Serge Gagnon - Mariage et famille au temps de Papineau

Loyalist Trails, , March 11, 2018

Over 230 years ago approximately 20,000 United Empire Loyalists came to Nova Scotia as refugees after the American Revolution. How can they be remembered ? Their presence is noticeable in Annapolis and Digby Counties in the names of communities, in the Loyalist era churches and cemeteries with their gravestones, in buildings and monuments, interpretative signs and plaques, and in street signs.

Urban History Review, 1990

Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.

Histoire Sociale-social History, 2016

2012

Histoire sociale/Social history, 2019

This article discusses understandings of manhood in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By means of the voluminous diary kept by Simeon Perkins, a man of local prominence, it explores the social responses within this rural seafaring community to how men chose strategies for gaining social status, exercising public power, and juggling private interest and public service. Across northeastern North America, capitalist ideals of independent manhood were gradually replacing moral ideals of communal manhood, which ultimately strained networks of reciprocity both within and outside the family. Yet by placing Perkins alongside Benajah Collins, another prominent Liverpudlian, this article also reveals that those who drifted too far from morally grounded communal ideals of manhood continued to find themselves ostracized within their immediate communities. * Elizabeth Mancke is Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Atlantic Canada Studies at the University of New Brunswick. Colin Grittner currently teaches history at Douglas College and has held Social Science and Humanites Research Council-funded postdoctoral fellowships at the University of British Columbia and the University of New Brunswick. The authors would like to thank Gerry Hallowell for hosting the Atlantic Canada Workshop in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, where Elizabeth presented the first iteration of this essay many years ago, and a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (#890-2014-0116), which funded Colin's postdoctoral fellowship at UNB in 2018 and made possible the collaboration. The authors are also grateful for the useful reviewer and editorial comments that contributed to the final version, and to Stéphanie O'Neill for her advice on historiography. 258 Histoire sociale / Social History sont trop éloignés de l'idéal communautaire de masculinité basé sur la morale ont continué à se retrouver ostracisés au sein même de leur milieu immédiat. ON HIS 62ND BIRTHDAY, May 4, 1798, Simeon Perkins reflected on his 36 years as a resident of Liverpool, Nova Scotia, a rural seafaring community on the province's South Shore. Over those years Perkins held many roles both public and private: father, trader, slaveholder, ship owner, member of the Nova Scotia assembly, colonel in the militia, county treasurer, proprietors' clerk, husband, brother, son-in-law, justice of the peace, judge of probates. 1 In those roles, and despite them, Perkins had not prospered. Now, at 62, he found himself in "Circumstances Very low," having "Spent my time to very little purpose for myself, much of it … taken up in publick Business, to very little profit, and a great deal of Anxiety and Trouble." Although he noted that "Many that were poor boys when I came, have grown Rich, and Some Grown Proud," he himself had not made the easy money. He had lost much to risky long-distance trade and, by his "lenity[,] lost many Large Sums due to me." 2 It was not just his own impression. When he died in 1812, his obituary, published in Halifax in The Weekly Chronicle, emphasized his willingness to act as an "indefatigable servant of the Public." It noted that his service had caused "no small injury to his private concerns" and lauded him for "His great wisdom, general knowledge, piety and benevolence, and uncommon usefulness." These qualities, the obituary concluded, had endeared him as "a Father" to all of Liverpool's residents. 3 By the time he died in 1812, Perkins had achieved a level of public esteem as high, if not greater, than any of his contemporaries in Liverpool. Perkins's almost overdrawn life of working in the community interest ended during an era when gender roles were undergoing significant transformations. Perhaps more than any other Liverpudlian at the time, Perkins exemplified what historian Anthony Rotundo has called "communal manhood": a gendered ideal prevalent in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English-speaking world where a man "fulfilled himself through public usefulness more than his economic success." By the late eighteenth century, however, this ideal had begun to shift. Perhaps most markedly in what would become the northeastern United States, but also throughout British North America, men increasingly strove to present themselves as independent and self-made, defining "themselves through personal success in

Histoire Sociale-social History, 2016

Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region / Revue d’histoire de la region atlantique, 2019

