to the Dave De Brou Scholarship Fund. Everyone of drinking age is welcome.

The New York Times today published a jaunty article about the Al Capone industry in Moose Jaw. For the next week or so, until the link expires, you can click here to read the article. Meanwhile, even as we speak, researchers are looking for tunnels under Regina, hoping to find evidence of Queen Victoria's surreptitious visits to her namesake city. The searchers have gained heart from recent admissions out of B.C. that rumours the queen (with or without Albert -- reports vary) lived for a time in a cave under the Empress Hotel have proven unfounded. She must have been somewhere, goes the reasoning, so why not Regina?

Call for papers: The ever-busy Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Saskatchewan group invites faculty and grad students to propose twenty-minute papers on any topic relating to the "long" eighteenth century (c.1660-1815) for the conference The Eighteenth Century: Current Research and Future Perspectives to be held March 18-19, 2005 at Luther College, University of Regina. Proposals in the form of 250-500 word abstracts should be sent in e-mail messages (not attachments) to Dr. Noel Chevalier (noel.chevaier@uregina.ca) AND Dr. Catherine Tite (catherine.tite@urgenina.ca). The deadline for proposals is January 15, 2005. The local point person is Ray Stephanson in the English Department: stephanr@usask.ca.

Alum Todd Diakow (MA, 1995)) recently contributed his reminiscences of Dave De Brou for the Memories of Dave page on our departmental site. Todd is a high school Social Studies teacher living in Langley, B.C. and teaching in Abbotsford,where he puts the De Brou method into practice year after year.

MA candidate Rob Morley has created a new "group" in PAWS, the History Teaching Group where instructors at all levels can swap tips and share strategies and concerns. Any faculty or graduate students interested in participating in the group should contact Rob at r.morley@usask.ca and ask to be signed up.