The War of 1812 Magazine

Issue 1: January 2006

Documents, Artefacts and Imagery

RESEARCH NOTE

The Champlain Society Digital Collection

For more than a century the Champlain Society has been publishing important titles on Canadian history in limited editions. In the autumn of 2005, to celebrate its centennial the Society launched its digital collection on the Internet and this is a matter of celebration for students of the War of 1812 as it makes available rare titles that have been hard to access for some time.

The most important titles in this series are William Wood's Select British Documents of the Canadian War of 1812, originally published shortly after the First World War and very hard to find, even in major libraries. Consisting of three parts in four large volumes, Select British Documents contains approximately 2000 pages of primary source documents from the National Library and Archives of Canada relating to the war -- dispatches, reports, casualty returns, orders on troop movements, intelligence reports, etc. -- and also some personal manuscripts and diaries of the period. Along with E.A. Cruikshank's Documentary History of the Campaigns on the Niagara Frontier, Wood's Select British Documents are the established British and Canadian source titles for the conflict.

Another important title in the series is The Journal of Major John Norton, written in 1816 and first published by the society prior to 1914. John Norton, half Cherokee, half Scot, was the war chief of the Mohawk peoples and his journal, written in Britain shortly after the war ended is, to this author at least, the best memoir of a British officer from the war and certainly the best account of the campaigns and actions of the aboriginal peoples during the war. However, it is much more than that as the war years occupy only about one third of its contents, it is actually a history of the aboriginal peoples of eastern North America based on Norton's extensive travels among them.

The Society also encouraged the publication of document collections. Four titles in the series, edited by experts in their subject area, contain documents relating to the war, both official records and personal manuscripts. These are: Kingston before the War of 1812; the two volumes on The Town of York; The Valley of the Six Nations and The Windsor Border Region.

All these fine titles are now available free of charge on "The Champlain Society Digital Collection" on the Internet.

D.E. Graves   

[ War of 1812 Magazine Issue 1 ]

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