This talk will discuss some of the arguments forwarded in my upcoming thesis, which uses a bibliometric approach to understand the development of the Canadian historical field since the second half of the twentieth century. Using co-word occurrences and frequency rankings, I seek to understand characteristics and trends in the field, specifically analyzing the use of subject and geographic terms within journal publications. What are popular areas of research in Canadian history? How, and in which contexts, have they evolved? Central to this work is the idea that history is constructed and produced in various ways in the context of contemporary circumstances. These circumstances influence the ways historians draw on primary sources, philosophies, and previous scholarship to inform their research. While it is often evident how the past influences the present throughout history, this research aims to unearth ways in which the present actively informs our ideas of the past.