Dear Friends,
It is with great regret that I inform you that our colleague and friend, Dr. Dave De Brou, a Professor of History, passed away this morning. He collapsed while out exercising and could not be revived. Dave has been a wonderful colleague and a great citizen of this university for many years. In his work as teacher, scholar, committee member and Department Head, he devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to the University of Saskatchewan. For those of us who worked most closely with him, we cherish his enthusiasm for our scholarship, his decency and his commitment to the ideals of university instruction and scholarship. He will be greatly missed. I will be in contact with you later with additional information.
Yours truly,
Dr. Ken Coates
Professor of History
Dean, College of Arts and Science
University of Saskatchewan

CANCELLED: The History Grad Student Book Pub scheduled for this Friday (April 2) has been cancelled in light of Dave De Brou's tragic death.

CMRS Colloquium: Frank Klaassen will speak on "Agrippa, Magic, and the Gifts of the Spirit(s)?" on Thursday, April 1, at STM Room 344B (a.k.a. the Chelsea Lounge). Agrippa was the most colourful and influential occultist of the 16th century, but did he or did he not pack in the occult for Pauline spirituality? Refreshments at 4, talk at 4:30. Everyone welcome. THIS EVENT IS CANCELLED.

The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) comprises electronic editions of the two major historical dictionaries of the Scots language: the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) and the Scottish National Dictionary (SND). DOST contains information about Scots words in use from the twelfth to the end of the seventeenth centuries (Older Scots); and SND contains information about Scots words in use from the eighteenth century to the present day (modern Scots). These are the most comprehensive dictionaries available for, respectively, Older Scots and modern Scots, and are therefore essential research tools for anyone interested in the history of either Scots or English language, and for historical or literary scholars whose sources are written in Scots or may contain Scots usages. See it here.

The U of S library now offers ANNO (Austrian Newspapers Online), a portal to historical journals, periodicals and newspapers published in the Habsburg Monarchy and Austria from 1808 to 1938. See it here.

The library now offers Early Encounters in North America on a permanent basis, a full text collection of (re-keyed) primary documents related to early encounters of North American Indian, European, American, and African peoples and cultures in North America, as well as descriptions of the natural features of North America at the time. The documents include letters, diaries, memoirs, accounts of early encounters, as well as images. The collection is centered on present-day Canada and the United States with some limited coverage of Mexico. U of S users can see it here.

Gutenberg online. A website allowing scholars, historians and anyone interested in the history and significance of printing to explore in detail the British Library's rare copies of the Gutenberg Bible, the oldest surviving printed book produced in the Western World, has be launched. On the site you will find digital images of the entire text of the Library's two copies of Johann Gutenberg's Bible, the first book to be printed using the technique of printing which Gutenberg invented in the 1450s. See it here.

Hildafest is almost upon us! The two-day conference celebrating the work and world of Hilda Neatby will be held at the Delta Bessborough Hotel in Saskatoon, Friday and Saturday March 26-27, 2004. Click here for details.

The library's free trial of ProQuest Historical Newspapers has been extended until March 31st. The service offers full text and images of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times from the nineteenth century forward. For details click here.

USSU Teaching Awards. The History Department has garnered two of eleven University of Saskatchewan Student’s Union Teaching Excellence Awards for 2003-4, and had no less than seven instructors nominated. Sharon Wright (History 213.6, Medieval England, 1000-1460) and Gordon DesBrisay (History 340.3, Early Modern Towns in Britain and Europe, 1500-1750) will receive their awards at a March 30th banquet. Clay Burlingham, Jack Coggins, Maureen Lux, John McCannon (though ineligible to win on account of winning last year), and Mark Meyers were also nominated by their students.

As previously noted, Lisa Smith's article 'Reassessing the Role of the Family: Women's Medicine Care in Eighteenth-century England' has just appeared in The Social History of Medicine 16, 3 (2003): 327-342. U of S library users can now access the article directly from the publisher (Oxford University Press). See for yourself at http://www3.oup.co.uk/sochis/hdb/Volume_16/Issue_03/.

The library has arranged for a free trial of Palmer's Full Text Online, which contains the Index to The Times® of London from October 1790 to December 1905. At present the database includes full indexes for 1790-1905, and page images for 1800-1870.

