ACADIENSIS最新文献

{"title":"Slavery and Black Labour in a St. Mary’s Bay Acadian Family, 1786–1840","authors":"Colby Gaudet","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907881","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907881","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Des documents laissés par un missionnaire catholique français et un capitaine acadien de navire marchand qui avait des liens avec les Antilles ont révélé que des Noirs furent réduits à l’esclavage et engagés dans d’autres relations de travail non libres par un réseau d’Acadiens de premier plan. Analysées et mises en dialogue avec des études de portée plus large portant sur l’esclavage dans les Maritimes et le silence de la mémoire collective acadienne, ces sources placent deux chefs de file bien connus de la communauté acadienne aux côtés d’autres propriétaires d’esclaves loyalistes dans les premiers temps de la Nouvelle-Écosse. Les héritiers de ces deux hommes ont signé une pétition adressée à l’Assemblée législative de la province en 1807 pour assurer que des esclaves demeuraient leur propriété, à une époque où, par ailleurs, le sentiment anti-esclavagiste et la politique abolitionniste gagnaient en influence dans l’Empire britannique. Documents left by a French Roman Catholic missionary and an Acadian merchant captain with Caribbean connections have revealed that Black people were enslaved by, and in other unfree and labouring relations with, a prominent Acadian network. Analyzed and placed into conversation with broader studies of Maritime slavery and the silences of Acadian public memory, these sources position two well-known Acadian community leaders alongside other Loyalist slaveholders in early Nova Scotia. The heirs of these two men signed an 1807 petition to the provincial legislature to secure their property in slaves at a time when anti-slavery sentiment and abolitionist policy were otherwise gaining influence in the British Empire.","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"When the Personal is Historical","authors":"Hannah M. Lane","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907886","url":null,"abstract":"When the Personal is Historical Hannah M. Lane (bio) WHETHER CORRESPONDENCE, LIFE WRITINGS, or other personal records, first-person sources have long been a staple for scholars from biographers to historians of cultural production and social practices in particular places. The two books reviewed here–Ruth Compton Brouwer’s All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia and Michael Boudreau and Bonnie Huskins’s Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist1–share a number of common themes with key works in Atlantic Canadian history that primarily use private records. But these two books are distinctive in that they focus on a family during more than one generation and, in Brouwer’s case, during more than one century.2 Many studies based on correspondence and life writings have focused on individuals, key moments, or particular themes. In Atlantic Canada, seafarers and their families3 along with those engaged in other specialized occupations such as medicine4 created life writings shaped by particular kinds of work. Loyalist5 and European settlers wrote about migration experiences shaped [End Page 147] by contemporary forces and events.6 The centenary of the First World War has drawn greater attention to first-person sources from soldiers, military nurses, and families on the home front, inspiring new studies as well as contextualized editions of war diaries such as those published by Island Studies Press or in the New Brunswick Military Heritage Series.7 Studies of outmigration from the region, a subtheme for some family members in All Things in Common, also rely on first-person sources, whether family correspondence or personal recollections.8 In many life writings from Atlantic Canada, work, family, and local community9 combine with broader themes from the history of childhood and the life course10 or even [End Page 148] environmental history.11 And some life writings fuse work and introspection, such as diaries kept by clergy.12 Scholars have often found the cultural practices of writing and preserving diaries in individuals inf luenced by those strands of Anglo-American Protestantism that emphasized the importance of literacy, self-reflection, and the keeping of spiritual histories.13 As Presbyterians or Baptists, the subjects of the two books reviewed here also fit partly within this tradition. Another significant subcategory within the genre of religious life writings are the earliest published life writings of Black people.14 Yet Indigenous peoples, Acadians, and Black people are underrepresented in life writings from earlier centuries.15 Manuscript recollections, published memoirs, and gathered oral [End Page 149] histories are more available from a broader range of social groups for 20th century biographies16 and other studies.17 In earlier centuries, most of these kinds of life writings were produced by men, and men’s diaries combining intellectually or religiously informed reflection with rec","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"127 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"After the Escuminac Disaster: Poverty and Paternalism in Miramichi Bay, New Brunswick","authors":"Ronald Rudin","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907884","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: En juin 1959, la flottille de pêche partie du quai d’Escuminac, dans le nord-est du Nouveau-Brunswick, fut frappée par un ouragan qui causa la mort de 35 hommes. Le désastre d’Escuminac, l’une des pires catastrophes de l’histoire de la province à s’être produites dans le cadre du travail, engendra de grandes difficultés pour les personnes à charge que ces pêcheurs laissèrent derrière eux et dont les ressources étaient limitées. En réponse, des dirigeants de la province, tant laïques que religieux, constituèrent Le fonds de secours du désastre maritime du Nouveau-Brunswick. Les administrateurs du fonds, pour la plupart des anglophones bien nantis, eurent du mal à comprendre les stratégies de survie employées par les familles, qui étaient pauvres et