Congratulations to former CRC postodoctoral fellow Myra Rutherdale, assistant professor at York University since 2004, who has just published Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada's Colonial Past (UBC Press, 2005), which she co-edited with Katie Pickles. Contact Zones locates Canadian women’s history within colonial and imperial systems. As both colonizer and colonized, women were uniquely positioned at the axis of the colonial encounter -- the so-called "contact zone" -- between Aboriginals and newcomers. It ultimately was an embodied experience. What bodies belonged inside the nation, who were outsiders, and who transgressed the rules -- these questions are at the heart of this provocative book. Contributors include Jean Barman, Robin Jarvis Brownlie, Sarah Carter, Jo-Anne Fiske, Carole Gerson, Cecilia Morgan, Dianne Newell, Adele Perry, Joan I. Sangster, & Veronica Strong-Boag. Click here to learn more.

Belated congratulations to CMRS head Carl Still, who earlier this year published Essays In Medieval Philosophy And Theology In Memory Of Walter H. Principe: Fortresses And Launching Pads (Ashgate, 2005) which he co-edited with James R. Ginther. Click here to learn more.

Congratulations to Peter Burnell, who has just published The Augustinian Person (Catholic University of America Press, 2005), a study of Augustine's notions of human nature and of person. Through careful analysis of Augustine’s writings, Peter concludes that Augustine conceives of human nature as a unity at every level—socially, morally, and in basic constitution—despite very common objections that he fails to achieve such a conception. One early reviewer has called the book "an adventure for the mind", and another writes of "a very solid study of Augustine which begins from the unexpected but intuitively brilliant starting point of expositing Augustine’s theological anthropology." Amazon.ca has the book for sale at a good price, but here at Amazon.com curious readers can scope out the first page and index. You might also like to read more about the book at the publisher's site, here.

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Michael Hayden and former U of S student (BA, MA) Professor Malcolm Greenshields (now at Lethbridge), who have just published Six Hundred Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 1190-1789 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005). Mike and Malcolm shed new light on the medieval origins of the Catholic Reformation and the nature of the reform movement in the sixteenth century. Their work shows the importance of French bishops in starting the early-modern reform and their subsequent role in preparing the Catholic Church to weather the French Revolution. They also explore both the role of the French monarchy in the creation and collapse of the Catholic Reformation, and the changing attitude of peasants and the proto-proletariat toward official religion. Those of you keen to add to your collection of books by U of S history faculty might wish to note that Amazon.ca (but not Amazon.com) is offering a 34% discount just now. If you catch our drift. Click here to learn more.

Christmas shoppers on campus should know that Bill Waiser will be signing copies of his Saskatchewan: A New History at the U of S Bookstore tomorrow, Wednesday, from 12 to 1:30 pm. And in the unlikely event that any What's Up reader does not already own a copy, this would be the time to add to your personal collection of books by History faculty.

Congratulations to Man Kam Leung for his eloquent news release on CBC radio this morning concerning his donation of Asian history books to the U of S Library. Donna Canevari de Parades was also interviewed on behalf of the library.

Peter Bietenholz continues to recover from his surgery of November 24th, and yesterday was released from RUH so as to pursue his convalescence at home. Peter spent part of his time in hospital polishing his Spanish.

Man-Kam Leung, who retired last spring after forty years on campus, has donated his massive collection of books on Chinese history and culture to the U of S Library. That donation immediately makes our library one of the top five in Canada for Asian studies, and the best on the prairies. The latest edition of On Campus News features a lead photo and story on Man-Kam's wonderful gift, which will benefit generations of students and scholars. What's Up salutes you, Man-Kam!

Professor Emeritus Peter Bietenholz is resting comfortably in Royal University Hospital following surgery last week. He is devouring magazines, and reminded a recent visitor of today's CMRS Colloquium. All of us here at What's Up wish Peter the best, and look forward to seeing him back on campus and attending the colloquia in person as soon as possible.

History Grad Student Colloquium: This Friday, December 2nd at 3:30, in the Faculty Club, in the former downstairs billiards room that now sports nice furniture and walls of vivid red fully appropriate to the first presentation, Teresa Redlick will present "The New Soviet Man? Youth and the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s", followed by Jordan Olver on "Love and the Sexual Sphere: Love and its Relation to Marriage, Intercourse, and Procreation in Karol Wojtyla's Love and Responsibility". Everyone welcome. Cash bar available.

