HUSA (the History Undergraduate Student’s Association) will be conducting its annual membership drive from September 26th to 30th in the friendly confines of the Arts Tunnel. Membership can be purchased for a meager five dollars, which buys history students the opportunity to socialize with fellow students at a number of planned gatherings and events. This year HUSA is planning to be more active than ever befor, so be sure to drop by and purchase your membership.

The Department of History will be holding an Undergraduate Workshop, "How to Apply for Graduate School and Grants," on Friday, September 30, in Arts 208, from 1-3 p.m. The program will feature a number of speakers from the History Department including professors and graduate students. All are welcome to attend. Refreshments will be served. If you have any questions, please contact the Undergraduate Director, Martha Smith-Norris (Arts 712).

Ph.D. Candidate Jeff Wigelsworth will defend his dissertation,"'Their Greater Degree of Infidelity': Deists, Politics, Natural Philosophy, and the Power of God in Eighteenth Century England", on Monday, September 26th, at 8:30 in the College of Grad Studies, room 50.

Roving correspondent Laura Mitchell, now embarked upon her graduate studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, reports that Codices Electronici Sangallenses will shortly offer electronic access to the medieval codices in the Abbey Library of St. Gallen by creating a virtual library. The project will begin with a two-year pilot to digitally reproduce a selection of the finest illuminated codices at such a high resolution that researchers cannot only work with the manuscripts but also perform detailed (art historical or otherwise) analyses of the miniatures in the codices.

The Lynching of Louie Sam is a documentary film of 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 is based on investigative work and analysis conducted by our own Keith Carlson. Having been shown in Toronto or some such place in the spring, it will now receive a much more prestigious screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival on October 4th and 6th. To learn more about the film, and, indeed, to purchase tickets to the Vancouver screening, click here and scroll to the alphabetical bottom of the list.

And the envelope please... The entire What's Up team joins us in congratulating the following winners of the History Department undergraduate book prizes for 2004-2005. Many fine students have won these awards in the past, and we are delighted to add the following names to their number.

The James H. Gray Essay Prize for the best research essay in a 400-level history class is shared this year by Amanda Harrington (“The Maturation of the History of Childhood: Achieving Independence from Centuries of Childhood”) and Jill Mackenzie (“The McDonutization of Canada: Tim Hortons True Commercials' Series and National Identity").

The Simpson Prize in History, awarded annually to two first-year students who have written the best final examinations in a History course at the 100 level, goes to Nicole Haugrud (History 122) and Kurt Krueger (History 120).

The Glen Makahonuk Book Prize for the best labour history essay goes to Scott Wright ("From Autonomy to Commodity: Finding Value from Adam Smith to Karl Marx”).

The winners will be receiving letters from the department shortly.

Boggled by Google, by Gosh. We here at What's Up share the sentiment expressed in a recent New York Times headline: "More Great Free Software from Google: What's With That?" Because for whatever reason, Google continues to roll out stuff we historians can really use. For example, there's Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), a powerful search engine that surveys an ever-growing array of academic articles. We've mentioned it before, but as of this fall, if you access it from a computer on campus, the search results will include a direct link to the item if it happens to be held by the U of S library. And remember that unlike other search engines, Google Scholar searches inside the content of articles within its orbit.

For full-tilt boggle, however, nothing beats Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/), a digital globe that at higher magnifications turns out to be made up of detailed satelite images of much, (hell, for all we know, all) of the planet. Saskatoon happens to be covered by higher-resolution images: if you type "9 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK" into the address box, the planet spins and the image zooms smoothly in until you can see the Arts Tower clearly. Zoom in further to see the cars parked beside it. Now type another address ("Paris, France", "Rome, Italy", or "Yankee Stadium, New York", say) and you will soon "fly" there and zoom down to the point where you can, for example, just about make out people on the Eifel Tower. You can also tilt the images so as to look out towards the horizon rather than straight down. It is a globe like no other, and its potential as a powerful pedagogical, educational, and time-wasting tool are boundless. And did we mention that it is free? You do need to download a small piece of software, but after that Google's Earth is your oyster. (As long as you run Windows on a recent-ish computer, that is -- Apple owners will have to wait a bit.)

Bill Waiser and his Saskatchewan: A New History are poised to play a lead role in the University's celebrations of the Saskatchewan centenary, starting this coming week. Festivities kick off this weekend across the province. On Tuesday September 6th, the official book launch will be held in Convocation Hall as part of the celebrations marking the re-opening of the grand old College Building.

Bill's book has done us all proud. It is a work of passion, vast effort, and great erudition. Just today it garnered a glowing review in today's Star Phoenix, and in the Globe and Mail book review section the distinguished historian (and Saskatchewan ex-patriot) Ramsay Cook used terms such as "authoritative", "well-written", "first-class", "searing", "balanced", "damning", "moving", and "brilliant". So you had better go read it.

It's official. Former M.A. candidate Rob Angove, now known as Rob Angove, M.A., has successfully defended his thesis, "Holocaust Denial and Historiography" . Congratulations, Rob!

Congratulations to Rachel Hatcher, who on August 22nd successfully defended her M.A. thesis, "Truth and Forgetting in Guatemala".