Acadiensis, 2013

Maritime Canada announced that it was "Planters Studies Series, No. 1." 1 The implication of more volumes to come was boldly confident, and realized over the next 25 years with the publication of four more volumes. 2 As Margaret Conrad explains in her introduction to the first volume, the New Englanders who settled in Nova Scotia in the 1760s had been relatively obscure figures in Canadian history. 3 John Bartlet Brebner, after spending a good portion of his scholarly career studying them, observed in the foreword to his 1937 The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia: A Marginal Colony During the Revolutionary Years that he had perhaps wasted his time in writing the study and, by extension, the reader's time by making the book longer than the topic probably warranted. In that book and his earlier one (the 1927 New England's Outpost) Brebner emphasized the influence of lower New England on northeastern North America, and especially Acadia and Nova Scotia, during the 17th and 18th centuries-an emphasis that influenced scholarship for most of the 20th century. In his 1986 The Shaping of America, for instance, Donald Meinig, following Brebner, calls the entire northeast, from Long Island to Labrador, "Greater New England." George Rawlyk, on the other hand, writing almost two generations after Brebner, struggled to step out of his long shadow-eventually escaping it by studying the region's religious history, beginning with Henry Alline (the New Light evangelist of New England Planter descent). 4

Acadiensis, 1999

ACCORDING TO THE COLONIAL PATRIOT, the "coincidence" of two events would mark December 1827 as an auspicious moment in the history of Pictou County, and indeed of Nova Scotia more generally. The first event was the inaugural issue of the newspaper, itself designed to "invigorate" local society and "prove to every individual a stimulation to exertion". 1 The weekly's editor, Jotham Blanchard promoted "liberal principles" and "correct morals" and, like his heroes, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and William Cobbett, maintained a laissez-faire position on economic issues and advocated regulation in the social sphere. 2 In an era when reform loomed large in England, the Patriot's editor saw his stance as forwardlooking and progressive; he thought his paper's advice and opinion were the path to "improvement", and all that was entailed by that most critical term of 19th-century social discourse. The other event the editor noted was the "arrival" of the "Royal Mining Association", or more correctly, the General Mining Association (GMA). Blanchard believed it would loom large in the county's future and represented a "harbinger of illimitable prosperity", but he overstated the "coincidence". The only "arrival" related to the GMA was that of their 20-horsepower steam engine; the resident manager, Richard Smith, had been on site since June with equipment and more than 100 miners and other tradesmen. Blanchard enthusiastically extolled the virtues of the Association, and especially Smith, whose "constant and persevering labour furnishes a useful illustration of the way wealth and respectability are acquired in Britain". The newspaperman, although correct that Smith was a first-rate mining engineer, was evidently unaware that the Englishman was in Nova Scotia because he had lost the family fortune. 3 It is ironic 1 Colonial Patriot (Pictou) 14 December 1827. The author thanks Alison Forrest, Ian McKay and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments. As usual, however, what is muddled is solely mine.

1984

ENGLISH-CANADIAN HISTORIANS have long had a love affair with the biographical approach to history. 1 In fact, prior to the First World War biography was the preferred form of writing history in Canada. Few of the publications produced during this period are of much value today. They were written according to a rigid formula, were based upon little or no research, were completely uncritical of their subjects, and were governed by a set of conventions which limited what could be revealed about the private lives of their subjects. In the 1920s a new breed of professional historians revamped the biographical form. 2 Their studies were based on meticulous research into primary sources, were much less hagiographie than their predecessors, and emphasized the times rather than the lives of their subjects. But frequently these became totally depersonalized accounts; the protagonists lost their personalities and became merely products of their times. The most damning critic of this tendency was Donald Creighton, who stressed that the basic function of a biographer must be to portray the course of an indvidual's life as it evolved over time. In the 1950s Creighton published his highly imaginative biography of John A. Macdonald, which quickly "became the standard against which succeeding lives were measured". 3 Since the 1950s there has been a veritable flood of biographies. Most of the major and many of the minor pre-Confederation politicians have been the subject of scholarly studies, and several of the Central Canadian politicians-including the leading fathers of Confederation-have even been honoured with two-volume treatments of their lives. The Maritimes, as usual, have been less well served. In an earlier period when the struggle for responsible government was seen as the central event in Canadian history at least token attention was paid to the Maritimes. But the Maritime politicians appeared neither as colourful nor as controversial as their Central Canadian counterparts and they never attracted the same scholarly interest as John Strachan or William Lyon Mackenzie. Following the Second World War, as Canadian historians shifted their focus to the Confederation era, Maritimers remained less attractive as subjects because they were seen as playing a less significant-often indeed a negative-role in the events which led to Confederation. The growth of interest in regional studies in the 1970s revived interest in the Maritimes but from a very 1 This has not been true of French-Canadian academics.