Category Archives: Public Lecture Series

The society meets monthly from September to May to hear and to discuss individual papers about personalities, places, and events integral to the history of Nova Scotia. Lectures are free and open to the public. Meetings begin at 7:00 p.m. and, until further notice, will be held via Zoom. For upcoming lectures visit here.


“The Tides of History: Exhibit Renewal at Halifax Citadel National Historic Site”

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Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Zoom link will be shared soon.

Keith Mercer is the Cultural Resource Manager for Parks Canada in Mainland Nova Scotia. Michael Kilfoil was the Project Manager for the “Fortress Halifax: A City Shaped by Conflict” exhibit development.

Abstract: 
In 2022, Parks Canada opened a new flagship exhibit at the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site. “Fortress Halifax: A City Shaped by Conflict” replaced the “Tides of History,” an aging but much-loved theatre-style historical experience from the late 1970s. Learn about the exhibit renewal project and how historians attempted – and sometimes struggled – to diversify the range of stories told at this British military site.

 

“Ireland, Atlantic Canada and the Crimean War: imperial connectivity and shared experiences?”

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Wednesday, June 25th, 2025, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Zoom link will be shared soon.

Dr Paul Huddie is a historical researcher from Ireland, who is interested in war and society, principally within the British Empire in the long 19th century. He is a graduate of University College Dublin (BA, 2008; MA 2009) and Queen’s University Belfast (2014) and the author of The Crimean War and Irish Society (2015). His research has been published in several edited volumes and multiple peer-reviewed journals, including the British Journal for Military History, Women’s History Review, and Mariner’s Mirror, and he is also the co-editor of New Perspectives on Conflict and Ireland in the Nineteenth Century, which will be published by Liverpool University Press in Spring 2025. He is currently employed as a Research Project Manager at University College Dublin, where he supports three prestigious European Research Council-funded projects.

Abstract: 
How did Canadians’ experience of the Crimean War of 1854-56 compare to people in Ireland (or Britain)?  Using the Welsford-Parker Monument in Halifax as its focal point, this lecture will explore the themes of popular culture, identity, and memory within both the imperial and settler-colonial contexts of Atlantic Canada and contrast them with the Irish experience. All with a view to identify shared experiences of imperial warfare in the nineteenth century. This research and lecture has been supported by the Ireland Canada University Foundation’s Craig Dobbin Legacy Programme.

 

Paul Huddie, UCD Research

 

 

 

“Not Just Nice Guys: Uncovering the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union”

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Wednesday, April 16th, 2025, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Zoom link will be shared soon.

Born in Truro (the glittering metropolis an hour’s drive from Halifax), Alex Robben is a graduate of Dalhousie’s MA History program. Alex’s research focuses on labour, a specialization inspired by a litany of odd jobs, especially warehouse work for a certain Atlantic Canadian grocery chain. His work attempts to bring Nova Scotia’s public-sector labour culture to the fore in an area dominated by central Canadian, private-sector labour history. Having worked in positions ranging from shuttle driver to substitute teacher, Alex has more recently been involved in Halifax-area political organizing.

Abstract: 
Not Just Nice Guys attempts to advance the existing patchwork history of the Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union between the 1940s to the 1980s. In this predominantly archives-based work, particular attention is paid to re-discovering the militant elements of the union and how they were contained by internal and external actors. It situates the union in the postwar professionalization of the Canadian labour movement and details teachers’ struggles with all levels of government and themselves.

 

“Nova Scotia’s first public servant: the Governor’s Secretary”

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Wednesday, March 19th, 2025, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Zoom link will be shared soon.

Christopher McCreery has served as an advisor to the Canadian and British governments on honours policy. Author of eighteen books, his works, The Canadian Honours System and The Order of Canada are the principal works on the history of honours in Canada. McCreery has served in various positions in the Senate of Canada and Privy Council Office and is one of the Commonwealth’s foremost scholars on the symbolic and constitutional position of the Crown. Since 2008 he has served as Private Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia. From 2012-18 he served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Museum of History. Along with Professor Michael Bliss and Richard Gwyn, he was part of the triumvirate of historians who diversified and made more accessible the museum’s Canada History Hall which was opened in 2017.