dont bon nombre étaient acadiennes. Abstract: In June 1959, the fishing fleet leaving from the wharf at Escuminac in northeastern New Brunswick was struck by a hurricane resulting in the deaths of 35 men. The Escuminac Disaster was one of the worst work-related disasters in the province’s history, creating a significant challenge for dependents left behind with limited resources. In response, provincial leaders–both secular and religious–created the New Brunswick Fishermen’s Disaster Fund. The administrators of the fund, mostly well-to-do and English-speaking, exhibited great difficulty in understanding the survival strategies employed by families, all of whom were poor and many of whom were Acadian.","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"484 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Located on Land in Nova Scotia”: British Soldier Settlement after the Napoleonic Wars","authors":"William R. Miles, Michael E. Vance","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907882","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907882","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Des soldats britanniques démobilisés s’établirent dans tout l’empire britannique après les guerres napoléoniennes, y compris en Nouvelle-Écosse. À la suite de la guerre de 1812, un groupe d’anciens militaires furent établis le long de la route d’Annapolis pour assurer une voie terrestre entre Halifax et Annapolis Royal. Malgré l’échec global du projet de colonisation, les anciens soldats restés sur leurs concessions purent le faire grâce à leurs liens avec le régiment, à leurs relations familiales et confessionnelles et au soutien de l’État par l’entremise des pensions de retraite de l’armée britannique. En permettant la réalisation des revendications impériales, ces colons soldats contribuèrent à la perturbations des collectivités mi’kmaq de l’intérieur de la colonie. Abstract: Demobilized British soldiers settled throughout the British Empire after the Napoleonic Wars, including Nova Scotia. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, a group of veterans were located along the Annapolis Road to provide a land route between Halifax and Annapolis Royal. Despite the overall failure of the settlement scheme, the veterans who remained on their land grants were able to do so because of regimental links, family and denominational ties, and state support through British Army pensions. In realizing imperial claims, these soldier settlers contributed to the disruption of Mi’kmaw communities in the interior of the colony.","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Great Unravelling: New Histories of Deindustrialization","authors":"Daryl Leeworthy","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907887","url":null,"abstract":"The Great Unravelling: New Histories of Deindustrialization Daryl Leeworthy (bio) DEINDUSTRIALIZATION IS A PROCESS, NOT AN EVENT. Historians have long understood this, although the field of deindustrialization studies is itself of more recent vintage.1 The socio-economic and political implications of colliery closures, the shutting of steelworks, and the loss of cod and lobster fisheries, papermills, and other large-scale primary industries has served as a catalyst for community activism and scholarly activity in Atlantic Canada, as elsewhere, for half a century. Writing in Acadiensis in 2000, as part of the famous debate on region and regionalism, Colin Howell recalled that one of the founding aspirations of the Acadiensis Generation was to make Canadians outside of Atlantic Canada “aware of how capitalism worked to the [region’s] disadvantage”; he also noted that in his Atlantic Canada Studies classes at Saint Mary’s from the 1970s onwards, discussions centred on historical industrialization and contemporary deindustrialization.2 It is, by now, well understood that the latter is experienced from below and, in the words of Christopher H. Johnson, often “engenders quiescence, the internalization of despair.”3 Industrial communities, once so central to the national story as drivers of development, as absorbers of migrants, as modernity embodied in the white heat of production, are pushed to the margins: disregarded, peripheralized, stereotyped, and subjected to every whim of the metropolitan fallacy–part of the false narrative that the big, modern city leads and the [End Page 158] ex-coalfields or ex-steeltowns or ex-papertowns or ex-fishing villages all follow along behind like an Oliver Twist asking for more. No one who has spent any time in a former industrial community can escape the palpable sense of loss that pervades, particularly amongst those older generations who were witness-participants to what was once there. To grow up in such a place, as did I and the writers of the two books under discussion here–Steven High’s One Job Town: Work, Belonging and Betrayal in Northern Ontario and Lachlan MacKinnon’s Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada’s Steel City–is to be rooted in a very particular mode of collective storytelling and of history writing.4 Memory acts as palimpsest. An empty patch of waste land is still called “the pit,” a squared-off parcel, not far away is called “the pony field” because this is where the colliery horses went during their holidays or (if they were fortunate) their retirement, a house holds onto to its tarnished reputation because a former inhabitant once broke a strike. Descendants, whether they live in the stained dwelling or not, retain the black mark of the “scab”; they are never fully trusted and never entirely integrated into the common weal of what is, otherwise, their home, their community. As Lachlan MacKinnon aptly describes in the introduction to Closing Sysco, “The historical moment in whi","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Our Story is Your Story”: Examining Recent Scholarship on Indigenous and Black Commemorations with a Nova Scotian Focus","authors":"Susan Parker","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907885","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Depuis les années 1960, les études muséales et commémoratives ont délaissé les récits axés uniquement sur la colonisation pour