Nineteen Years Later

Nineteen Years Later When the Journal of Canadian Studies made its inaugural appearance in May 1966, its first editor, Denis Smith, wrote: "This Journal has been founded in the belief that the life and history of Canada, still largely unexamined, deserves common study by persons of many approaches and attitudes. The Journal is concerned not only with politics, but with the whole range of Canadian studies, so far as they throw light upon our collective experience and character." Nineteen years and as many volumes later, with a fourth editor now in the elusive "Canadian studies" saddle, those comments continue to be pertinent. While it is no longer possible to talk about the life and history of Canada as "still largely unexamined," the Journal ofCanadian Studies remains committed to publishing as much of the best material it can gather together concerning "the whole range of Canadian studies." In pursuing this goal, the Journal places a large faith in its public, trusting that among the unsolicited articles it regularly receives there will be a sustained variety of contributions to that range, not just in the conventional disciplines associated with Canadian studies - history, politics, geography, sociology, literature, anthropology, and economics - but in such areas as music, architecture, folklore, medicine, law, education, and native studies. Moreover, it remains the Journars constant aim to seek out and publish articles which exercise a truly interdisciplinary approach. As Ralph Heintzman, the Journars second editor, lamented (Vol. 10, Fall 1975, "Editorial"), this is an area in which the Journal has faltered despite its best intentions. To that lament he added his concern that, after ten years, the Journal "remains by and large an academic quarterly written by and for English-speaking Canadians." These are the sorts of problems the editor of a "studies journal" lives with daily in a bilingual country. There are no easy answers. The Great Brain Robbery has emphasized the battlelines between disciplinary conservatives and interdisciplinary advocates. That controversy will not go away, just as the differences between English-speaking and French-speaking Canada must inevitably persist, on many levels. Though the Journal finds far more sympathy and interest now among francophone intellectuals than it did during "the quiet revolution," its editors remain as concerned as Ralph Heintzman was in 1975 that too little material written in French and expressive of French interests is received for consideration. And always there is the struggle for intellectual perspective, the editorial dilemma not only of separating scholarly wheat from chaff but also of deciding which articles are of sufficient general interest and which, despite their quality, are too narrowly disciplinary or precise in focus to meet the Journars mandate. In this difficult area, the Journal has been fortunate in its editors. Denis Smith, Ralph Heintzman, and John Wadland, the former by training a political scientist and the latter two historians, were - and are - men of wide-ranging, cosmopolitan interests, keenly aware of and curious about not only the politically and historically relevant but also the culturally worthwhile. Each in turn has done his Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 20, No. 2 (EM 1985 Summer) 3 part to make the Journal an effective means of publishing as much wide-ranging scholarly work as possible during a given year and of building a circulation which currently includes some 1,400 subscribers, 30 per cent of whom are outside Canada. To John Wadland in particular, the Journal owes its detailed planning of special issues and its development of an increasingly solid financial basis for continuing operations. Notwithstanding the generous continuing support the Journal receives from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Ontario Arts Council, John Wadland's concerns about rising costs of production and the restraints upon granting bodies led him to initiate the development not only of a Journal trust fund but also a fund for the purchase of special operating equipment. Thus, as he stepped down from the editorship to become Chairman of Trent's Canadian Studies Program, he was able to oversee the Journal's purchase of an automatic typesetting machine, the result entirely of the effective fund-raising he had initiated and spearheaded. Through such foresight the Journal is able to think positively about its...