Abstract: 
The arrival of the first Governor of Acadia accompanied by his secretary, Jean Ralluau in 1604, signalled the haphazard beginnings of an administrative structure that would eventually develop into a formal public service. This lecture will examine the development of the position of the governor’s secretary and its transition from transient patronage post, sometimes secure, and topic of vociferous legislative debate, into a statutory office that would come to be replicated across Canada.

 

“An Unspeakable Crime”: The Divisive Reaction of the Halifax Press toward the July Crisis and Outbreak of the First World War

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Wednesday, January 15th, 2025, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor.at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Click here for the Zoom link. 

Bio:
Liam Caswell (he/they) is PhD candidate studying within Dalhousie University’s Department of History and specializing in twentieth century British imperial and foreign policy. In addition to their academic work, Liam has over a decade of experience working in local historical interpretation through affiliations with the Dartmouth Heritage Museum and Friends of McNab’s Island. The present lecture is an adaptation of their 2016 Mount Saint Vincent University Honours Thesis, which Liam is thrilled to have an opportunity to share with the wider Halifax community.

Abstract: 
Examining the Halifax press reaction to the July Crisis and outbreak of the First World War, this lecture contests the popular notion of Canadian society subscribing to a universally jingoistic and celebratory “spirit of 1914”. By comparing the attitudes expressed by Halifax’s two most widely circulated dailies – the Liberal-leaning Morning Chronicle and the Conservative-affiliated Halifax Morning Herald – it is demonstrated how divisive the popular press reaction was toward the possibility, and eventual reality, of Halifax’s participation in a major European War.

The Painter, His Muse and Their Marriage: George Harvey and Priscilla Wells in Late Victorian Halifax

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Wednesday, December 11th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Paul O’Regan Hall room at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Click here for the Zoom link. 

A graduate of Dalhousie University, Lois Yorke is the former Provincial Archivist and Director of the Nova Scotia Archives. She has spent over forty years as an archivist, editor, researcher and consultant in cultural heritage. Her long-standing involvement in women’s history has produced various articles on ‘interesting’ women from Nova Scotia’s past. Priscilla Wells is the most recent, and was discovered by accident while working on a much larger project – the first biography to explore fully the life and times of Anna Harriette Leonowens, ‘The English Governess at the Siamese Court’ – possibly the most interesting woman of them all.

Abstract: 
George Harvey lingers in our cultural history today only as a footnote, faintly remembered as the first headmaster of Halifax’s new Victoria School of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) in 1887. His wife Priscilla is remembered not at all. Their lives were lived at the intersections of Victorian art, literature and music in bohemian London, while in Halifax they were well-known and liked – but afterwards, the erasure of their memory was complete and deliberate. This illustrated presentation will revisit their world, reclaim their lives, and give them the voices they so richly deserve

Life and Work on Sable Island: The Early Federal Record of Island Operations.

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Wednesday, November 20th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Halifax Public Library. Click here for the Zoom Link.

Anne Marie Lane Jonah, Parks Canada

Abstract: 
With the BNA Act, the new government of Canada took responsibility for Sable Island. A study of the federal record of the island from the time of Confederation to the 1960s provides insight into the evolution of services on the island, the changing public perceptions of the place and its importance, and how these shaped people’s lives and work. These records document administrative struggles, labour disputes, strange and ambitious projects, moments of tragedy, and deliberations that would shape the island’s fate. Parks Canada is undertaking to better understand the island’s history and the value it represents to Canadians to guide future planning for the island. This presentation will explore the records, including photos, hand-drawn sketches, and news clippings, giving a new perspective on this well-loved, yet always mysterious island.

