Alan MacEachern The University of Western Ontario The following was my contribution to a 2010 Canadian Historical Association roundtable, “So What IS the Story? Exploring Fragmentation and Synthesis in Current Canadian Historiography.” In it, I tried to a) graphically illustrate the marginalization of Canadian historical scholarship, b) argue why demography is likely only to make this problem worse, and c)… Read more »
By Jo McCutcheon Thinking about my work as a public historian and some of the recent and on-going discussions about training in history generally and doctoral training specifically have made me think about the skills and opportunities I try to provide to both students and professional consulting researchers.[1] Mixing academic teaching with entrepreneurialism has given me the opportunity to work… Read more »
Budget cuts at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government across the country have targeted cultural and heritage institutions, threatening the integrity of the capacity of Canada to maintain an adequate understanding of its collective past. Just as Margaret Atwood helped mobilize opposition to proposed cuts to Toronto libraries, the challenge for active historians who oppose such measures is to make their opposition public.
Ma’s grinning. “We can do anything now.” “Why?” “Because we’re free.” – Emma Donoghue, Room (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2010). Free of “Room” – a locked garden shed with a single skylight, the primary setting of Emma Donoghue’s award-winning fiction novel, Room. In Room, Donoghue brings readers into Jack’s world, an eleven by eleven ‘cell,’ that he shares with Ma and a… Read more »
Last Wednesday I posted an essay by Dr. Patricia Daley that I first read on an H-Net Listserv, H- Urban. This is one of the hundreds of free email lists facilitated by the H-Net organization. Long before academic blogs, websites, and Twitter accounts, these H-Net lists were a key form of electronic communication among academic historians (and related disciplines). These… Read more »
Toronto Public Library is pleased to announce the 2011 History Matters series. This year these lectures focus on two themes—labour and environmental history in the Toronto area and beyond. Part of TPL’s Thought Exchange programming, these lively talks will give the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which… Read more »
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/podcasts/Wikipedia.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadI started editing a few Wikipedia articles lately. While I’ve been interested in the project for years, I never seemed to have the time to become involved. Before this past week, I had created an account and fixed a few small details on pages directly related to my expertise, but I never added much… Read more »
By Ioana Teodorescu You may have heard of it. Or not. Its official title is Reading Artifacts Summer Institute at Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa and this is the third year when it happens. Jaipreet Virdi gave it a serious review in June last year on this very blog and I totally agree with that. I won’t repeat what… Read more »
R.W. Sandwell, University of Toronto Ruth.sandwell@utoronto.ca Collectively, historians’ work consists of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing a vast edifice of knowledge about which generalizations and synthesis will vary according to the purposes of the historians and the audiences to whom they are directing any particular manifestation of their work. Historians tend to identify their work exclusively with their purposes and audiences… Read more »
Adele Perry, University of Manitoba[1] The terms synthesis and fragmentation both circulate fairly widely in casual scholarly conversation, the former usually negatively and the latter positively. To invoke either synthesis or fragmentation is to presume an object, one that it is either broken apart or brought together by the historian. Few if any historians are on a search for a… Read more »