favoriser l’inclusion des points de vue des Autochtones et des Noirs. Bien que certains critiques aient condamné l’utilisation abusive que des institutions font de la décolonisation et de la diversité comme des mots à la mode au lieu d’entretenir un dialogue avec les créateurs et leurs communautés, on a observé en Nouvelle-Écosse des progrès considérables au sein des institutions et dans les espaces publics de la province, comme en font foi l’embauche de spécialistes de la commémoration issus des communautés noires et autochtones, la création d’expositions et de musées ou de centres axés sur les perspectives de celles-ci, et la réappropriation d’espaces publics tels que des parcs, des rues et des édifices. Abstract: Since the 1960s, there has been a shift in commemoration and museum studies away from settler-only narratives and towards institutional inclusion of Indigenous and Black perspectives. While some critics have condemned institutional misuse of decolonization and diversity, in Nova Scotia there has been meaningful engagement with Black and Indigenous creators and their communities in the province’s institutions and public spaces. This is evidenced by the hiring of Indigenous and Black commemoration professionals, the creation of exhibits and museums/centres that focus on these perspectives, and the ongoing reclamation of public spaces such as parks, streets, and buildings.","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"201 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Co-editors’ Note","authors":"Erin Morton, Peter L. Twohig","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907880","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907880","url":null,"abstract":"Co-editors’ Note Erin Morton and Peter L. Twohig THE SPRING 2023 ISSUE IS THE FIRST FULLY DIGITAL EDITION OF ACADIENSIS. We face a changing world when it comes to publishing and moving towards more accessible, digital, and open access formats. From a political perspective, the goal of Acadiensis has always been to publish the finest scholarship on the Atlantic region, while making space for new analytical paths. For more than 50 years, Acadiensis has continued to reach new audiences. We open this issue with a research article that examines Acadian histories of enslaving people of African descent. Colby Gaudet examines two prominent Acadian community leaders alongside well-known Loyalist enslavers in the early 18th century, offering an important perspective into the interconnected networks of Acadian and British Empire slavery. William R. Miles and Michael E. Vance’s research article focuses on settler colonialism and British soldier settlement following the War of 1812 along the Annapolis Road, a land route connecting Halifax to Annapolis Royal. The authors demonstrate how these “soldier settlers” contributed to the further disruption of Mi’kmaw communities in the interior of Nova Scotia. Katherine Crooks’s research article analyzes Mina Hubbard’s Labrador expedition to illustrate how her important standing as a traveller and witness to the north was shaped both through her empirical observations and her writing. Crooks demonstrates that this was a “two-part” process that was shaped through her gender and writing aspirations, but also through her negotiation of racial, physical, and moral issues. Ronald Rudin’s research article brings us into the mid-20th century to look at the survival mechanisms of poor Anglo and Acadian families navigating the New Brunswick Fishermen’s Disaster Fund. Using the 1959 Escuminac Disaster as a case study, Rudin shows the paternalistic interest that sharpened linguistic and religious divisions within the impacted communities. Finally, Susan Parker’s research article uses contemporary shifts in Canadian museology to examine the increased inclusion of Black and Indigenous histories in Nova Scotia museums while expanding into public history debates over colonial commemorations. [End Page 4] Hannah Lane’s review essay examines two recent books on life writing in the region–Ruth Compton Brouwer’s All Things in Common: A Canadian Family and Its Island Utopia and Michael Boudreau and Bonnie Huskins’s Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist. Daryl Leeworthy’s review essay looks at the history of deindustrialization in the region against broader scholarship by examining Steven High’s One Job Town: Work, Belonging and Betrayal in Northern Ontario and Lachlan MacKinnon’s Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada’s Steel City. As co-editors, we were deeply saddened by the passing of Peter Kent and Elizabeth McGahan, both of whom were important scholars. As longstanding members of t","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"91 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“I am the first of my kind to see it”: Observation and Authorship in Mina Hubbard’s Performance as Labrador Explorer, 1905–1908","authors":"Katherine Crooks","doi":"10.1353/aca.2023.a907883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aca.2023.a907883","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Cet article porte sur l’expédition réalisée en 1905 par la Canadienne Mina Hubbard à travers le Labrador et la péninsule d’Ungava. Ce faisant, il examine la notion d’explorateur/voyageur nordique non autochtone en tant que témoin. Il considère deux pratiques qui furent essentielles à Hubbard dans la construction et la mise en scène de son identité en tant qu’exploratrice : l’observation empirique et la publication de ses travaux. Les efforts de Hubbard pour se présenter comme une personne digne de témoigner des régions nordiques, en compétition avec ses guides des régions sauvages, mettent aussi en relief les types d’identités de race, de classes sociales et de genre qui étaient exclus de l’entreprise d’exploration des régions nordiques au tournant du siècle. Abstract: This article focuses on Canadian Mina Hubbard’s expedition through the Labrador-Ungava Peninsula in 1905. In so doing, it examines the notion of the northern non-Indigenous explorer/traveller as witness. It considers two practices that were essential to Hubbard in the construction and performance of her identity as an explorer: empirical observation and authorship. Hubbard’s efforts to present herself as a reliable northern witness, in contest with her wilderness guides, also highlight the kinds of racialized, classed, and gendered identities that were excluded from the work of northern exploration around the turn of the century.","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"484 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135532840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Environmental Historiography of the Maritime Peninsula","authors":"B. Payne","doi":"10.1353/ACA.2016.