An Illustrated History of Nova Scotia

Margaret Conrad is a professor of history at Acadia University. She is
the author of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800, and Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in
Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 and the co

Commissioned by the Nova Scotia government, this is the first general
history of Nova Scotia since G.G. Campbell’s The History of Nova
Scotia, published by Ryerson Press in 1948. The intervening half century
has yielded a bumper harvest of academic research on the province’s
history, much of it published in books and articles produced by
university presses. The time is long overdue for a synthesis of this
research that is accessible to a general adult audience.

A skilled writer, Harry Bruce offers a breezy narrative that is
punctuated with amusing anecdotes and penetrating insights. The book is
also handsomely produced, every page illustrated with one or more
black-and-white images. However, good writing and plenty of pictures
cannot cover up the book’s shortcomings. First there is a problem of
balance. Like many authors, Bruce is attracted to the excitement of
European exploration and imperial wars, but he devotes relatively little
space to the post-Confederation era (65 of the 280 pages of text), or to
social history. Indeed, the years after 1867 are spared from dissolving
into a series of biographical sketches only by liberal references to
Atlantic Canada in Confederation (1993). Unfortunately the other volume
in this series, The Atlantic Region to Confederation (1994), seems to
have escaped the author’s notice. This leads to my second concern: the
failure to consult sources that have added new ways of seeing the past.
It is hard to imagine a book on Nova Scotia that does not mention in the
bibliography the works of scholars such as David Frank, Naomi Griffiths,
Colin Howell, Ian McKay, or John Reid, but such is the case here. The
unwillingness of the author to make this a serious work of synthesis
means that the story has not changed much since 1948 and leaves the way
open for another, quite different history of Nova Scotia.