Glasstry news

John Warkentin Went down to the annual meeting of the Champlain Society the other day, always a gathering of the tribe for Torontonians interested in published Canadiana. The Society  discovered in recent decades that its century-old model -- members pay a hundred bucks a year, get a handsomely published book of carefully edited Canadian documents on a chosen subject, and thereby subsidize the dissemination of accessible documentary knowledge  -- just was not working anymore.  Library building among Canadians is not such a big thing anymore, 'tseems.  Proof: plunging membership, plunging revenue, looming collapse. That was a decade ago. This AGM demonstrated that the Society has successfully been re-orienting itself away from dependency on membership dues and into other sources of revenue, along with other vehicles for disseminating historical knowledge. One of those new vehicles is the Society's very active and ambitious podcast Witness to Yesterday .  Listener...

My friends at The Champlain Society run a website crammed with findings, sources, readings, and podcasts about Canadian history. They have just done me the honour of inviting me to cross-post now and then from here to there. So every ten days or so, a post from this blog will go up on the Champlain Society site at well. And the first one selected from here is now there .  Go take a look, and browse around.

The Champlain Society , a member-supported organization that for more than a century has been publishing scrupulously edited Canadian historical documents in handsome editions, has also been expanding into new ventures, not least of which is " Witness to Yesterday ," a podcast series that has been running for some months on the society website, and on iTunes and other podcast sources. It's hosted by Patrice Dutil, Greg Marchildon, and Kenna Turcotte, and while the focus of each episode is a particular historical document, they tend to talk about just about any CanHist topic that takes their fancy: the Canadian Irish, the diary of Lucy Morrison, the birth of the NHL, the religious use of peyote in Canada.  And more. If you need something new in your earbuds....