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.
In 1496 John Cabot traveled what is now called Newfoundland and Cape Breton and claimed the lands on behalf of Britain. Tony Seed looks at the devastation this “discovery” wrought upon Mi’kmaq and Beothuk populations and the invalidity of the doctrine of discovery and the colonizers’ claims of dominion.
Canada Post recently issued a stamp of Lawren Harris’ painting ‘Miners houses, Glace Bay’. Fiona McQuarrie writes about her personal connection and the painting’s significance in terms of Cape Breton labour history.
There have been 12 rockfalls at the Donkin coal mine in Cape Breton in the span of three years. Danny Cavanagh, president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour worries that neither the mine owner nor the Nova Scotia Department of Labour are dealing effectively with safety issues.
Taylor Linloff writes about their experiences growing up in Cape Breton as a rural nonbinary femme on the autism spectrum.
Alex Kronstein reviews I Am Skylar, a short directed by Rachel Bower, about a young transgender woman from Cape Breton.
With Labour Day around the corner, Professor David Frank introduces an essay by the great J.B. McLachlan on the ideal preacher. McLachlan, known first and foremost through the Cape Breton coal miner strikes, is Nova Scotia’s most important labour leader, and he is on fire here.
“In a word, the “Ideal Preacher” is not a soothsayer. “He stirreth up the people,” for which he may get hanged some day, but if he gets his way the disinherited will refuse to remain disinherited.”
An interview with Mary Campbell, who runs the Cape Breton Spectator, and is the kind of journalist many civil servants and politicians dread, the kind that keeps on digging and keeps on asking questions.
This interview is the first in a series. There will be more interviews on journalism in Nova Scotia all through the summer.
NS Federation of Labour president Danny Cavanagh reflects on 100 years of Nova Scotia history. From the day William Davis was shot to today’s injured miners looking for respect and dignity, not much has changed.
Historian Daniel Joseph Samson recently spent a day going through the private library of the early-20th-century Cape Breton labour leader J. B. McLachlan at the Beaton Institute. Turns out McLachlan didn’t just read Lenin and Engels, Samson encountered some books he didn’t expect to see there.