End of a pioneer blog

On January 1, 2003, on a new blog simply entitled "The Diary ofSamuel Pepys," a British web designer named Phil Gyford posted the first entry written by Samuel Pepys in the diary that he began on January 1, 1660.  Gyford has been posting one entry a day from the diary ever since.

Samuel Pepys, fearing blindness, wrote his final diary entry on May 31, 1669. Today May 31, 2012, The Diary of Samuel Pepys blog runs out of entries. And stops.

There have been many other “liveblog” daily recreations:  from George Orwell to World War II to my own siege of Quebec 1759, and to the War of 1812 ones just starting up. Gyford's however, may have been the first to capture the pleasures of this new medium, the historical liveblog, and to spark the blogosphere's imagination with its possibilities.

New Constitutional Organization

Duff Conacher, who became widely known as the coordinator and public face of the Ottawa-based advocacy group Democracy Watch, announces the launch of a new organization, Your Canada, Your Constitution.  Its launching event and reception is at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa next Monday, June 4.  Andrew Cohen, André Pratte, and the authors of the recent (and Donner Prize-winning) Democratizing the Constitution, will speak.  (Do prizes matter? The book is temporarily unavailable from both Chindigo and Amazon, so someone's been buying it)

Save Library and Archives Canada

The campaigns over the national archives and the national library -- to defund and diminish them, on the one hand, and to stand up for them as vital cultural institutions, on the other -- are gathering momentum every day.  I'm going to try and track developments in this war in the coming months, because it looks like being a long one.  And it matters.

For starters, you might follow Save Library and Archives Canada, which aspires to be a clearinghouse for information about the issue. The Canadian Historical Association and its new blog are on the case. This past weekend, the Writers' Union of Canada, in its annual meeting in Vancouver, condemned the archival cuts as an attack on culture (though I don't see that yet on the handsome redesigned website.)

More to come, I hope.

Notes on historical live-blogging

With the War of 1812 live tweeting about to begin (see yesterday's post), I'm reminded of the World War II+70 liveblog that I follow intermittently. It's now just over a thousand days into its long campaign, and boy, does it demonstrate the ebbs and flows of a massive historical event like that war.  Weeks go by with only a grim litany of U-boat sinkings and peripheral skirmishes in places like Madagascar. Then suddenly you see a turning-point looming on the horizon: Japanese preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbour last winter, say.

Right now forces are being assembled for another big turning point: American and Japanese carrier groups are preparing for battle near a mid-Pacific atoll named Midway.

Picture source.

Boring technical note (I hope): From blogspot.com to blogspot.ca

I started this blog on blogger software because in 2004 it was about the only blogging platform I was aware of.  I' remain agnostic about the rival virtues and drawbacks of WordPress, Blogger, and the various other blog programs available, and I've stayed with Blogger because it's never seemed worth changing.

But apparently Google, Blogger's owner, is changing Blogger beneath me.  When I signed up, all Blogger account were dot-com, usually as a URL ending in blogspot.com.  But apparently Blogger is migrating to country domains, and you may begin to see this blog's URL showing up as blogspot.ca.

This should make no difference to your reading of the blog (or, as far as I can tell, to our writing of it either).  And by and large I prefer to be on the dot-ca domain anyway.  But if you are interested in the technical details, here's a FAQ from Google about it.

War of 1812 live Twitter feed loaded and ready to fire

Canadianist and historyblogger Andrew Smith, now teaching in the UK, announces a day-by-day Twitter feed of the events of the War of 1812 (+200 years).

Andrew reports: 

Over the next three years, a team of undergraduates working under my direction will be live tweeting the War of 1812, plus 200. Events will be reported exactly 200 years to the day after they took place….  Our tweets will include links to digitised primary sources related to the event being discussed. (For instance, on 18 June 2012 we will send out a tweet to a scanned image of President Madison’s formal declaration of war against Britain). The aim is to get readers to explore that vast number of primary sources that have been placed online in the last decade. Most of the online primary sources we will link to are materials from US, British, and Canadian archives.

Andrew hopes the twitter feed will help bring “the great wealth of online primary sources about the war to the attention of the public” (and also give some undergraduates experience in digital public history, “while putting some cash into their pockets.”) 

The twitter feed will be @Warof1812Live. The related blog, Warof1812Live is here. Having looked into this kind of project myself and flinched from the amount of work required, I'm delighted to see Andrew applying his organizational skills to this.  I wish his team well and I'll be looking in.

The war starts June 18. Keep your powder dry.


