Category History

Steady, Steady … Holding to a Prudent Course

Anxious to participate in the crowdsourced initiative to map out Ireland’s historical political and administrative boundaries, I have been carefully and steadily following the stages outlined by Dave Corley in “Mapping Irish Townlands”. As I mentioned last week he has provided superb…

Challenging the Spatial Historian

I have great respect for the Programming Historian, a collaborative and evolving collection of tutorials and hands-on guides to inspire and guide practitioners in the art of doing digital history. The site does’t sugarcoat the one critical aspect of doing digital…

Big Data in Bygone Times

There are some telling lessons for today’s larger organisations by  looking into the history of the organisation.  Big data is not a new phenomenon – it is entirely relative and all too strikingly familiar. Over time individuals and organisations have been…

Travel Writing

The Royal irish Academy hosted William Dalrymple to a sell-out crowd anxious to hear tales of the 1839 retreat from Kabul. Seriously, standing room only and rapt attention! The author is a superb story teller and this is more the…

Tri in the Sky

As I was wandering to the whole food store tonight I heard the droning of an aircraft I couldn’t identify. There was the beat of a helicopter blade, but I could identify the comingled drone of a heavy engine. Then…

McInnis on Exagerated Rumours of the Prairie Wheat Rollercoaster

His talk at the University of Guelph Rural Roundtable yesterday, presented a nuanced and revisionary look at the common story that wartime demand drove Canadian farmers to double acreage devoted to wheat as a result rely on it as a dominant crop resulting in a huge blow to GNP when the price of wheat collapsed after the war. ... In this paper, McInnis questions the conclusion that Canada's rapid economic growth during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century rested on western settlement and the 'wheat boom.' ... The commonly held vision of mass migration to the prairies and the subsequent breaking of new land leading to verdant crops of wheat has gone hand in hand with a picture of Canada as the wheat bowl for the Empire during the time of the First World War.

Ah…Mystery!

When I took a look at the three new mysteries I was reminded what a powerful addition to the teaching of Canadian history that this collection is. The new mysteries: "The Redpath Mansion Mystery", "Death on Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy," and "Death of a Diplomat: Herbert Norman and the Cold War" keep raising the bar of how to effectively present material using the web. ... With the addition of these new modules, the breadth of the site is reaching a point of critical mass and offer a nicely diverse collection from throughout time and geographic area.