Sunday, April 03, 2016

Talks in T.O.: Wright on Creighton doing history, MacMillan on women doing history


Maclean's reports on Margaret MacMillan, in Toronto to deliver the Bluma Lecture at Toronto Reference Library, April 4, on the question of women doing history
“There’s been a bit of a debate here in Britain,” she says in an interview, “with some saying women don’t write the big biographies or the sweeping histories, and asking why. Yet I’ve never felt there were topics women weren’t ‘allowed’ to approach or that I couldn’t do.”
But
when she was a student at the University of Toronto a half-century ago, “there was one woman among the history faculty, and she soon departed for friendlier climes in the U.S.” Nor did her professors ask MacMillan—as they did the male students—where she planned to do graduate work.
Sold out, but will be available online here.

A week later, Saturday April 9, Donald Wright delivers the Creighton Lecture  (poster here) on the man himself, Donald Creighton, followed by a day-long conference on biography.  That's also in Toronto.

Update, April 13:  Toronto Star: Catherine Porter's followup on the MacMillan lecture.
Celebrated historian Margaret MacMillan swept into town this week to give teh Bluma lecture at the Toronto Reference Library on women who made history and women historians.

I crunched some numbers for the occasion.

Last year, 132 new history books by Canadian authors hit our bookshelves.

Of those, only 34 had female names on their spines. When you remove the three books with no official authors, books written or compiled by women make up just 26 per cent.
(Disclosure:  I'd be one of the 132-34 = 98 (in a series edited by Margaret MacMillan, just to complicate things).
 
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