Update, May 30:  Charles Levi tells me that the Archives of Ontario has begun to tweet from the 1812-era diary of Ely Playter, York-area farmer and militiaman @elyplayter1812

[Image: Wikipedia via Warof1812Live.]

The market for history books

I'm often in awe of the range and quality of both historical programming and historical publishing in Britain. The Guardian Online's history-book reviews section is extraordinarily rich and diverse, for instance --  for having so many books to review, and for actually reviewing them.

Paul Lay, editor of Britain's flagship history magazine History Today, has some thoughts regarding a current discussion on the state of history commentary (too many telly-dons?) and the market for history books.

History of grave robbery

Earle Gray. via the latest page on his blog Sandy's Collected Thoughts, offers an apercu about historical changes in the economics of grave robbery. When the American Civil War ended, a valuable source of dissection cadavers for medical schools also came to an end, it seems. Med students had to go back to the more traditional source -- in the cemetaries.

Two cases, marked glass-ware and containing the bodies of two men and five women, packed in snow, were sized by the police on a freight train from Point Levi. They were intended for the McGill College dissecting room, and taken from the cemetery in the vicinity of Quebec [City], the authorities of which city telegraphed to our [Montreal] police about them. 

Maglia rosa

Details here.

Paul Litt on cultural cuts

The library and archival community is up in arms about the recent cuts to its funding by the federal government. Support is coming in from a variety of people and places including this article by a former professor of mine, Paul Litt, at Carleton University. I appreciate his point about the government's cuts to cultural and research institutions while funding massive military history campaigns.

http://www.ipolitics.ca/2012/05/26/paul-litt-canada-lite-our-diminished-nation/

You can keep up with the various campaigns and movements within the library/archival community protesting these cuts by subscribing to these list-servs: Arcan-L or the listserv of the Archival Association of Ontario.

Enjoy!

Modernization and the archives

At Active History Ian Milligan considers whether digitization and online access at Library and Archives Canada are modernization, or just a smokescreen for service cuts.

Nostro ragazzo e il Giro d'Italia

Okay, this blog doesn't usually go all Tour de France-y until July.  But I interrupt May coverage to note that our boy Ryder Hesjedal, the Victoria bike racer who has been carrying the flag in the Tour the last several years (with top 10 and top 20 finishes in recent years), currently stands number 2 in another of the big three European bike races, the Giro d'Italia -- and has held the overall leader's Maglia Rosa at two different stages of the race (first Canadian ever -- there, see, this is a history post). That number two is number 2 with a bullet, as the final stages this weekend look to favour him over the other leading contenders.  He was not supposed to be one of the Giro "big" -- but there he is, according to this story. TV coverage early mornings on some Sportsnet channels, I hear.
Photo: Velonews

CHA in Waterloo

If it concerns you, you probably already know this.  But the Canadian Historical Association annual meeting and conference starts Sunday in Waterloo. Program here.

I'm not attending, but if anyone is into live-blogging events and developments at the conference, I'd be delighted to give them a forum on this blog, since it does not look like the CHA website is set up to do so.   Send notes or contact me here.

As ever, the CHA program is a good guide to what's fashionable in historical scholarship.  It certainly looks like the construction of modernity, memory studies, gender history, and race history remain hot. But there is a fair amount of traditional material too:  New France, political history, diplomatic history... no, not extinct.

Some interesting sessions, judging by the program (and my own interests, no doubt).  A stellar panel on Treaty 9. An extensive series of sessions on Historians and Archives.  A demonstration of a confederation role-playing simulation. A session on applying Geographical Information Systems to historical research.  A look at how the centennial of the War of 1812 was observed in 1912. Active History's mini-conference on "Whose War was 1812, Anyway?"  And, no doubt, Cliopalooza, the president's reception at Wilf's pub on the Wilfrid Laurier campus

History of the monarchy

Future monarchs? 17% of Canadians hope so

In Britain recently, I was impressed by the way that many British people seemed to have adopted the Queen's Jubilee as their own festivity.  It seemed a big event there.  I don't think it is anything like the same here in Canada, despite pro forma efforts to recognize the event.

As if to confirm that comparison comes an Angus Reid poll reporting that about a third of Canadians say it is their preference that Canada should remain a monarchy (and about half of those are rooting for Prince William over Prince Charles -- though surely the point of monarchy is you don't get to choose). Support for an elected head of state stands slightly higher at 37%.  But only 20% say the debate is of no importance to them.

In Britain, supporters of preserving the monarchy outnumber supporters of an elected head of state by four to one: 54% to 13%.

Photo: Globe and Mail