This past year has been a long one. While my corporal presence has remained, as an uninvited interloper, on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Esquimalt, and Lkwungen peoples, my intellectual wanderings feel much less grounded even if they are equally trespasses. We have spent too long in the same places. We have spent too long living with grief and anxiety and uncertainty. We have spent too long barred from the places we love (with a small “l”) — our classes, and libraries and archives—and too long with the people we love (with a capital “L”) — our quirky partners, our worrisome and worrying parents, our sullen and sniggering teenagers, and our fretful babies. We have spent the year on a roller coaster of emotions, hoping the ride will end soon. And while the world has suffered, and is suffering still, in asymmetrical ways, historians have carried a particular burden. Indeed, our scholarly sufferings may have been greater than most in this long pandemic year because we have had to live so purposefully in the present, and we are used to living, at least occasionally, in the past.