CMRS Colloquium: Donna Canevari de Paredes, Collections Librarian of the Research Services Division of the Library, will speak on "Early English Books On-line, 1475-1700: History, Overview, and Resarch Potential". The electronic collection in question is vital to any faculty or student at all interested in early modern history or literature, and does indeed offer remarkable opportunities for work with primary printed sources. Thursday, December 1, Room 344B at STM. Refreshments at 4, talk at 4:30. Everyone welcome.

Congratulations to Bill Waiser, whose Saskatchewan: A New History has just been named to the Toronto Globe and Mail's top 100 books of 2005 list. Bill was also a finalist once again this year for the Saskatchewan Book Awards. Saskatchewan: A New History was nominated in the nonfiction and scholarly writing categories.

Congratulations, too, to Gordon Barnhardt, editor of Saskatchewan Premiers of the Twentieth Century, which was nominated for a Saskatchewan Book Award in the publishing in education category.

Yesterday, November 27, in the Theatre of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in
Gatineau, QC, Janice MacKinnon was inducted into Academy I (Academy of the Arts
and Humanities) of the Royal Society of Canada. The citation for Janice read: "Janice MacKinnon is a historian, a former minister in the Government of Saskatchewan, and a scholar of public policy. Her published historical work has recast modern understanding of the Loyalist influence and, especially, the role women played in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ontario. Saskatchewan's Minister of Finance from 1992 to 1997, Janice MacKinnon carried the province and her colleagues through an unprecedented deficit crisis. Subsequently, combining her skills as a scholar and political practitioner, she wrote authoritatively about public policy and political leadership. While still a practicing academic, her unique career truly qualifies her as a public intellectual."

Also joining Academy I of the Royal Society of Canada was Guy Vanderhaeghe, the
accomplished novelist and short story writer from Saskatoon. Guy is a graduate of our Department, having earned a Honours B.A.and M.A. in History at the U of S. Unfortunately, other commitments prevented Guy from attending the induction ceremony.

Congratulations to both Janice and Guy for having achieved this great distinction.

Bill Waiser was recently in Ottawa to give a reading and generally put this university's best foot forward as one of eight Saskatchewan authors invited to take part in From the Heart: A Celebration of Saskatchewan, a centenary celebration which, in the words of one of Premier Lorne Calvert's assistants, showcased "the rich and varied work of Saskatchewan's traditional and non-traditional visual, literary and performing artists, and the cultural industries that flourish in our province." The gala event ran from November 14-19and was sponsored by Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Opening a new frontier: Lisa Smith, in conjunction with Paul Bidwell of the English Department, is spearheading the new University of Saskatchewan exchange agreement with the University of Essex. It marks the first university-wide exchange between the U of S and a British university. Essex, located in Colchester, England, is one of the top ten universities in the UK, and its history program is particularly strong: Lisa Smith is herself one of its distinguished doctoral graduates. Before long, our students will be heading there to study, for example, British and European history from close range, while students from Essex will be coming here for a closer look at Native/Newcomer and Western Canadian history. Stay tuned for further announcements.

Food for thought: The Internet Archive's new subscription service, Archive-it, allows any user to create, manage and search their own web archive through a web interface without any technical expertise required. Archive-it can be used to archive an institution's own web site, or build collections of up to one hundred web sites. Check out, for example, the Latin American Government Documents Archive and explore the options generally at http://www.archive-it.org.

Good news from Scotland. Paul Jenkins (MA), now a doctoral candidate at Glasgow, recently presented a paper entitled "'Every Quaker has a Pope in his Brest': Scriptural Controversy, History and the Politics of Religious Dissent in Restoration Scotland", as part of the University of Glasgow's Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies' autumn seminar series on 'Early Modern Scottish Culture and the republic of Letters'. Paul is also T.A.'ing a course on Scottish witchcraft, and working as a consultant/writer for a documentary on the Reformation destined to be aired on BBC4 and Vision TV in Canada.

Good news from England, where Jameel Hampton (BA Hons.) is currently a doctoral student at the University of Bristol, where he is completing his doctoral dissertation, 'Disability and the Welfare State in Britain, 1942-1970,' under the supervision of Rodney Lowe and David Gladstone. Jameel was earlier awarded a prestigious Universities UK ORS Award for overseas grad students, and has just now been awarded the Edward Thompson Memorial Bursary from the Society for the Study of Labour History, tenable at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick. The award is named in honour of E.P. Thompson, one of the great historians of the twentieth century. Congratulations, Jameel!

Earlier today, former MA candidate Jennifer Jozic passed the oral defense of her M.A. thesis, "'Here We Can Behold the Great Machine in Motion': The Belfast Monthly Magazine, 1808-1814". Professor Lisa Vargo of the Department of English was the external examiner. What's Up corespondents in the room report that the candidate passed with flying colours. Congratulations, Jen!

