Culture, Art, and the Sense of Place

PIONEERS, COMMODITY PRODUCTION, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY once dominated the historiography of the Atlantic Provinces. Attention to popular culture came much later, and it was then usually understood either as examples of the oral transmission of tradition or of an antimodernist impulse implicit in mature capitalism. Each of the Atlantic Provinces is different from its neighbours, and regions within provinces often share more in common with regions in other provinces than they do with other parts of their own provinces. The four books under consideration here–Michael Eamon's Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America; Janet Kitz's Andrew Cobb: Architect and Artist; Kirk Niergarth's The Dignity of Every Human Being: New Brunswick Artists and Canadian Culture between the Great Depression and the Cold War; and Darrell Varga's Shooting from the East: Filmmaking in the Canadian Atlantic–span provinces, including some outside "Atlantic Canada," as well as several cultural forms, from newspapers to architecture and painting to filmmaking.¹ As such, they provide interpretive opportunities that transcend the "regional." While a few 20th-century historians reduced culture to manifestations of class struggle, or the ephemera of ethnic performance, the authors of these books take cultural products seriously on their own terms.² This set of books about the cultural work of artists, architects, printers, and filmmakers show scholars engaging with the most recent scholarship of the cultural realm. They also embody the authors' thoughts about the ways in which the local engages with the tendrils of globalism. They make for rewarding reading beyond our own communities.

Historians have always been comfortable reading texts from the past as sources, and in recent decades have considered the process through which the text was created as well as its content. Michael Eamon's Imprinting Britain delves deeply into the history of 18th-century print culture in two British colonial capitals: Halifax and Quebec City. These two colonial outposts are not often considered together. The subtitle of the book signals that it is a study of "newspapers, sociability and the shaping of British North America," indicating a shift in emphasis from the content to the medium of transmission–from the cultural cargo to the vessel that carries it. Locally produced culture receives less of Eamon's attention, as the colonial elites he examined continue to mentally inhabit the British world.

It is unclear to me why these two ports were chosen for analysis, except for the rich vein of sources that Eamon deploys in his study. The result is a comprehensive study of newspapers and pamphlets in two garrison towns on the northern periphery of the Thirteen Colonies in the period after the American Revolution. It is a substantive contribution to the historiography of print in colonial America as well as that of proto-Canada, not the least because it surveys two towns that historians in the United States rarely include in their analysis. Halifax was, of course, a Royal Navy base, on a peninsula that had been ceded by the French not many years previously. Quebec had an English administration that was surrounded by a French-speaking population. The book gives little sense of the two colonies beyond the social lives of the English male bourgeoisie; as Eamon points out, women, First Nations, French speakers, and many others were rarely addressed or discussed in newspapers and pamphlets. Interestingly, the author uses newspaper accounts to reconstruct some of the cultural life in the theatres and coffee shops that historians sometimes treat as silos. In this account readers are made aware of which plays were being performed, along with the papers and pamphlets that were undoubtedly being read and discussed. This fuller picture of cultural life is helpful. It does, however, raise the questions (more easily asked than answered) of how broadly the print culture circulated. Were women reading the papers? Were members of the Francophone bourgeoisie and clerics reading them? Did literate people read to the illiterate?

Drawing upon Habermas, and other cultural theorists, Eamon's attention to the social role of print is valuable to our understanding of colonial culture. This is not...