Canadian Journal of History was founded to give a voice to those historians in Canada who are not historians of Canada--Hugh Johnson's non-nationalist explorers of unusual and the Over the years, the editors and most members of the editorial board have been Canadians (by birth or adoption) who do other kinds of history than Canadian. Over time, a slowly growing number of authors and, especially, book reviewers have come from countries other than Canada. To facilitate the study by Canadians of the widest possible range of geographical subfields remains central to the mission of the journal, as does the goal of serving as a point of contact between Canadian scholars and their colleagues in countries other than Canada. Every historian of a country other than her or his own has a story connected with the choice of field. Often, like mine, it is a story of fortuitous happenstance. I began my graduate career studying eighteenth-century North America. Somehow my master's thesis became The Land Policies of Thomas Hart Benton (the senator, not the artist). On the advice of my advisor I then abandoned American history (too many historians, too little history) and switched to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European history. I went to Loyola University in Chicago for doctoral studies because I had received a fellowship. Unfortunately, the person there in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century European history and I saw the world very differently. I became a historian of institutions, specifically the French Estates General of 1614, mainly to stop a faculty member from constantly bugging me about what I was going to do. In time, I became fascinated with the topic. My attempts to find details about the lives of the now obscure deputies to the Estates General and to identify election and voting patterns turned into a fascination with trying to resurrect individuals and groups of individuals who make only fleeting appearances in historical records. Eventually my study of the Estates General of 1614 appeared as a book. (1) During the rest of my career I sampled French, Canadian, German, English, and Irish history. I published articles on the history of religious orders in England and France, as well as French foreign policy, social structure, and religion; I wrote two family histories (I know, real historians do not do that), edited the writings of Hilda Neatby and wrote the history of the University of Saskatchewan. Finally, I returned to French history and, with the assistance of Malcolm Greenshields, wrote a detailed history of ecclesiastical reform in France. (2) At the age of seventy-one, after eight books and thirty-some articles, I think I have only one book left in me--a study of the many varieties of religion that existed in early modern Normandy--which I plan to call Catholicisms of Coutances. Unhappily, that leaves unfinished two topics I had planned to pursue further. work I have done so far on these topics--which I now leave to others--serves as an example of the type of research opportunities that await those willing to explore the unusual and exotic. topics in question are the lives of the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross in Paris and in London. members of this small, undistinguished group are usually known in English as the Crosiers (though in England they were called the Crutched Friars). In general terms, the potential interest of these two studies is that the Crosiers were members of a small order, never important, usually run of the mill, often in need of reform. By studying them one can learn the state of religious life at the bottom. This provides a gauge to use in assessing the lives and influence of religious and clergy in general. To know a monastery or convent, a historian must know the world around it and not only the world broadly understood. One must come to know the immediate milieu--the neighbourhood. In the process one can learn much about the lives, careers, and even the ideas of the people who lived in that neighbourhood. …