History
Canada had been without a national encyclopedia since the 1957 Encyclopedia Canadiana.
In response, in the 1980s the Canadian nationalist Mel Hurtig launched a project to create a wholly new Canadian encyclopedia with support from Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed. The Editor in chief James Harley Marsh recruited more than 3,000 authors to write for it.
The first edition of The Canadian Encyclopedia was published in three volumes in 1985 (ISBN 0-88830-269-X) and was a Canadian bestseller (150,000 sets sold in six months), and a revised and expanded edition was released in 1988 (ISBN 0-88830-326-2). In September 1990, Hurtig published the five-volume Junior Encyclopedia of Canada (ISBN 0-88830-334-3), the first encyclopedia for young Canadians.
Hurtig sold his publishing company to McClelland & Stewart in May 1991 and with it the encyclopedia. In 1995, McClelland & Stewart published the first digital CD-ROM edition (ISBN 0-7710-2041-4). Today, The Historica Dominion Institute, a not-for-profit foundation, publishes the encyclopedia for free online.
Sadly, when McClelland & Stewart took over The Canadian Encyclopedia archives that Hurtig had left behind in an East York warehouse, thousands of original photographs, recordings, letters and other research materials which had been used in the production of the publication were destroyed, most simply thrown in the trash.
Read more about this topic: The Canadian Encyclopedia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
—Conor Cruise O’Brien (b. 1917)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)