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.