Where has pre-Confederation history gone? The CHA and the changing contours of a discipline.

For years now I have talked with colleagues about the rather anaemic pre-Confederation history representation at the CHA. Most of these conversations have been anecdotal in nature, the seemingly self-evident decline represented by the fact that most of us pre-Confed types could fit around a couple of tables at the beer tent. Then about two years ago Thomas Peace began looking for trends using basic word cloud compilations for previous CHA programs to show the distribution of presentations by century (see yesterday’s post for this year’s instalment). Though cursory in nature, Tom’s study confirmed what many of us had long suspected, that pre-Confederation history at the CHA was on the decline, if not on life support.