The History Grad Student Colloquium reconvenes tomorrow, Friday March 31st from 3:30-5pm, downstairs in the Faculty Club. The speakers will be Cheryl Loadman on "Interest Groups and Public Policy Making in the Saskatchewan Wellness Experience", and Mara Marginean on "In Search of Socialist Realism: The Stalinization of Romanian Architecture: 1947- 1954". Grad students and faculty welcome.

Valerie Korinek has been nominated (by multiple people) for the Saskatoon YWCA Woman of Distinction Award. Since 1982, the award has recognized women who are “leaders, mentors, facilitators, communicators, supporters, and listeners.” On all those counts, Valerie is a most worthy nominee. The winner will be announced at the award banquet on June 8th.

Congratulations to Michael Cottrell, who has been awarded a SSHRC Aboriginal Development Grant. Funded for two years, the project, the first part of a projected province-wide study, will look at Aboriginal teachers within the Prince Albert Grand Council area, focussing specifically on their contributions to community development and self-government. It will form the Congratulations, Michael!

The HGSC Lecture Series continues this Wednesday, March 29th with two presentations: Brett Fairbairn offers "Personal Reflections on How History is Made, and for Whom", after which Clay Burlingham will lecture on "Louis XVI: The Substance of the Sovereign of Shadows". The lectures will be held in STM Room 120 from 3:30-5 pm, and everyone is welcome.

Early word from the accounting department of the HGSC suggests that the annual Book Pub held last Friday raised roughly (hey, these are amateur accountants) as much money as last year's record-setting event. And this despite the fact that a local representative of the Scottish history fraternity who wishes to remain anonymous and who in past years slopped money around while seemingly unaware that the more he drank the more likely he was to overbid for those books nobody else wanted and which he was almost certainly destined never to read, was absent.

Our friends at the Library are providing a free trial of yet another astonishing new online resource. American History & Culture Online: Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 brings together a vast collection of searchable full-text of works about the Americas published throughout the world from 1500 to the early 1900's. Included are books, pamphlets and other documents about North, Central and South America,including accounts of exploration, trade, colonialism, Native North Americans, and more. Some of the earlier materials are available in Early English Books or Eighteenth Century Collections Online, but others are not, and much of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century is available to us here for the first time. The collection is of obvious value for historians of Canada, the US, and Latin America, but anyone interested in Europe or the Atlantic World will also want to dip into these treasures. Click here to check it out.

Those of you who can tear yourself away from What's Up long enough to read the History Department home page may have noticed that the "Coming Events" section mistakenly announced a History Grad Student Colloquium for this Friday, the 17th. Bad web page, bad! The colloquium in question will actually be held on March 31st, and the next and last one of the year will be held April 21st. Rest assured that the fool in charge of the web page will be spoken to most sternly, and may well have his daily ration of rum reduced. Meanwhile, on behalf of the fool, we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Aware the Ides of March! The annual IDES OF MARCH TRIVIA NIGHT is this coming Saturday, March 18th, at 7:00pm in Convocation Hall (Inside the main doors on the first floor of the College Building). Come along for a raucous evening of fun and friendly team competition! Test your knowledge of the Ancient and Medieval world in a total of 8 categories, including mythology, warfare, archaeology, and of course, Julius Caesar; 8 questions per category; teams can be composed of family members, friends, or a combination of both; if you come alone we'll find you a team to join! So enjoy the ride! Win Prizes! Enjoy appetizers and refreshments! All proceeds to the Museum of Antiquities projects involving student employment and community programming. Tickets available at McNally Robinson and the Museum of Antiquities (Rm 116 College Building), or e-mail john.porter@usask.ca and reserve your tickets.

Adults $12.00
Students $10.00
Children $8.00

10% off for students registered in advance

Congratulations to Jennifer Shepperd, who studied History and English at the U of S and recently completed her Ph.D. in English at the U of Alberta. She now lives in Belfast and was even more recently awarded a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, which she is taking up in affiliation with Hull University in England.

Jennifer is also the post-graduate (or, as we say in North America, graduate) associate editor for the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA) Working Papers in the Humanities, in which capacity she brings the following call for papers to your attention:

The MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities (http://www.mhra.org.uk/ojs/index.php/wph) is a new electronic publication forum intended to allow researchers to present initial findings or hypotheses such as might, at a more advanced stage, become eligible for publication in established scholarly journals. As such it will be of particular interest to postgraduate (i.e. graduate) researchers, though established scholars are also invited to submit papers. Submissions for the first issue of the Working Papers, to be published in October 2006, are invited on any topic, but the editorial panel aims to choose half of the papers from submissions that relate to the theme of Youth and Age. Authors might consider, among other things: the cultural construction and symbolization of youth and age (e.g. notions of young blood, coming of age, seniority); the role these terms play in constructions of gender, ethnicity, etc.; the symbolization of political or artistic succession in terms of youth and age (e.g. the old guard / young Turks); and the privileging, in cultural discourses about generational succession, of the male line over female-female and mixed-gender relations. Authors may also want to dismantle the opposition youth / age to consider more complex models of life stages. Papers may come from any field in the modern humanities, which includes the modern and medieval languages, literatures, and cultures of Europe (including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora). History, library studies, education and pedagogical subjects, and the medical application of linguistics are excluded. THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS 1ST MAY 2006.

