Category Archives: Uncategorized

Grace McNutt hails from Sydney, Cape Breton. In 2014, she began her post-secondary studies at Cape Breton University as a Chancellor Scholarship recipient. Grace graduated in 2018 with her Bachelor of Arts Honours in History and was awarded the CBU Silver Medal for highest aggregate in a BA program and the Angus “Gus” Morrison Scholarship for excellence in history. In the Fall of 2018, Grace began her master’s studies at Saint Mary’s University. In 2019, she received a SSHRC Canadian Graduate Scholarship to complete her master’s thesis Oppression in the Shadows: The Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia and the Department of Indian Affairs, 1760-1950. In June 2020, Grace successfully defended her thesis and graduated from SMU with her Master of Arts in Atlantic Canada Studies as Valedictorian.

Jennifer Brady is a Registered Dietitian and Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Vincent University. Her broad interdisciplinary background informs her research interests which span critical, feminist perspectives of food, nutrition, eating, bodies, and expertise. She is particularly interested in the history and professionalization of dietetics and its forbearer, home economics, as well as health professionals’ roles in advancing social justice. Her work is primarily qualitative and includes oral history, phenomenology, autoethnography, collective biography, and the use of embodied methods, particularly cooking, as a mode of inquiry.

Lindsey MacCallum is the Scholarly Publishing Librarian at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a BA History from the University of New Brunswick and a MA Librarianship from the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests include building capacity for scholarly communications at small academic institutions, the ethics of care in academia, and exploring the history of home economics in the Maritimes.

Sawyer Carnegie is a second year MA Candidate in the Atlantic Canada Studies program at Saint Mary’s University. She completed her BA at Acadia University in 2017 where she double majored in English/Gender Studies. At Acadia, working under Dr. Claudine Bonner, she became interested in African Nova Scotian newspapers. Sawyer was born and raised in London, Ontario and has ancestral ties to Buxton, one of the first free Black settlements in Canada. She currently resides in Kjipuktuk, on the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq or L’nu people.

Photo caption: Colonel (Ret’d) Orr and his wife Cheri attend the induction of one of his favourite helicopters to the collection at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum on 9 December 2019.

Colonel Orr joined the Royal Canadian Navy in September 1963 and graduated in 1967 from the Royal Military College of Canada. Selected for aircrew duties, he completed five operational tours on the Sea King helicopter. Colonel Orr attended the Canadian Forces Command and Staff College and has held a variety of command and staff appointments in Canada, NATO and the Middle East. He retired from the Canadian Armed Forces in September 2000 and since then has volunteered as a researcher at the Shearwater Aviation Museum where he has concentrated his efforts on documenting the history of the Canadian Sea King helicopter as well as the history of the air station at Shearwater, Nova Scotia.

Heather McBriarty is a Medical Radiation Technologist, lecturer and author from Saint John, NB. With more than 30 years experience in diagnostic imaging, specializing in the fields of Urological imaging and Mammography, she has been involved in international research projects with the American Cancer Society and Pacific Northwest Cancer Foundation, as well as on-going local research into prostate cancer screening and the use of doppler ultrasound in Extracorporeal Shockwave Lithotripsy. Heather has delivered series of educational seminars to the public, presented to the Urology Nurses of Canada, and co-authored a study for the Canadian Urological Association. A lifelong love of history and a chance find turned her attention toward Canada’s role in the First World War. Her first book, a non-fiction look at the First World War titled “Somewhere in Flanders” was published in November 2019. She is currently working on a novel of the Great War.

Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D. (OISE/Toronto) is a widely published Halifax author, education consultant, and commentator. His latest strictly history book is Turning Points: 15 Pivotal Moments in Nova Scotia’s History (2019).

Paul is founding Director of Schoolhouse Institute, and former Adjunct Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s University. Over a career spanning three decades in three different provinces, Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia, Dr. Bennett has written or co-authored ten books and dozens of articles in both the popular media and the academic press. He is currently the regular education columnist for Brunswick News.

As a published historian, Paul is best known across Canada as the author of three widely recognized Canadian history textbooks, Canada: A North American Nation (Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1995), Years of Promise, 1896-1911 (Toronto: Grolier, 1986), and (with Cornelius J. Jaenen) Emerging Identities: Problems and Interpretations in Canadian History (Scarborough: Prentice Hall, 1986). His 2011 book, Vanishing Schools, Threatened Communities: The Contested Schoolhouse in Maritime Canada, was recognized in Acadiensis as one of the top works in Canadian education history.

His tenth book, The State of the System: A Reality Check on Canada’s Schools, is coming soon from McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Born and raised in Quebec, Patrick Lacroix earned a master’s degree in history at Brock University and attended the University of New Hampshire on a Fulbright scholarship. His doctoral dissertation, “John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith,” is set to appear at the University Press of Kansas next spring. Beyond his work on the church-state issues in modern American history, Dr. Lacroix is widely published in the field of French-Canadian migrations and Franco-Americans studies. His research has notably appeared in the Catholic Historical Review, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française. He has taught at Phillips Exeter Academy, Bishop’s University, Acadia University, and Mount Saint Vincent University. 

Mathias Rodorff is a PhD-candidate at the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU Munich) with a joint supervision at the Department of History at Dalhousie University. He received a joint master’s degree from the University of Freiburg and the University of Basel, in Modern, Social and Economic History, and Media Studies, funded by the European Campus Program (EUCOR). His dissertation examines how transatlantic processes, the American Civil War and the Canadian Confederation, interacted with local spaces and how public sphere was created in Great Britain and Canada during the 1850s-1870s.

Since July 2018 he is a Research Associate at the Gorsebrook Research Institute at Saint Mary’s University, and, since January 2019, a Member of the Council of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society.

Currently, Mathias is teaching the second year course “20th Century Germany” at the Department of History at Dalhousie University.

Title of dissertation:
“The American Civil War and the Canadian Confederation in Canada and Great Britain: Its Representation, Impacts and Repercussions in Liverpool, Halifax and Montreal (1856-1873)”

Further information and abstract of the dissertation can be found here: http://www.en.proamhist.amerikanistik.uni-muenchen.de/staff/phd_students/mathias-rodorff/index.html

Articles

Invisible Murders: The Trial For the Murders of Emoneau Family of the Township of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia in 1791 
 Kenneth S. Paulsen 

Halifax was Plunged into Gloom: The Impact of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic on Nova Scotia
Allan Marble 

“The Home of Cricket”: The Sport of Cricket in Pictou County Ordinary People, to 1914
  John G. Reid 

Chief Justice Lorne Clarke: A Case Study in Canadian Judicial Biography 
  Barry Cahill 

The New Woman Worker of Shipbuilding: World War II Contributions on the Homefront
  Kirby Ross 

Research Notes

Documenting the Mills of Matheson Brook 
Darrell Burke 

Precursor to Viola Desmond: Henry Bundy Visits Dartmouth’s Dundas Theatre
 David A. Sutherland, with the assistance of David A. States

Genealogy

The Coolen Family of Nova Scotia 
 Nathaniel Smith 

Book Reviews

Anya Zilberstein – A Temperate Empire: Making Climate Change in Early America
  Reviewed by Keith Grant 

Joan Dawson – Nova Scotia’s Lost Communities: The Early Settlements That Helped Build the Province 
  Reviewed by Jay White 

Mary E. MacCara – Dispensing Aid: Druggists and the Halifax Explosion
  Reviewed by Brian Tuttle 

The Society regrets to learn of the death of Janet Kitz, at the age of 89. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society in 2002 and was a recipient of the Order of Nova Scotia in 2018. See also Halifax Explosion authority Janet Kitz dies at 89.