In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in 20th-Century Nova Scotia (review)

This is a long awaited and much anticipated book, especially for historians of Nova Scotia, and although much of the material has already been published in article form or presented as public talks, the book is greater than the sum of its parts. McKay and Bates develop a compelling narrative of the development of what they call “tourism/history” from the 1930s to the 1960s to argue that in Nova Scotia “a decisive shift in representational strategies took place during the second quarter of the twentieth century, connected both to the province’s pro-found socio-economic crisis and to the correlative rise of a new consumer capitalism exemplified above all by the advent of tourism.” (19) Nova Scotia, their province of history, was “extraordinarily precocious in commodifying its past.” (20) The authors offer In the Province of History as a sequel to McKay’s monograph The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montréal and Kingston 1994) which it is in both theme and in its call to action to develop a critique of tourism/history.

The book’s six chapters are sandwiched between a Prologue (“The People of “Canada’s Ocean Playground”), and a Conclusion, which asks, “Is the Romance Ended?” After a theoretical and historiographical first chapter and an examination of Nova Scotia’s first foray into tourism/history as the land of Evangeline, the central chapters provide detailed studies of the three men whom Bates and McKay present as the central figures in the creation of tourism/history in the province. They describe the first two, publicist, journalist and novelist Will R. Bird and novelist and amateur historian Thomas Raddall, as “the cultural cartographers who mapped the Province of History – or, perhaps the songwriters who most fully developed many hits beloved with tourism history.” (252) The final figure is Nova Scotia’s long-serving Liberal premier Angus L. Macdonald, who was a zealous proponent of a Scottish origin myth for the province. He was, the authors argue, the paramount “‘organic intellectual’ of tourism/history.” (354) The final chapter brings the triumvirate together through an examination of the Nova Scotia Historic Sites Advisory Council.

The Prologue offers an alternative analysis of a montage of seven portrait photographs published on the inside back cover of a 1936 tourism promotion book-let, “A Postcard from the ‘Shore of Songs.’” They argue that the montage is unified by a “particular kind of whiteness,” most strongly exemplified by the largest constituent element, a Scottish man at the centre. (6) The authors reject the original description as error-filled, oversimplified, and deliberately emphasizing of the five white races that tourism/history treats as representative of the people of the province. In their alternative version they create fictitious biographies for each of the portraits which emphasise themes of progress and conflict in Nova Scotia history. The first chapter, “How a Land without Antiquities became the Province of History,” functions as an introduction to the book, and defines the concept of tourism/history as influenced by Bird, Raddall and Macdonald. Chapter Two explores the route by which Nova Scotia became the Land of Evangeline. Long-fellow’s poem of the same title, with its themes of pastoralism and romance, they argue, became the locus classicus of tourism/history and laid the groundwork for the commodification of history in Nova Scotia. The Evangeline phenomenon was transformed in the period from the late 1880s to the 1920s by corporate campaigns of the Dominion Atlantic Railway and Steamship lines. But the Evangeline story was complicated by Acadian interpretations of both the poem and the impact of the deportation of 1755. For tourism/history promoters, Acadians did not represent the essence of Nova Scotia’s ethnic heritage.

Chapters Three and Four provide biographical information and a close analysis of the historical fiction of Will R. Bird...