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:
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“It would be naive to think that peace and justice can be achieved easily. No set of rules or study of history will automatically resolve the problems.... However, with faith and perseverance,... complex problems in the past have been resolved in our search for justice and peace. They can be resolved in the future, provided, of course, that we can think of five new ways to measure the height of a tall building by using a barometer.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)