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.