The oral defense for Jennifer Jozic's M.A. thesis, "'Here We Can Behold the Great Machine in Motion': The Belfast Monthly Magazine, 1808-1814", will be held today, November 16, 2005 at 1:30 pm, in Arts 710. Faculty and grad students welcome.

One of our loyal correspondents happened to attend the Social Science History Association meeting in Portland last weekend, where an “Author meets the Critics” session was dedicated to Geoff Cunfer’s book On The Great Plains: Agriculture And Environment. The organizers seemed to presume an adversarial situation, but the economist, historian of science, and geographer who made presentations all sang the book’s praises. Phrases such as “clarity of vision”, “an exemplar of what is possible”, and a “clarion call for more work on land use” were bandied about. Congratulations, Geoff!

Geoff Cunfer also gave a paper at the Social Science History Association meeting, "An Unremembered Diversity" (with Kenneth Sylvester), and Gordon DesBrisay was a so-called critic for a session dedicated to an important new collection of essays, The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain, 1400-1900, edited by Maria Agren and Amy Louise Erickson.

Meanwhile, as if by coincidence, John McCannon was giving his own paper, "On the Edge of Time: Images of the Archaic in Fin-de-Siècle Russian Painting," at the National Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, in Salt Lake City.

Lori Kuffner, a producer with Cooper Rock in Regina, will be visiting Bill Waiser's public history seminar on Tuesday November 8 at 9:30 in 710 Arts. Lori will be screening "Eyewitness to War," a 45-minute feature film about Gladys Arnold, a Saskatchewan-born journalist who was the only Canadian Press correspondent in Paris when France fell to the Nazis in 1940. Lori received a Gemini nomination for the production. Interested faculty and grad students are welcome.

HUSA-fying CMRS: Not content with having a CMRS rep on HUSA, CMRS students are now thinking of establishing a subcommittee of HUSA that would attend to specifically CMRS issues and events. Any student interested in this initiative or in learning more about it should drop an email to uofshusa@yahoo.ca.

Meanwhile, the currently ad-hoc CMRS wing of HUSA will be holding an informal meeting this coming Thursday, November 10th, regarding a forthcoming trip to the International Congress on Medieval Studies to be hald in Kalamazoo, Michigan, this coming spring. Anyone interested in learning more should gather by the radiators opposite the elevators on the first floor of the ARTS tower at 2:30 on Thursday.

Congratulations to MA candidate Scott Wright, who has just returned from Ottawa, where he was honoured by Canadian Blood Services for his outstanding volunteer work on behalf of that organization. Among other things, Scott serves as the U of S liason to Canadian Blood Services. In April, he also received the Saskatchewan Centennial Leadership Award for his outstanding contribution to the province and the blood supply (both as a volunteer organizer and as a much-drained donor.) Scott would think us remiss if we did not add that Saskatoon residents wishing to volunteer, donate money, or bleed for the team should contact Canadian Blood Services at 1-882-236-6283.

The first History Grad Colloquium of the year will be held this coming Friday afternoon, November 4th, from 5pm in the basement of the Faculty Club. Chris Clarke will speak on "History’s explorations on the explorations of explorers in the first 50 years of the New World", while Rob Morley will speak of "Wrestling with the Modern in a Time of War: British Pilot Training, 1912-1918". All faculty, grad, and honours students welcome.

It is not often that successfully defending one's MA thesis counts as only the number two highlight of one's month, but given that Liz Scott was married earlier in October, I suppose we here at What's Up can grant that her thesis defense earlier today must rank second. How close a second is not for us to say. What we can say is that Liz's defense of "Cockney Plots: Working Class Politics and Garden Allotments in London's East End, 1890-1918" went swimmingly. Congratulations, Liz.

M.A. candidate Liz Scott married Chris Harris (whom some of you will recognize as the Global TV sportscaster) on October 8th at Grace Westminster United Church here in Saskatoon. Liz reports that it was "a smallish affair with mostly just family and close friends attending, but a wonderful day all around." Congratulations, Liz and Chris!

Belated congratulations to Whitney Lackenbauer, former CRC Postdoctoral Fellow in our department (2003-04), now an assitant professor at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ontario. This past summer Whitney's article "The Methodological Challenge of "non-Events": A Reflection Using Comparative Case Studies on Military-Aboriginal Relations Over Land Use in Twentieth-Century Canada", Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 2004, was co-winner of the Journal of the CHA Prize for best article.

