Halifax: The First 250 Years

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

What would Halifax do without anniversaries? Produced to commemorate the
founding of Halifax in 1749, this is the first history of the city to
appear since Thomas Raddall’s Warden of the North (1948), written on
the occasion of the 200th anniversary. Most Canadian cities have been
the subject of book-length studies in recent years, but Halifax was
somehow overlooked. Happily, this well-written and beautifully
illustrated (though badly edited) book admirably fills this yawning gap
in Canadian urban history.

David Sutherland, Judith Fingard, and Janet Guildford bring an
impressive depth of knowledge to their subject and offer a splendid
balance of economic, political, social, and cultural history.
Sure-footed in their treatment of controversial issues as Edward
Cornwallis’s policy toward the Mi’kmaq, the V-E Day riots in May
1945, and the “dispersal” of Africville, the authors are not averse
to making sharp judgments. Fingard, for example, notes in her excellent
treatment of the Women’s Movement at the turn of the century that it
paid little attention to African Nova Scotia women; she also
acknowledges the nasty treatment of the Chinese minority, most
notoriously in the post–World War I rampage against the city’s six
Chinese restaurants.

Although they try valiantly, the authors only partly succeed in moving
beyond Raddall’s conclusion that Halifax was a place founded and
defined by its military role. Sutherland’s masterful survey of the
period covering the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and
French and Napoleonic Wars is particularly preoccupied with issues of
wartime prosperity and peacetime decline, but could scarcely be
otherwise. The pattern is seemingly broken in the second half of the
20th century, which is covered in Guildford’s two excellent chapters
focusing on the politics of urban renewal and the emergence of an
exciting new metropolis since 1980. The authors sometimes have trouble
placing Halifax in its larger regional and national contexts and only
cursorily cover the communities recently (1996) incorporated in the new
Halifax Regional Municipality. Nevertheless, this is a fine book, one
destined to remain unsurpassed—if past history is any
indication—until the next major anniversary comes around.