Unwritten Histories

The Unwritten Rules of History

Category: The Academic Life (Page 3 of 4)

My Top Picks for the 2017 CHA Annual Meeting

May 28, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Top CHA Picks 2017

 

Who’s excited for the CHA? I know I am! If you remember last year, back when Unwritten Histories was still a tiny little baby blog, I wrote a Beginner’s Guide to the CHA, including my top picks for the conference.  Just because I love you guys, I have rewritten and updated the guide for this year’s CHA! However, this year, my guide is being hosted over at the CHA’s website! Go check it out!

But what about my top picks? You guys seem to think my opinion is important, so of course I am not going to leave you hanging. In this post, I’ll go over the panels that I think will be the most popular as well as the ones that I am planning to attend! Think of it as a history version of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego,” only it’s just me, not some super exciting spy. Just remember that these are just my recommendations, and I wish there was a way to attend multiple panels at once. 🙁

One final note before I get down to business: if you happen to spot me running around at some point, please say hi! I promise, I don’t bite! 😉 I would tell you to look for the short, quiet girl with brown hair and glasses, but since that describes at least half of the female CHA attendees, I’m not sure that it’s so helpful…

 

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Guest Post: Demystifying the ‘Access to Information Request’ Process

May 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments
LAC Headquarters

I. Padraic Ryan, “The headquarters of Library and Archives Canada on Wellington Street in Ottawa, Canada.” CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

Welcome to back to Unwritten Histories! As promised, this week we have a special guest post by Dennis Molinaro. You may know him better as the Canadian historian who uncovered top secret documents showing that the federal government approved wiretapping on Canadian citizens during the Cold War. Being something of an expert on the subject, he has kindly agreed to provide a short guide to submitting ATI Requests, or “Access to Information” Requests, something all historians should know! Enjoy!

 

Dennis Molinaro

Dennis Molinaro holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and his research focuses on the historical use of emergency powers and their effect on society. He is currently completing a second book on Canada’s role in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and its covert Cold War wiretapping programs. He teaches at Trent University.

 

 

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Digital Pedagogy: A History of the Yukon in 100 Objects

April 25, 2017 / / 0 Comments

A History of the Yukon in 100 Objects

Several weeks ago, a new blog started showing up in my social media feeds, A History of the Yukon in 100 Objects. Just FYI, titles like that are catnip for me! After some investigating, I discovered that this project was created by Amanda Graham — a faculty member at Yukon College — for the students enrolled in her course entitled “Northern Studies 200: Research in the North.” The project echoes the BBC and the British Museum’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” but reconfigured for a classroom setting. Graham was kind enough to agree to talk to me about this project so that I could in turn share it with you! I’ve talked previously about the importance of active learning in Canadian history, as well as the possibilities of digital history. However, such activities can often seem intimidating, so I hope that this blog post, the result of that conversation, will convince you that they are worthwhile additions to any classroom!

But first, allow me to introduce Amanda Graham!

A History of the Yukon in 100 ObjectsAmanda Graham, BA, Dipl. NOST MA

  • Coordinator/Instructor, University of the Arctic
  • School of Liberal Arts

Amanda Graham was the first graduate of the college’s Northern Studies program. She joined Yukon College in 1992 as managing editor of The Northern Review, taught northern studies, and served as Chair of Social Sciences and Humanities in the old Arts and Science Division for two terms (1994-1998). In 2004, Graham resigned to coordinate UArctic programs at Yukon College and to teach northern and circumpolar studies and, variously European and Canadian history. She piloted a successful service learning course that linked coursework and reflection to voluteer work with the Arctic Winter Games.

 

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How to Write Scholarly Book Reviews

April 4, 2017 / / 7 Comments

How to Write a Scholarly Book Review

The inspiration for today’s blog post comes from the lovely and talented Dr. Anne Dance, historian and Programme Director of the Parliamentary Internship Programme!

 

Publish or Perish is pretty much academia’s guiding principle. Our careers are, to a large extent, dependent upon our publications (bet you thought it was teaching. Nope!). This is as true for tenure-track professors as it is for sessional instructors. It used to be that graduate students were encouraged to focus on their theses and dissertations rather than on publishing articles. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, and individuals completing their PhD are often advised to have at least one peer-reviewed publication under their belt prior to graduating (though two is better!)

A good starting point is to do book reviews for scholarly journals. However, as is the case for scholarly articles, there are few guides or resources available on how to do this successfully. Most of us end up learning by trial and error, or by following the patterns that can be found in existing book reviews. So to save you the trouble, in this blog post, I am going to walk you through the basics of writing book reviews. While I am approaching this subject as a historian, the basics apply no matter what humanities or social science field you are working in.

