Historian David Frank on Miners’ Houses, the painting of a Glace Bay townscape by Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris, now on a stamp. Harris visited Glace Bay in 1925, the same year striking miner William Davis was shot by company police. “Glace Bay is really no town, but a number of huddles of box-like houses around scattered coal mine mouths. . . . It’s drab and dreary and bedraggled even on a sunny day . . . “, Harris wrote at the time.
Historian Martha Walls takes a closer look at the establishment of the Shubenacadie Residential School as an effort by the state to deflate Indigenous People’s resistance in the region.
Over and over Black people tell of racism in Nova Scotia, and then there are the stats, but still the message isn’t getting through. Historian Jill Campbell-Miller on the origin of this reluctance to accept that racism is for real, and how a knowledge of history can counteract this disbelief.
Many different groups have challenged Mi’kmaw sovereignty over A’Se’k and the area around it, and for centuries, the Mi’kmaq have resisted and protected their homeland. Historian Colin Osmond describes how today’s Mi’kmaq protectors of A’se’k walk in the footsteps and shadows of generations of Mi’kmaq who have done the same.
Historian Nolan Reily chronicles how one hundred years ago workers in Amherst, Nova Scotia, —women and men, union and non-union—shutdown the town’s industries. Even the mechanics in the local garage went on strike. It was a community strike, just like the one that had started four days earlier in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Historian and Halifax Poet Laureate Afua Cooper on the lack of visible recognition of Black history in Halifax, and why some kind of memorialization of the many contributions of the Jamaican Maroons would be a good way to start filling that void.
This article by historian Lachlan MacKinnon was originally published on September 18, 2014 on the excellent ActiveHistory.ca site. We re-publish this now three-year old article because the gap between mill workers and Pictou County environmentalists the author identifies if anything has widened in the last three years. “Environmentalists must confront the fact that structural power is also wielded against other marginalized groups, such as industrial workers facing the threat of deindustrialization. In this recognition, we can hope to transcend narrow categories such as worker and environmentalist and achieve a broader-based support for systemic change.”
Historian Elliot Worsfold on Cornwallis and similar “renaming” debates: “historians should remind the public that these spaces, be they literal or ideological, have been known by many names and by many people throughout Canada’s history. Reclaiming those spaces through removing names, statues, or other symbols is more often a return to that place’s historic roots than those decrying the erasure of history often realize.”