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ACA.2016.0000","url":null,"abstract":"IN HIS 2014 PUBLICATION Second Nature: An Environmental History of New England, Richard Judd referred to the region stretching from Long Island Sound to the Gaspé Peninsula as a “landform known as the Maritime Peninsula.”1 Archaeologists use the term “maritime peninsula” to illustrate connections between pre-European-contact Native people in what is today New England and Atlantic Canada, and this is the context in which Judd used the term in his book. Earlier, in the introduction, Judd described New England as a “giant peninsula,” although without reference to Atlantic Canada (2). In the introduction to their collection of essays, Land and Sea: Environmental History in Atlantic Canada, Claire Campbell and Robert Summerby-Murray write: “For some time, environmental historians have argued against writing history within the confines of national boundaries . . . . Some scholars have suggested that we look not to nation-states but to bioregions.” Pointing to their own region, the authors note that “Atlantic Canada itself is a wonderful example of the artificial nature of political boundaries. Originally an invention of bureaucratic convenience, the region has rarely been anything approaching an organic alliance.”2 Such statements build upon a large collection of scholarly work from across disciplines that have identified New England and Atlantic Canada as a borderland – a region of shared cultural and social history and economic connections that are somewhat artificially divided by the political border separating the United States and Canada. Although this analytical framework has faded somewhat in recent years, with the most recent edited collection of essays utilizing it appearing in 2005 – Stephen Hornsby and John G. Reid’s New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons3 – it still retains important methodological guidance for environmental historians. Among all sub-disciplines of history, environmental history might be the least dependent upon contemporary political borders. Yet even here most of our work still struggles to jump that border. Campbell and SummerbyMurray note the importance of balancing this approach with an appreciation for the uniqueness of locality: “Environmental historians must be true to these particular places, the distinctive features of the local” (4). By comparing local stories across a bio-region, or a borderland, the editors argue that “these common sensibilities create a regional sense of place” (4). But their regionalism is confined to Atlantic Canada. Within the essays themselves there is no breaking of international borders – only","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"45 1","pages":"163 - 177"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2016-05-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/ACA.2016.0000","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66749321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Who matters? Public history and the invention of the Canadian past","authors":"F. Pannekoek","doi":"10.11575/PRISM/29883","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/29883","url":null,"abstract":"THERE IS NO LONGER ANY REAL DISPUTE that the past, as distinct from traditions, is an invention based on a careful selection of apparently empirical evidence. Historians now accept that there is no “ultimate” truth; there are many perspectives or narratives, all valid and all exploring new realities and new truths. The current multi-streamed discourse in history, however, is fraught with impossible challenges for public historians. Some narratives focus on a heritage of achievement and triumph. Others will focus on exploitation and marginalization, which will in turn be denied by the narratives of the exploiters. Not all narratives can be accommodated equally without creating problems of imbalance or a diet of pablum. Such is the conundrum of the Canadian historian who would like to achieve that pleasant Canadian nirvana — consensus. The “invention” of the past has been the explicit subject of a significant body of work in recent years, much of it in the British or American context. The two most frequently cited books have provocative titles: The Invention of Tradition and Mickey Mouse History.1 Until recently, little similar work had been undertaken in the Canadian context, with the exception of excellent reviews of Canadian museums in the Journal of American History and some articles in journals such as Acadiensis.2 Recently several books have paid attention to this topic in a uniquely Canadian way. These include Donald B. Smith, From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (Saskatoon, Western Producer Prairie Books, 1990), Barbara Lawson, Collected Curios: Missionary Tales from the South Seas (Montreal, McGill University Libraries, 1994), Norman Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1997) and Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). There are also two useful collections of essays and statements relevant to the field: Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds., Creating Historical Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1997) and Thomas H.B. Symons ed., The Place of History: Commemorating Canada’s: Past Proceedings of the National Symposium held on the Occasion of the 75th Anniversary","PeriodicalId":51920,"journal":{"name":"ACADIENSIS","volume":"29 1","pages":"205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2000-03-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64322690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}