Bluenose Bluebirds: Nova Scotia’s Military Nurses in the Great War

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Wednesday, October 16th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Halifax Public Library and online through Zoom. Here is the Zoom link.

Born and raised in Toronto, Brian Tennyson studied history at the University of Toronto (Hons BA and MA) and the Commonwealth Institute, University of London (PhD). In 1966 he made the wise decision to move to Nova Scotia to teach history at what was then Xavier Junior College in Sydney, now Cape Breton University. He has never regretted that decision. He is the author or editor of eighteen books and is presently working on the nineteenth and has published forty scholarly journal articles and forty-seven book reviews, mostly on aspects of Nova Scotian history. He was also the founder of the Centre for International Studies, which introduced international student recruitment, international exchange agreements, and managed a number of overseas development projects, all funded by $5 million by the federal government. He retired in 2023, having completed fifty-seven years of service.

Abstract: 
In 2017, Tennyson published a book entitled Nova Scotia at War, 1914-1919, the first attempt to tell the story of the province’s experience of the First World War. This led him to determine how many Nova Scotian soldiers served in the war. Tennyson included military nurses, of course, but didn’t give them the attention that he came to realize they deserved. Somewhat to his surprise, only one book, Sister Soldiers of the Great War: The Nurses of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, has been written, by Cynthia Toman and published in 2016 but she only included nurses who served in the Canadian Army Medical Nursing Service (CAMCNS). The result was that 250 of Canada’s 2,845 military nurses were Nova Scotians. Because Tennyson includes nurses who served in other military organizations such as Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), the nursing service of the British army and other similar organizations, his number is 303 and there may have been more. Tennyson’s study of Nova Scotia’s military nurses not only identifies all Nova Scotian nurses who served in the war, it includes brief biographies including as much as possible about their prewar and postwar lives.

 






The War on Tuberculosis: The Nova Scotia Sanatorium and Patient Trends

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Wednesday, September 18th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic). Due to the library strike, this lecture will be exclusively held virtually. Here is the Zoom link.

Dr. Courtney Mrazek is the W.P. Bell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Canadian Studies Department at Mount Allison University. She is a historian of health, and her research explores eugenics, public health, settler colonialism, and health policies in Atlantic Canada.

Abstract:
The early-twentieth century is a historical period that straddles several large-scale societal and cultural shifts that significantly altered medical interactions: who provided medical attention, how it was financed, and where and how caregiving and healthcare were experienced. It is also a critical time for changes in patient demographics. Examining a specific institution over the course of its operation provides a case study that magnifies these important changes over time. This lecture will look at the Nova Scotia Sanatorium (NSS), an institution that operated between 1904 to 1970, to examine and contextualize changing patient demographics in the war against tuberculosis. 





The History of the Port at Pugwash

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Wednesday, April 17th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Halifax Public Library. To join the lecture virtually, click the Zoom link here.

Stephen Leahey was raised in Pugwash. His early education was in a one-room schoolhouse. He graduated from the Technical University of Nova Scotia, Queen’s University, and attended William’s College in Massachusetts. An Honourary Citizen of Winnipeg and a Lieutenant in the 78th Fraser Highlanders, he has received/holds an Honourary Doctor of Laws from Saint Mary’s University. Reading widely and being naturally curious led him to relating the history of his village in two books which he has donated to the Cumberland County Museum. Neither a scholar nor an academic, in his research and treatment Leahey relies extensively on the work of others who have undertaken the basic research and writing. His books are designed/intended to be sold locally by the museum.

Abstract: The configuration of the Port of Pugwash, a seagoing harbour at the end of a long bay on the Northumberland Strait, easily shields its presence. This feature was exploited first by Nicolas Deny for a trading post, then by French aristocrats from Trois-Rivières to funnel agricultural products from their marsh-based seigneuries to Fort Louisbourg, and finally by the British in London who tapped it for their masts and naval stores. With rare exceptions, London prohibited settlement near the harbour, specifically between River Philip and Tatamagouche, until the Westchester Refugees arrived in 1784.