The 40th Anniversary edition of the Canadian Journal of History has just been published. The CJH has always been produced in our department, right from its origins under the founding editorship of Ivo Lambi and his associates, Peter Bietenholz and Peter Marsh. The idea has always been to provide an opportunity for Canadian (but not only Canadian) scholars in all fields of history to find a general audience and to engage with the work of others internationally. Congratulations to the current editor, John McCannon, and to the backstage team of managing editor Linda Dietz and editorial assistants Ingrid McGregor, Nadine Penner, and Warren Johnston. The subscription rate remains a ridiculously low $28, and your really ought to sign up. Click here to learn more.

This year's prestigious Whelen Lecture will be delivered Tuesday, March 21st at 7:pm in the Adam Ballroom of the Delta Bessborough by Professor Brian W. Dippie of the University of Victoria, a leading expert on the American West and its art. The lecture explores the Canadian connections of America's favourite "cowboy artist", Charles M. Russell (1864-1926). Come out to hear "From Frog Lake to Saskatoon: Charlie Russsell's Canadian Connections" . Free to everyone. Public reception to follow.

Those about to graduate, we salute you! You have earned the right to ascend to the departmental Wall of Fame, where your proud mug will grace the hallowed halls of the seventh floor for all time, or at least until the elevators break down for good. But that can't happen (you being on the Wall of Fame, that is) unless you get your Official History Grad Photo taken.

McMasters Photographers will be taking care of grad pictures for History students again this year. General info and a price list are available in the History Department main office (Arts 721, open 830-1200, 100-4:30). In the office you will also find the all-important sign-up sheet for booking an appointment during one of the following periods:

Tuesday, 14 March 1:00 pm - 5:15 pm
Thursday, 16 March 11:30-1:30
Friday, 17 March 1:00-3:45

On Friday, March 24th, the History Grad Students Council will be holding its annual HGSC Book Pub. For those who are not familiar with the event, we will be getting together for a book auction at Louis'. Besides being able to purchase some new (or old) books, it's also a fun social event. If you have some extra books filling your shelves, please consider donating them to the event. There is a box set out in the Mailroom to collect bookly donations. Tomes of staggering importance, undoubted merit, and richly deserved obscurity are sure to be available for prices even students can afford (unless faculty bid). Don't miss it. Absolutely everyone is welcome.

Irish Newspaper Archives Ltd. is the most ambitious archival project ever launched in Ireland. (Pay attention, this part is not supposed to be funny.) It extends to over 1 million pages of Irish news publications at present. Irish Newspaper Archive Ltd is launching this comprehensive website on behalf of Irish newspaper proprietors and is marketing this site directly to libraries, universities and individuals around the world on a subscription basis. This archive consists of continuous news publications from 1763 up to the current month. A limited free trial is available now. Click here to learn more.

Who says Milton is dead? The English Department's annual Paradise Lost reading marathon takes place this Sunday, March 12. Please consider coming out for part or all of the day. Check out full details and a roster of readers at http://www.usask.ca/english/news/ParadiseLost.htm. And if you are an expert reader (and frankly, if you have been in school since kindergarten, you ought to be a pretty damn good reader by now) then by all means apply to read your bit for the team!

ArchiveGrid (http://archivegrid.org) brings thousands of archives worldwide together, making it easier to find primary source collections--information that's otherwise very hard to track down.
ArchiveGrid is freely accessible through May 31st, and they're getting the word out so that as many researchers can take advantage of this open access period as possible. If additional grants funds or sponsorship are obtained, ArchiveGrid will remain free of charge; otherwise subscriptions will be available for institutions and individuals alike. For now, though, get in there and dig around. If something you seek resides, say, with the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Minnesota, rest assured that ArchiveGrid will find it. Hey, you never know.

Ever wanted to know more about Manitoba? Well, if you did, you need now look no further than the goofily named but otherwise serious Manitobia Life and Times, a major new web resource offering over 122,000 pages of historically significant newspapers and other content including an atlas, books and historic maps -- all free for the clicking at http://www.manitobia.ca.

The U of S Library has been adding yet more online wonders for your scholarly pleasure. All of the items listed below, and many others, are available to U of S users at http://library.usask.ca/eresources/.

Proquest National Newspapers includes major American newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA TODAY, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, Barron's, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Washington Post, as well as a wide selection of regional U.S. papers. (pw: welcome)

Proquest Newstand enables you to design your own custom database from one of the world's largest digital newspaper collections. Select from hundreds of dailies, including local, regional, national, and international titles. (pw: welcome)

Black Thought and Culture is a collection of nearly 800 "monographs, essays, articles, speeches, and interviews written by leaders within the black community from the earliest times to the present. The collection is intended for research in black studies, political science, American history, music, literature, and art." (no pw)