The Canadian Encyclopedia

The Canadian Encyclopedia

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The Canadian Encyclopedia

Cover of 2000 edition

The Canadian Encyclopedia is a source of information on Canada. It is available online, at no cost. The Canadian Encyclopedia is available in both English and French and includes some 14,000 articles in each language on a wide variety of subjects including history, popular culture, events, people, places, politics, arts, First Nations, sports and science.

The website also provides access to the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, The Canadian Encyclopedia Junior Edition, Maclean's articles and Timelines of Canadian history.

History

Canada had been without a national encyclopedia since the 1957 Encyclopedia Canadiana. In response to this Mel Hurtig, a staunch Canadian nationalist, launched a project to create a wholly new Canadian Encyclopedia. Editor in chief James Harley Marsh recruited more than 3,000 authors to write for it. The first edition of The Canadian Encyclopedia was published in three volumes in 1985 (ISBN 0-88830-269-X) and was a Canadian bestseller (150,000 sets sold in six months), and a revised and expanded edition was released in 1988 (ISBN 0-88830-326-2). The company later published The Junior Encyclopedia of Canada (ISBN 0-88830-334-3).

In 1995, the first CD-ROM edition was published (ISBN 0-7710-2041-4). Currently the Historica Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation, publishes the encyclopedia for free online.