The MA Oral Thesis Defence for Elizabeth Scott and her thesis on "Cockney Plots: Working Class Politics and Garden Allotments in London's East End, 1890-1918" will be held on Wednesday, October 26th at 9:30 am in the College of Grad Studies boardroom (Rm 50).

The History Department will be holding an informational meeting for all Honours students planning to participate in the Michael Swan Colloquium. The meeting will take place on Wednesday November 9, 2005, from 2:30 until 3:30 p.m., in Arts 710. Refreshments will be served. If you have any questions, please contact Martha Smith-Norris, Director of Undergraduate Studies (smithm@sask.usask.ca).

Many thanks to Rylan Loucks and Chris Phillips of HUSA for their help with the revamped Experience US, the annual open house for high school students. Instead of the traditional departmental table wedged into a noisy hallway or gym, this year students actually considering taking a history class signed up for one of six one-hour presentations at which faculty and HUSA reps could make their pitch on behalf of History and CMRS. Frank Klaassen, Keith Carlson, and Gordon DesBrisay represented the department before a total of about 140 visitors.

Congratulations to HUSA co-president Chris Phillips, who has had a paper accepted for the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan this coming April. Chris' paper is entitled 'The Syve will Turne Rounde': Reclaiming Ritual Magic in Oxford, Bodleian, MS Additional B.1", and will be part of a panel entitled "Codicological Contexts for Works of Magic".

The vastly successful HUSA Film Series reignites for this academic year with Kingdom of Heaven, director Ridley Scott's epic recounting of the Crusades, starring Orlando Bloom as an implausibly lonely French blacksmith who discovers, go figure, that he's actually Liam Neeson's son (ok, Liam Neeson's character's son) and thereby heir to a tidy noble inheritance. But not until he's done with the whole Crusades thing. An under-rated film that you really ought to see. Catch it for FREE on Monday, October 17th, at 7:pm in Arts 241 (the Neatby-Timlin Theatre). Introduced by HUSA's own Chris Phillips. Everyone welcome.

Congratulations to Anastasia Tataryn, who will shortly graduate with High Honours in History, and at the forthcoming fall convocation will also be honoured with the Rose Litman Medal in the Humanities.

Anastasia, left, is seen here with her sister atop Hell's Gate on the Fraser River in B.C. while attending the department's Ethnohistory Summer School last year.

Come schmooze, come schmooze with us! Thursday, October 6th is Meet the Prof's Night! A priceless opportunity for students and faculty to hang out in casual fashion at Louis's on campus, 4-6pm. All History Students or prospective History Students or people who like History Students or people who are like History Students are welcome. Sponsored by your friends at HUSA.

Brendan Edwards recently published a short article entitled "To Put the Talk Upon Paper: Aboriginal Communities" in The History of the Book in Canada, Volume II, 1840-1918, edited by Yvan Lamonde, Patricia Fleming, and Fionna Black (University of Toronto Press, 2005). For additional information, click here.

Bill Waiser is a busy bee. This past Saturday, for example, he spoke at the commemoration ceremony for the Addison Sod House, a National Historic Site located near Kindersley. It was one of four talks Bill gave last week. This week he is in Ottawa to address the Ottawa Writers' Festival. Upon his return he promises to tell us more about his recent talk to the Saskatchewan Waste Reduction Council (not to be confused with the Saskatchewan Waist Reduction Council, though Bill probably spoke to them, too.)

We here at What's Up offer somewhat belated but nonetheless heartfelt congratulations to former Ph.d. candidate Jeff Wigelsworth. A candidate no longer, Jeff successfully defended his thesis, "'Their Greater Degree of Infidelity': Deists, Politics, Natural Philosophy, and the Power of God in Eighteenth Century England" on September 26th. Professor Justin Champion of Royal Holloway, University of London, was the external examiner.

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.

On July 7th, we reported that Jack Coggins had been hurt in a bicycle accident. Jack sustained a serious spinal cord injury. He is out of intensive care but remains in hospital. Jack and Shelley thank their many friends for their visits, good wishes, and prayers.

If you would like to send Jack your best wishes, you can do so in at least three ways. Jack can receive more visitors these days, and he is in the neurosurgery unit (the sci-fi-sounding "Area 6300") of Royal University Hospital, where visiting hours are from 2:00 - 7:30 pm. 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. And we have also created a special email account just for this occasion: jackcoggins@gmail.com. Jack will have the password to the account and will answer when he is able, but for now he can receive any messages you care to send that way.

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.