On 19 October 2009, the Network in Canadian History and Environment will be hosting a workshop at the University of Western Ontario for Canadian history graduate students on writing for a popular audience. Graduate students are invited to sign up for this workshop in order enhance their writing skills and develop a proposal for an article to pitch to a newspaper or magazine editor. There will be a public lecture that evening by MIT’s Harriet Ritvo, president of the American Society of Environmental Historians. Ritvo will be discussing her new book, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago University Press, 2009).
If you are interested in participating, please contact Adam Crymble.
I think that this is a wonderful initiative! I was recently looking that the history shelves in my local big-box bookstore and was struck by the paucity of books on Canadian history. There were plenty of books on US, British, and other histories, however. I think that fact so few books on Canadian history are consumed by the public has something to do with fact so many Canadian historians don’t know how to write for a mass audience. Historians such as Sean Wilentz, Simon Schama, Sir Martin Gilbert, Alan Taylor, Linda Colley, and Sir David Cannadine have shown that it is possible to write for a mass audience while still maintaining scholarly rigour. Sadly, few Canadian academic historians have been able to bridge the gap between scholarly and popular historical writing. (One of the few honourable exceptions to this generalization in Western’s Jonathan Vance, whose books do indeed grace the shelves of mainstream bookstores).
Hat tip to Sean Kheraj.
The Past Speaks 