 

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Holiday Gift Guide for Historians

November 22, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Gift Guide for Historians

 

As depressing (or not) as it sounds, it’s that time of year again when we show our love for other people by buying them gifts. You may know this time of year as Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, or what-have-you. but you know what it’s really about. 😉 Depending on your personal level of organization, now is the time to start planning and shopping. Especially if you’re a professor, because we all know now is the calm before the storm of finals, final essays, and grade submissions that will keep you busy until at least December 22nd. However, online gift guides for historians, history-buffs, or even academics tend to be limited almost exclusively to books. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want more work for the holidays, not to mention random history books by questionable authors from well-meaning gift-givers. (However, if you do want some book suggestions, check out my previous blog posts on upcoming publications in Canadian history).

So with that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of gift suggestions at roughly six different price points. Now, Gwyneth Paltrow I am not, (though this goop guide,  The Thinker, actually has some reasonable suggestions), so I tried to pick things that I would be happy to receive at any time of the year. While the title says that this list is for historians, and my price points have cheeky academic labels, this list has great suggestions for anyone with an interest in history, including archaeology and anthropology. Also, since most gift guides are American in focus, and the only Canadian one I could find was exclusively coins (seriously???), I’ve tried to include specific recommendations that would appeal to Canadians or are available in Canada, as well as more universal gifts.

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Women’s History Month in Canada: Recommended Readings

October 25, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Recommended Readings in Canadian Women's History

 

Many historians, including myself, tend to overlook various “history months,” mostly because it’s always history month for them. We’re the kind of nerds that do this kind of thing for fun. However, October is Women’s History Month in Canada, and, especially given the recent article by Elise Chenier, Lori Chambers, and Anne Toews, “Still Working in the Shadow of Men? An Analysis of Sex Distribution in Publications and Prizes in Canadian History” on the underrepresentation of female authors in the field, I want to highlight some of my favourite scholarship on the history of women in Canada. Many organizations are getting in on this, and are using the hashtag #becauseofher to spotlight women who have inspired. These are books and articles that I go back to again and again, that I actually enjoy reading, that fired my imagination, and that have shaped my own approach to historical research. I’ve tried to limit this list to women’s history rather than the history of gender and/or sexuality, given the theme of this month. And so, in no particular order, they are….

 

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Managing Historical Research: Secondary Sources

October 18, 2016 / / 5 Comments

Managing Historical Research: Secondary Sources

If there is one topic that goes nearly completely “unwritten” in the field of history, it is managing research. Whether you are writing your dissertation or writing your latest article, managing your primary and secondary sources is extremely important. This is especially the case for historians since the sheer number of sources that we use is enormous.

Back when I was writing my dissertation (in the dark ages of 2009), your options for management were pretty limited. I initially tried printing everything out, but that created mountains of paper that I seldom read once, if at all. I also tried keeping pdfs on my computer, but those were the days before cloud storage, and too many pdfs was a problem. To say nothing of the difficulty of searching for the information I wanted.

However, as I began reworking my dissertation into a book manuscript, I quickly realized that I needed to have a better system. So today, I’m going to talk about the workflow that I’ve developed using reference management software.

 

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Storify of the Second Annual Building Reconciliation Forum

September 29, 2016 / / 2 Comments

I couldn’t attend the forum that’s being held at the University of Alberta yesterday and today, but I’ve been following the live-tweets from the #uofatrc2016 hashtag. It occurred to me that compiling the tweets, as I did for the CHA, would make a wonderful resource. So here you go! Day 1 is completed and can be read below. I’ll post Day 2 later, once everything is completed. I am extremely grateful to all of the live-tweeters and the presenters, and all credit goes to them.

A few notes: I have included every single tweets that was not obvious spam. The story is organized by panel or event, to make it a bit easier to follow. If there is anything you’d like me to change, remove, or add, please let me know and I’d be more than happy to accommodate you.

Read Day 2 here.

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A Guide To Peer-Reviewed Journals in Canadian History

September 20, 2016 / / 28 Comments

Peer-Reviewed Journals in Canadian History

(Updated April 2019)

So I teased this one a little bit in the latest round up. The number one question that I get from students (aside from the classic, “Will this be on the exam?”) is: “How do I tell if this is a peer-reviewed article?” Some professors are bewildered by this question. After all, isn’t it obvious? Unfortunately, most first year students (and many second, third, and fourth year students) have never heard the term before.  So in this blog post, I’m going to provide a (really) short introduction to the concept of peer-review and how to tell when an article is peer-reviewed. I’m also going to talk about a couple of publications that are commonly perceived by students to be peer-reviewed, but are actually not. The remainder of the blog post will be devoted a comprehensive list of peer-reviewed journals that publish articles on Canadian history.

While I created this post with undergraduates in mind, this is also a great resource for new graduate students or scholars who are trying to get their work published. Not only does do I list all of the relevant journals that publish articles on Canadian history, but I also include information about their websites, publication frequency and schedules, their scope, access (whether you can read them for free or not – open versus closed), the languages they accept, and available formats.

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