www.alittlehistory.com
About The Author
Motivation:
While we were growing up in Drumheller during the 1950's, the radio brought us "The Lone Ranger" and "The Cisco Kid," fictional stories about the "Wild West" in the United States. Also, every week we went to a Saturday afternoon movie where we quite often saw more stories about the American Wild West. The stories became more real to us when we acted them out in our play activities. "Custer's Last Stand" and "The Battle of the Alamo" were extremely important events in our world.
As I got older I became more concerned with reality, with the facts, and became critical and irritated by the versions of history that Hollywood created. With time, my interest in what actually happened in the Canadian West developed, and I was soon pleased to find that the facts are not boring.
Experience:
When I became serious about writing historical summaries, my history writing experience only included creating a booklet on family history, plus essays for history courses. Minimal experience meant that I had to adapt in a major way in order to be adequate, to spend excessive time doing research and rewrites. More than a decade later, as my Web site began to draw steady traffic, I reevaluated my lack of experience and qualifications and then declared to myself that I had achieved the status of a "fake historian."
Education:
A BA which included courses in history, English, sociology, drama, and psychology.
How alittlehistory.com was developed:
My first objective in writing history, was to discover if it was possible to select some supposedly boring Canadian history and present it in an interesting, easy to understand story format, so that the average person would find the facts to be enjoyable.
So in 1985, while creating the first drafts of Riel, Dumont, and the 1885 Rebellion, I used the following strategy: create an extensively researched summary account, and then sprinkle in carefully selected, relevant, meaningful, high interest facts. At this point, the story targeted Junior High school students and the content was molded so a relevant sketch could appear on each page. Although the results seemed impressive, my submissions to a number of publishers were turned down. Then, to make the account more authoritative, I reviewed the sources and added a set of notes. Meanwhile, bits of humor crept in making it more unique, and therefore making the marketing process more complicated and risky. So after more unsuccessful submissions were made, Riel, Dumont, and the 1885 Rebellion wound up abandoned in my bottom desk drawer, still unpublished.
In 1997, while creating a personal Web site, I found that my files already included many items that were suitable for posting. So, I posted the account of the Metis half of the Rebellion, my 1955 personal diary, some family history which was written in 1983, and edited versions of my Grandmother's diary and memoirs. Towards the end of 2000, I was making plans to tie it all together, to create a unified Web site with a unique domain name. Finally, after adding a few more files, a network of information was all posted here, all in one big chunk.
Other Projects:
- Photos from my home town: Drumheller, "The Dinosaur Capital of Canada".
- Photos of where I have lived: Calgary, Alberta where you can attend the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede.
- Photos of where I now live: Edmonton, Alberta where you can attend Klondike Days.
- Photos of an interesting area to hike: Horseshoe Canyon, just west of Drumheller.
- Illustrated children's dinosaur stories: the Doomore and Chipper stories.
- A not too serious look into The Future.
- For those who want to learn more
about present day Western Canada,
try this thumbnail photograph file
which lets you access different
locations with the aid of a map:(westerntour.com).
Questions? Suggestions? Comments.
Use this link to contact the author.
Experimenting with a Web Cam in December, 2001.
(but was seldom online).
At the time of posting this item, I was attempting to develop
view Webcam
the potential of this Web site in every way. So I experimented
with a Web cam, to add an extra dimension to this new media,
to take it to another level. It was a nice idea, but in 2007 I
turned to creating video at youtube.com, video which can
now be accessed from thumbnail photos, located half way
down the file on The Future.
to:
Counter since Feb. 20, 2001:
(Up to Sept. 5/07: 2550 hits; reactivated Dec. 1/07. Total to Feb. 22, 2017 was 3,294.).
