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.