Nuclear Train and Operation Hurricane

Yesterday, 3 October 2012, was the 60th anniversary of Operation Hurricane, which was the first British test of an atomic bomb. Today, 4 October, is the 55th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik. We're also less than two weeks away from the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It is, in other words, a good time to remember how lucky we are to be here.

The Misery and Joy of Doing Recent History

I am an historian of recent events. Well, relatively recent events. Some of the people who participated in the events I study are still alive. In the past day I've been reminded of the statement that real historians don't study anything that has happened in the past X years (where X is a real number between 1 and 100 that is arbitrarily chosen by the speaker of the admonition). I still don't agree with the statement, but I have new reasons for believing that recent history is hard.

Microform Was Ahead Of Its Time (I still hate it)

In the midst of all the career-hunting I've been doing (networking, career counselling, job-searching and job applications), I've been making time to tweak my thesis and turn it into a book manuscript. Fortunately, I chose to write my dissertation as something more book-like than other people seem to think is possible, so I have relatively few things to do before I can submit to a publisher. One of them is using microform - the worst research tool available to historians - to solve a research question posed by my defence committee.

Making Some Changes Around Here

It has been far too long since my last update, but big things are happening, so I thought I'd post a bit of an update.

Dissertation Update #3: Drafted

Finished!

Dissertation Update #2: "The Last Good Year"

I finished a chapter during the week, finally. I zoomed past my intended page count at least a week before that, but it turns out that I couldn't say everything I needed to say about the International Geophysical Year, Diefenbaker, the Glassco Commission, Pearson, the 1964 White Paper on Defence, the Mackenzie Report, the Science Secretariat, the Science Council, Integration/Unification, the Laurendeau/Dunton Commission, the Bird Commission, and how all of these things impacted the Defence Research Board in a mere 50 pages. The last few pages of the Chapter kept stretching out. One more sentence turned into one more paragraph, and one more paragraph turned into one more page.

Where there's smoke, there's fire

Every so often I meet with my supervisor to discuss my progress (or lack thereof) and then we brainstorm ways to get this dissertation done sooner than later. At the end of the summer we met. His suggestion was to take a week off to refresh the batteries and then get back at it. My desire was to rediscover my love of writing and continue working on the dissertation. The compromise was a temporary break from dissertating and a brief focus on tangential, but necessary academic activities like updating my CV and starting this blog. This was moderately successful; I don't blog as regularly as I might like and the dissertation meter doesn't always inch up in terms of raw and comprehensible page count, even while I'm plugging away every day.

Three Questions

Once people learn that I am a graduate student they usually follow up with three questions.

1. What do you study?
1. Which comes with a subliminal request, "please keep the answer short and comprehensible; if I'm actually interested and understand your short answer, then I will ask for more details."
2. When are you going to be done?
3. What do you think you'll do when you're done?

Dissertation Update #1: Ionosphere and Rockets

The current chapter that I'm working on covers the period from 1956 to 1967. It's the tenure of the second chairman of the Defence Research Board, a man by the name of Hartley Zimmerman (full name Adam Hartley Zimmerman, father of Noranda CEO and Member of the Order of Canada Adam Hartley Zimmerman).