By Lachlan MacKinnon On Labour Day Weekend, Sydney, Nova Scotia celebrated the opening of the Open Hearth Park on the remediated site of the former steel plant with a series of musical performances, a gourmet street fair, and a procession of former steelworkers through the park. The celebration, titled “Stronger than Steel,” revealed some of the ways that the experiences of… Read more »
By Lachlan MacKinnon Two weeks ago, David Zylberberg wrote on ActiveHistory of the political responses to deindustrialization in Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom. In expressing the relatively divergent implementation of industrial policy in these areas, he concludes that these examples “should serve as a warning against [policies of austerity] in Europe and beyond.” Today, with a new Liberal government… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Bernard.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadOn Thursday February 7 Professor Wanda Thomas Bernard delivered this lunchtime lecture to the Lifelong Learners program at Acadia University. Bernard’s lecture builds on her work with Judith Fingard on Black Nova Scotian domestic workers in the mid-twentieth century. In this lecture Bernard discusses the hardships these women faced and the complex worlds in… Read more »
By Thomas Peace I may be cursed. Everywhere I move flooding seems to follow. Last fall, my family and I moved to White River Junction, Vermont. On an apartment hunt, my father and I arrived in the Green Mountain State immediately following Hurricane Irene. Pulling into Rutland we were told that there were no roads open that crossed the state… Read more »
By virtue of its very lack of polish, commitment to community artifacts, and desire to treat different social groups fairly, Ottawa House presents more than a frozen past. It is not perfect, but it shows an active past, where goods moved along a range of trade networks to reach destinations far from their starting points.
The Halifax Regional School Board’s decision to rename Cornwallis Junior High fits into a long Nova Scotian tradition of changing names with evolving social and political conditions in Nova Scotia.
Paul Bennett, director of Schoolhouse Consulting, reviews McKay and Bates’s ‘In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia’