Acadiensis

This keynote was originally delivered at the CHA Conference in Charlottetown and posted on the CHA website. Shared with permission.

Edward MacDonald, University of Prince Edward Island
Canadian Historical Association, Charlottetown, June 2026
©Edward MacDonald
(Please do not reproduce without permission from gemacdonald@upei.ca)

PREAMBLE

May I offer you, as a native-born Islander, a welcome to Prince Edward Island, the first time that the CHA has graced our shores since 1992 and the first time that the ACS has met here since 2009.

I confess that when I was approached by Andrew Nurse to make some remarks at the CHA this year, I nearly said no. After all, I said, what has the likes of me, a slight sage from a small place, to say to the likes of you? What qualification do I have, aside from being old and so, allegedly wise. My mind immediately went back to my first class in graduate school at Queen’s in the fall of 1978. I was 20 years old and a long way from home. I left that day with two words I couldn’t define banging around in my head: “declension” and “paradigm.” “I do not belong here!” I thought.

I was probably right. Just the same, I stuck it out and here we are. But, the question I asked Andrew Nurse remains valid: what wisdom do I have to offer? Only the kind you can buy at any corner store. So, I’ve decided it is safest for me simply to remind you today of things that you already know. Then we can both feel smart!

I began with that reference to myself as a native-born Islander because, well, I am, but also, because it is the key to what I would like to rehearse with you. I am an historian of place, and that has furnished me with some insights into the significance of place when it comes to the practice of history. I would like to begin with that.[1]

And being an historian of place in a very small place has meant that I have ended up becoming – in scale, at least – a public intellectual. The media ask me from time to time to provide insight into current events by tracking their history, and my school has prevailed on me to help populate their Facebook page with some vignettes from the Island’s past. I also began my career outside of academia, as a public historian, working for a museum and, because it didn’t pay very well, moonlighting as a tour guide. Those experiences fed some pre-existing notions about the place of the historian in the larger society. In the second part of my address, I’d like to talk a little about that because I am convinced that we have a critical – although delicate – role to play.[2]

Afterwards, I expect, you can put ME in MY place.

We are pleased to announce the release of Acadiensis, Vol. 54, No. 2!

In this issue Greg Mitchell and Amanda Crompton probe fragmentary archival sources to bring to the surface stories of Labrador Inuit enslavement, while David Tough comparatively examines 1960s media and political responses to the communities of Brantville, New Brunswick and Keelerville, Ontario that were labelled “poverty capitals.” In a review essay examining post-war Atlantic Canadian art history, Andrew Nurse analyzes the connections of art, culture, and economy as revealed through the publications of Wabanaki Modern, Mary Pratt, and The Cause of Art. Book reviews examine publications covering topics of literary history, Black history, and Acadian history, including critiques of Billy Johnson’s Publishing Place (by Greg Marquis), Tony Colaiacovo’s Black History of Nova Scotia (by Titilola Aiyegbusi), Michelle Landry, Dominique Pépin-Filion, and Julien Massicotte’s L’État de l’Acadie (by Caroline-Isabelle Caron),  and Hilary Doda’s Fashioning Acadians (by Laura Oland).

For any questions or to subscribe, please visit our site or send us a message at acadnsis@unb.ca.

Nous avons le plaisir d’annoncer la sortie d’Acadiensis, vol. 54, n^o 2 !

Dans ce numéro, Greg Mitchell et Amanda Crompton dépouillent des archives fragmentaires pour mettre au jour des récits de l’asservissement d’Inuits du Labrador, tandis que David Tough effectue une comparaison de la façon dont les médias et des responsables politiques des années 1960 percevaient les localités de Brantville, au Nouveau-Brunswick, et de Keelerville, en Ontario, considérées comme des « capitales de la pauvreté ». Dans une note critique portant sur l’histoire de l’art au Canada atlantique dans l’après-guerre, Andrew Nurse analyse les liens entre l’art, la culture et l’économie tels qu’ils se révèlent à travers les publications Wabanaki moderne, Mary Pratt et The Cause of Art. De plus, le numéro comprend des comptes rendus critiques d’ouvrages qui traitent de sujets liés à l’histoire littéraire, l’histoire des Noir·es et à l’histoire acadienne, soit Publishing Place de Billy Johnson (par Greg Marquis), Black History of Nova Scotia de Tony Colaiacovo (par Titilola Aiyegbusi), L’état de l’Acadie de Michelle Landry, Dominique Pépin-Filion et Julien Massicotte (par Caroline-Isabelle Caron) et Fashioning Acadians de Hilary Doda (par Laura Oland).

Pour toute question ou pour s’abonner, veuillez visiter notre site ou nous envoyer un message à acadnsis@unb.ca.

The Editorial Board of the Journal of New Brunswick Studies/Revue d’études sur le Nouveau-Brunswick (JNBS/RÉNB) is pleased to announce that a special issue of the Journal: Abortion Pathways and Abortion Obstacles: Accessing Reproductive Healthcare in the Maritime Provinces, guest edited by Dr. Tobin LeBlanc Haley (UNB, Saint John) and Dr. Jula Hughes (Lakehead University) is now available.

Here is the link to the special issue: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/JNBS/issue/view/2471

Please share this link with your various networks.

The David Alexander Prize is awarded annually for the best essay on the history of Atlantic Canada written in a course by an undergraduate student in any university. Dr. Alexander (1939-1980) was one of the leading scholars of economic and maritime history in Atlantic Canada, and he is remembered for his contributions to Acadiensis, his support of students, and his love of the sea.

If you have a student who wrote an excellent paper on Atlantic Canadian History please submit it for consideration.

The deadline for submissions is June 30th, 2026. Entries may be submitted by email attachment to acadnsis@unb.ca, or by post to:

Alexander Prize Committee
c/o Acadiensis
Campus House, University of New Brunswick
PO Box 4400, Fredericton, NB E3B 5A3

Please click through for more information about the David Alexander Prize.

Andrew Nurse

All in a Woman’s Day’s Work is a new exhibition launched by the Boultenhouse Heritage Centre in Sackville, New Brunswick. It is not a female supplement to Makers and Sellers, another new display that looks at work in the Tantramar region. It is better seen as a stand-alone exhibitiondepicting women’s paid and unpaid labour. It continues the work of Tantramar Heritage Trust, which owns Boultenhouse and one other regional museum. Like other museums in New Brunswick, it stands to be affected by provincial budget cuts, although it may have escaped the first round. This exhibition shows why those cuts are a bad idea. Feminism, Susan Sontag once commented, both created, and carried with it, its own forms of memory. All in a Woman’s Day’s Work highlights how gendered memories and historical processes are an inherent, but often neglected, element of local histories.

All in a Woman’s Day’s Work owes a lot to family traditions. Its displays are built around clothes, tools, images, and decorative arts and the knowledge they embody. As with Makers and Sellers, the images are particularly fascinating because of the remarkable efforts the Trust has made to identify each person they depict. This is possible, I was told during a visit to Boultenhouse, only through the active collaboration of community members. Said differently, All in a Woman’s Day’s Work is a representation of the past that is co-created by Boultenhouse and the community. It is a working model of shared authority. As the Trust gains new knowledge from the community, it alters display labels to reflect that. The objective is something more than accuracy. The aim is to depict the the past in an intensely human way. Be restoring names to old photographs or adding histories to the objects in its collection, the Trust simultaneously restores identities to the past. This is particularly important for the public history of women’s work, which can all too easily be cast in an abstract light.

Joshua MacFadyen, Abigail Fenton, and Fabian Wegner

Introduction

The UPEI lab for Geospatial Research in Atlantic Canadian History (the GeoREACH Lab) recently added a new layer of aerial photographs to GeoPEI: the Prince Edward Island Historical Map Viewer platform.[1] GeoPEI already contains aerial photos from 1935, 1958, 1968, 1990, 2000, and 2020, offering historical views of the entire province over nine decades. However, these new “oblique aerial” photos, taken by pilot Paul Sharpe between 1947-1952, offer a unique perspective. Unlike the top-down view, Sharpe’s oblique photos were taken from an angle, offering “bird’s eye view” or panoramas of the landscape, often at high resolution. Many places have a handful of obliques in their collection, but with over 500 images covering most parts of Prince Edward Island this resource will greatly help historians understand society, environment, and place in Atlantic Canada in the mid-twentieth century.

The photographer, Eric Paul Sharpe, was a skilled pilot, and during his flying career, he served in the Second World War, he flew for Maritime Central Airways, and he later operated his own business, Paul’s Flying Service in Charlottetown, PEI. Sharpe served with the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Second World War, flying Beaufighters and Spitfires during the Battle of Britain as a night fighter with the 410th Squadron. He also served with the 164 Transport Squadron based in Moncton, NB, and he was later transferred to Central Aircraft in London, Ontario, to test and ferry the famous Mosquito bomber.

