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Dr. Rob Nelson will spend 22 months in Germany researching how Canada's early growth inspired German expansion
Digital Sources for Victorian Research
Dr. Howsam's Research into Victorian Digital Resources
Sean Morton is the latest History graduate student who has helped me to discover what the Victorians thought about their own past and about world history. Sean is spending the summer of 2010 redesigning my research website to make room for an emerging reference work – a catalogue of entries pertaining to “History in the (Victorian) Periodical Press Online,” which we’ve nicknamed HiPPo.
The history of the book is interdisciplinary, but the majority of research has been on the canonical literary works that everyone knows about. As a historian, I’ve been more interested in other kinds of books. My colleagues in the history of science gave me the idea of looking at history books. Our 
understanding of the way that scientists in the past actually worked with each other and thought about their craft has been transformed, recently, by research into how scientific thinkers interacted with printers and publishers. It struck me that the same thing might be true of history, especially since history became a university-based discipline in the late 19th century, about the same time as book and periodical publishing was expanding. And that turned out to be a smart idea. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded the project, and I found that publishers, and their knowledge of the market among readers for stories about the past, had a lot of influence in the writing of history.
understanding of the way that scientists in the past actually worked with each other and thought about their craft has been transformed, recently, by research into how scientific thinkers interacted with printers and publishers. It struck me that the same thing might be true of history, especially since history became a university-based discipline in the late 19th century, about the same time as book and periodical publishing was expanding. And that turned out to be a smart idea. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded the project, and I found that publishers, and their knowledge of the market among readers for stories about the past, had a lot of influence in the writing of history.Past into Print: the Publishing of History in Britain 1850-1950 was published in 2009 by the British Library and the University of Toronto Press. It represents the first slice of research, mainly in archives and libraries, while this new work on the periodical press is mostly online.
Sean and other research assistants have worked with databases that we have at Windsor thanks to the Leddy Library. ProQuest and Gale-Cengage digitized huge swaths of the Victorian periodical press – not only the well-known reviews, but obscure texts, like magazines for children, sporting journals, and fashion magazines. And history, it turns out, permeated that discourse. My research assistants look for the history, read the article, and then write a little summary of it that will go into the forthcoming “HiPPo” catalogue and, eventually, onto the historybooks website.
The study of the Victorian periodical press is a thriving interdisciplinary academic “industry” – most of it captured by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. Scholars talk about the “hybridity” of the periodicals – the articles were jumbled up together in every issue. When we try to 
understand the nineteenth-century reader’s experience, we have to get our minds around the way in which history, for example, sat right next to a chapter of a novel, and an ad for soap, or perhaps an article about science. he “periodicity” is important too – rather than coming out as a single, long, book, many of the works that we think of as “books” first appeared periodically, week by week or month by month, in a magazine or review or journal.
understand the nineteenth-century reader’s experience, we have to get our minds around the way in which history, for example, sat right next to a chapter of a novel, and an ad for soap, or perhaps an article about science. he “periodicity” is important too – rather than coming out as a single, long, book, many of the works that we think of as “books” first appeared periodically, week by week or month by month, in a magazine or review or journal.Searching isn’t easy, the researchers have found – sometimes they even hint that it’s a little boring – but it can certainly be rewarding. The Girl’s Own Magazine had a fascinating article in 1881 on “How to Study History,” which encouraged teenagers to learn dozens of all-important dates, and every king and queen of England – by teaching those things to their little brothers and sisters and cousins in the nursery at home. It’s a long way from the teaching and learning of history in the twenty-first century.