M.A. candidate Rob Angove will defend his thesis, "Holocaust Denial and Historiography", today at 1:30 in Arts 710.

Mike Kresak (BA hons, 2005) has just (just) arrived in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he will shortly begin teaching English. In his first 24 hours or so, Mike has plugged into the expat community, stayed out all night, and partaken of the ancient Taiwanese custom of shopping at Costco, which he achieved by navigating Kaohsiung traffic on his new scooter with hot rain pelting down and groceries between his legs. For more, see Mike's new blog at http://mikekresak.blogspot.com/. If you want to leave Mike a message, just scroll to the bottom of his blog and click on the comments link.

This just in from our "historians are not as boring as some people would have it" newsdesk. Take Curtis Howe (B.A. Hons., shortly), for example. Curtis is just back from Detroit, where he served as a referee at the World Inline Hockey Championship, which featured teams from Canada, the U.S., Austrialia, Spain, Great Britain, and China. While in Detroit, Curtis and other inline hockey dignitaries attended a Tigers baseball game, where a fifteen minute bench-clearing brawl broke out, presumably in their honour. In winter, Curtis pays for his tuition by upholding the law on junior hockey ice rinks all over Saskatchewan. This past spring he worked the Allan Cup Canadian Senior AAA Hockey Championships, and was selected to serve as a linesman in the final game. And just to show he can hold down a desk job, Curtis has been employed this summer writing an official history of the University of Saskatchewan Students' Union. A man for all seasons.

Update on Jack Coggins: Jack has been moved from RUH to City Hospital, Unit 1, 7140. He is now undergoing rehabilitation therapy, and has a little more feeling on his right side. The best times to visit are the weekends or alternatively on weekdays at 3:30-5:00 pm or 6:00-7:00 pm. It is best to keep visits short because the therapy is very strenuous.

Gobsmacked. That's what we here at What's Up are, having test-driven another astounding feature just added by Amazon.com (and its little sister Amazon.ca). Thousands, for all we know millions, of books on offer at their web site are now fully searchable, and when you search you are provided with two lines of text and the page reference. The idea is to allow you to determine in advance whether you want/need the book, as if you were flipping through a copy on a shelf. (The implications for research and bibliographic corner-cutting don't bear thinking about, so we will refrain from mentioning them.) Say, for example, you were to look up How to Prepare for the AP World History (Barron's How to Prepare for the AP World History Examination), by our very own John McCannon (in conjunction with Pam Jordan). Hover your mouse over the cover of the book, and up comes the search box (a banner over the book cover will tell you if the search function is available). Now search for what you like. "Stalin", for example, yields 23 hits, "Saskatchewan" just 1. "Aberdeen" yields none, but we expect that the forthcoming new edition will correct that oversight.

A warm welcome to Simonne Horwitz, a doctoral candidate at Oxford University who has just moved to Saskatoon. The way one does. Simonne will be a research associate connected with Jim Miller's Canadian Research Chair in Native-Newcomer Relations. Her doctoral research concerns the medical history of South Africa, her native land, and it has a strong comparative and interdisciplinary cast. Simonne's article 'Leprosy in South Africa: A case study of Westfort Leper Institution, 1898 – 1948', will appear in African Studies, Vol 65, No. 2, 2006. The next stage of her work will extend her research to the Canadian scene. In the short term, though, Simonne's summer plans include mastering driving on the right side of the road. Click here to read more about Simonne.

Congratulations to Clay Poupart, who successfully defended 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 past Friday.

We here at What's Up join our colleagues in the Department of History in congratulating this year's recipients of the Simpson Memorial Scholarship awards, given annually to outstanding students in our graduate program. This year's winners are Chris Clarke (MA), Christine Charmbury (MA), Selena Crosson (PhD) and Bryon Plant(PhD). The scholarship was established in honour of the late George W. Simpson, Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan from 1922 – 1958. Professor Simpson also served as Head of the Department and Provincial Archivist, and his reflective scholarship and humanity influenced a generation of Saskatchewan historians, archivists and teachers. (Our apologies for an earlier version of this congratulatory message, which inadvertently congratulated only one of the four winners.)

The U of S Library is offering readers a trial of the ACLS History E-Book Project, an online, fully searchable collection of high-quality books in history, recommended and reviewed by historians, many of them (the books, that is) quite recent, and all of them available in their entirety. The collection offers unlimited multi-user access and free, downloadable bibliographic records. The collection is especially strong in American History, but you might be surprised at what they have in whatever field you are interested in. The browse and search facilities are excellent -- you can quickly search for a keyword within the texts of the entire collection, for example. The ACLS History E-Book Project was initially funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. U of S users can take it for a test drive by clicking here, although you may find (for the duration of the trial, at any rate) that you need to be on campus to access the texts themselves.

More good news for CRC postdoctoral fellow Lissa Wadewitz. Lissa was recently awarded a two-year fellowship at Stanford University, where she will be based at the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. To top that off, she has just learned that the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association has awarded her U.C.L.A. doctoral dissertation the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award for 2005. When informed of this latest triumph, Lissa responded with a resounding "Woohoo!". And rightly so. Lissa departs shortly, alas, for Palo Alto, and we here at What's Up wish her all the very best.