After a short period flying for Maritime Central Airways, Sharpe founded Paul’s Flying Service, the first licensed flight school in the Maritimes. His business offered passenger transport, aerial photography, and daily newspaper delivery to 25 rural post offices. He ran the company from 1946 to 1952, building one of the Atlantic region’s leading flight schools. In 1952, he sold it to a former student, and Paul and his wife Norma Eleanor Osgood moved to Alberta and continued raising their family there. Paul retired from flying and started a new career in land transportation. Over his 15 years as a pilot, Sharpe flew 44 aircraft types and logged over a million miles and 6,017 hours in the air.^[2]

In 2025, members of Sharpe’s family saw the work of the GeoREACH Lab and offered to share this impressive collection of oblique aerial photographs with us. We digitized the photographs and geolocated all of them, creating a geospatial index map which is now visible as a layer on the GeoPEI website. Clicking on each dot will produce a medium-resolution scan of the photograph which may be downloaded.

The Paul Sharpe collection is made up of over 500 photographs and negatives taken between 1947 to 1952. His field book recorded a basic description of each image, which was often useful for geolocating each photograph. Because they cover so many rural and urban environments across much of the province, these photos add high-resolution imagery from a period when most air photos are too grainy to show details at the street and household scale. In this article, we focus on the task of digitizing, dating, and geolocating around 420 prints from the Sharpe collection.

The photography wing of Paul’s Flying Service peaked in his first two years, with 177 images in 1947 and about 200 in 1948. Early work emphasized tourism sites. However, by 1948 he had shifted to rural properties, photographing more than 55 farmsteads which he then attempted to sell to the occupants. Production dropped in later years, likely due to his growing passenger flights, which included service to the mainland. His later photos differed from earlier work, focusing on industrial activities, ships, and even a funeral. The near-vertical shots from this period suggest a change in style in his photography. This article showcases a small selection of his photographs and the various methods we used to identify some of the more elusive locations.

By Danny Samson

One of my favourite novels is Iain Banks’s 1994 cyber-punk classic Feersum Endjinn. Set in a fully-wired future, it tells of a world where the real and the virtual are indistinguishable, and where many people’s consciousness exist within a crumbing digital architecture. Characters move through a landscape of decaying partial data, their experiences increasingly unintelligible.

It’s not unlike how , in the very near future, we’ll need to experience heritage sites in Nova Scotia.

“Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here” certainly captures where we seem to be going. Heritage sites are being closed; dead links pretend they never existed. Of course, the sites are still there, under that dead link. We can see a snapshot of the site in the Wayback Machine – though a snapshot is just that – there’s no functionality, just some pictures and some text. It’s not yet crumbling like Banks’s “cryptosphere”, but it will. It may be virtual, but it’s just like the real-world Sutherland Steam Museum: not yet crumbling under a lack of maintenance, but it will.

By Jay Lalonde, Tegan Rowlings, and Zachary A. Tingley

“Museums play a key role in preserving and sharing our heritage. To protect that work for future generations, we’re taking steps to modernize the Nova Scotia Museum system.”

Statement from the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism, and Heritage, 24 February 2026[1]

On 23 February 2026, the Nova Scotia government, at the direction of Premier Tim Houston, presented a draft budget for 2026. Included in the budget were unexpected cuts to the heritage sector, which have already begun to significantly impact local communities across the province.

On 24 February, the Nova Scotia Museum published a “Statement from the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism, and Heritage.[2] Included in this statement was a commitment to further-unspecified modernization of the museum system, and the closure of 12 museum sites: Cossit House, Lawrence House, McCulloch House, Perkins House, Prescott House, Ross-Thomson House, Shand House, Barrington Woolen Mill, Sutherland Steam Mill, Wile Carding Mill, Fisherman’s Life Museum, and North Hills Museum. The information about these sites was immediately erased from the Nova Scotia Museum website, and their former addresses now lead to the main page. Low attendance was used to justify the closure of the dozen sites, and no community consultation was completed before the decisions were made. We feel that these closures, along with a blanket twenty-percent reduction in operational funding under the Community Museum Assistance Program (CMAP) need to be considered against the backdrop of social memory in the twenty-first century.

Museums in Nova Scotia strive to be much more than just spaces to remember the past of colonial white elites and their economies; they have been and continue to be anchors of collective memory as living community spaces.[3] The recent closures directly challenge the ways that especially rural communities have been able to remember themselves and visit with their past. These closures cannot be separated from social memory, sustainable tourism, public history/heritage, and the health of rural communities in Nova Scotia. As individuals directly impacted by reductions in museum funding, and the sudden contraction of the professional job market for those working in public history, we feel it is important to bring to light the challenges that museums in Nova Scotia have faced since 2020, when the visitation of public institutions was a no go because of pandemic restrictions. It is not a secret that people were forced to change their habits to protect their own health. Rural museums felt this more than any other sector because of their reliance on volunteers to perform labour to either manage the day-to-day operation of the museums or, in the few more fortunate cases, to support an overburdened manager/curator.