In the fabulous news department, the University Library is now a subscriber to Early English Books Online [EEBO] and has become a participant in the EEBO Text Creation Partnership. EEBO is an accessible full-text collection of Early English works, including about 100,000 of over 125,000 titles listed in the Pollard and Redgrave Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640), also known as STCI, and the Wing Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700), also known as STCII, and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. In addition to becoming subscribers to EEBO, the University of Saskatchewan Library has joined the EEBO Text Creation Partnership (EEBO TCP) co-ordinated by the Universities of Michigan and Oxford. This initiative will create searchable, ASCII full-text versions of 25,000 EEBO documents, and participants in the partnership can access the full text of completed documents through the EEBO interface. This is a Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries consortial license. EEBO is now listed on the History Databases page under "Major Databases", and is available to all U of S folk. Check it out at http://library.usask.ca/subjects/hist.html.

HUSA will sponsor a screening of "Lucie Aubrac", a film by Claude Berri, on Thursday, March 25 at 6:30pm in Arts 134. Carole Bouquet stars as a heroine of the French resistance during World War II. Her husband Raymond (Daniel Auteuil) is a resistance fighter who helps sabotage Nazi trains. He and some compatriots are arrested, but Lucie secures his release and enables them to fulfill their oath to spend every May 14 together, the anniversary of the first night they made love. The arrest of a resistance leader causes divisions; a meeting called to resolve them is raided, and Raymond is arrested again and sentenced to death. With steely determination, Lucie plots to rescue him. The film will be introduced by M.Meyers, admission is free, and everyone is welcome.

History honours student Jennifer Gilchrist has just been accepted into the MA program at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She will start the one year program in September. Congratulations, Jennifer!

Thanks to our hard-working friends at the Library's Technical Services and ITS Departments, the Library Catalogue now contains individual title records for each of the1292 titles contained within in the EARLY ENGLISH NEWSPAPERS microfilm collection. The Library holds the complete Early English Newspapers Collection on microfilm in 132 Units (approximately 50 reels per Unit). The collection contains 17th and 18th century English newspapers from the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Among the titles in this collection are: British Journal, Daily Courant, Daily Gazetteer, Daily Post, Evening Post, General Advertiser, Lloyd's Evening Post and British Chronicle, London Chronicle, London Evening Post, London Gazette, Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, St James' Chronicle or, British Evening Post, Whitehall Evening Post, and London Intelligencer. Our collection was completed over the twenty-year period from1983-2003, primarily with funding from the Murray Bequest left by our former colleague Jean Murray, and the Library Endowment Fund.

Congratulations to Kyle Jantzen (PhD, McGill; BA hons, MA, and former sessional instructor at the U of S), who is now Associate Professor of History and Program Head for the Bachelor of Arts in History at the new Alliance University College in Calgary (www.auc-nuc.ca). His most recent publication is “National Socialism as a Force for German Protestant Renewal?: Pastors and Parishioners Respond to Adolf Hitler’s ‘National Renewal’.” Pages 52-72 in Christian Responses to the Holocaust: Moral and Ethical Issues, edited by Donald Dietrich. (Syracuse University Press, 2003). Kyle sends greetings to all his former professors, colleagues and students in the history department, and can be reached at kjantzen@auc-nuc.ca.

Tracene Harvey (MA 2002), currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta, has just been awarded a place at the prestigious American Numismatic Society Seminar at New York City's American Numismatic Society Museum. The two-month appointment features an intensive round of lectures and seminars presented by leading specialists in the field. Only six grad students a year are admitted from across North America. Congratulations, Tracene!

The Departments of English, History & CMRS, and St. Thomas More College present: “Fighting and Flyting in Medieval Scotland”, a talk by Professor Elizabeth Ewan (University of Guelph) on Friday, March 12, from 2:30-3:20 in STM 344B (a.k.a. the Chelsea Lounge). Everyone Welcome, Reception to Follow.

Change of plan. The grad student Book Pub will now be held on Friday, April 2 at 7:00 in a private room at Louis'. Donations should still be made in the boxes set out by the window in the mail room.

John Porter's article, "Aristophanes, Acharnians 1118-21" has just appeared in volume 51 of the journal Greece and Rome. Professor Porter argues for the comic use of the actor's stage phallus in the scene and examines the difficulties entailed in reconstructing the stage action of ancient comic -- as opposed to tragic -- texts. U of S folk can read the article at http://80-www3.oup.co.uk.cyber.usask.ca/gromej/current/pdf/510021.pdf.

The Archives Hub provides a single point of access to descriptions of archives held in UK universities and colleges. The hub can be searched according to place, subject, surname, etc., and can turn up collections on all manner of materials deposited in British university archives, from the papers of Sir Isaac Newton, to a 1791 journal belonging to a ship's surgeon on an Aberdeen whaling vessel, to the Winston Churchill Antarctic correspondence collection. Check out the hub at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/about.shtml.