The Belfast Riot of 1847
Publisher: Island Studies Press$29.95On March 1, 1847, Prince Edward Island experienced the second-worst election riot in Canadian history. About 200 Scottish Protestants and 300 Irish Catholics got into a brawl, resulting in at least three men dead and up to 100 others injured. This event set the stage for the hardening of the sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics on Prince Edward Island for the next 125 years.
Bluenose Ghosts (3rd Edition )
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95The classic work of Nova Scotia folklore, available in an attractive new edition.
Titanic True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew, and Legacy (pb)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95This book tells the lives of the passengers on the Titanic‘s ill-fated voyage, and shines a spotlight on the vessel’s lost treasures, its celebrated send-off from Belfast, its animal passengers, the iconic music and movies inspired by the story, and the many, many tales of heroism and bravery that arose from this tragedy. Richly illustrated with archival photographs and newspaper clippings, as well as a comprehensive index, timeline, and suggested further reading, this all-ages book presents an accessible, fascinating history of the world’s most famous ship. Includes over 50 black and white photos.
The Last Farm on McNabs | A Family History of Twentieth – Century Life on the Island
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95A personal, historical portrait of Halifax Harbour’s largest and most storied island from 1920–1970, featuring anecdotes, photographs, and maps.
Westray
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$18.95Vernon Theriault was off shift when the Westray mine exploded in 1992, killing twenty-six men in Plymouth, Nova Scotia. Theriault took part in the perilous rescue operation that followed. As the magnitude of Westray took hold, Theriault found himself struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares. When he tried to re-educate himself for another line of work, he discovered that he was both illiterate and dyslexic. Theriault found new purpose when he became part of a labour movement that successfully lobbied the federal government to bring in a worker-safety law that became known as the Westray Bill.
Theriault openly discusses his complicated journey in this straightforward, simply written memoir, which begins with the promise of a good job with good pay at Westray.
In the Great Days of Sail
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Archibald MacMechan revelled in the tales of worldwide adventure, pirates, storms, fires, rescues, and tragedies. MacMechan’s collections, all popular successes in their day, have been out of print for several years. Now In the Great Days of Sail brings fourteen stories together for a new generation of readers. Edited and with an introduction by Halifax author Elizabeth Peirce, the book displays the very best of this master chronicler’s work.
On South Mountain The Dark Secrets of the Goler Clan
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$27.95Stories of South Mountain and its notorious Goler Clan are often told in whispers–or not at all.
For over a century, a gruesome pattern of sexual and physical abuse, incest, and psychological torture defined the isolated mountain community, and residents of the nearby Annapolis Valley turned a blind eye. But when a fourteen-year-old South Mountain girl finally spoke up, the story and its ensuing investigation captivated the country.
In this twentieth-anniversary edition of the bestselling book The Vancouver Sun called “a terrible story, beautifully told,” acclaimed authors David Cruise and Alison Griffiths return to South Mountain with a new Preface and the original, startling text.
100 Things You Don’t Know About Nova Scotia
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Inspired by the success of her popular Halifax Magazine column, “50 Things You Don’t Know about Halifax,” Sawler has expanded her focus to include interesting anecdotes and facts about the social, political, economic, and cultural history of Nova Scotia.
Flight 111 A Year in the Life of a Tragedy
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$27.95Fifteen years later, the crash of Swissair Flight 111 remains one of the largest aviation accidents ever recorded. The crash claimed over two hundred victims, and changed the course of countless lives, from the victims’s friends and relatives, the dedicated individuals who helped with the search and investigation, and the residents who welcomed the victims’ families into their homes. Award-winning writer Steven Kimber has collected their stories, starting with the seemingly innocent events leading up to the fatal day on September 2, 1998, the search for survivors, and failing that, the pursuit for answers. Kimber successfully combines these accounts in a lively, heart-wrenching style to give a human face to one of the worst tragedies in Canadian history. This new edition includes an afterword with updated information from the investigation.
Titanic True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew, and Legacy
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$25.95This book tells the lives of the passengers on the Titanic‘s ill-fated voyage, and shines a spotlight on the vessel’s lost treasures, its celebrated send-off from Belfast, its animal passengers, the iconic music and movies inspired by the story, and the many, many tales of heroism and bravery that arose from this tragedy. Richly illustrated with archival photographs and newspaper clippings, as well as a comprehensive index, timeline, and suggested further reading, this all-ages book presents an accessible, fascinating history of the world’s most famous ship. Includes over 50 black and white photos.
New Brunswick’s Early Roads The Routes that Shaped the Province
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95Except for Roman military roads and the Inca roads in Peru, roads and road-making have seldom attracted much attention. Like fields, fences and old stone walls, roads can seem so much part of the fabric of a landscape that we need reminding that many of them were made intentionally. In New Brunswick, road-building was a great labour performed, as elsewhere, without fuss by often reluctant workers drawn from a remarkably small population. Against heavy odds, New Brunswick by 1930 had roads and a highway system that, in terms of quality and coverage, was the envy of many larger provinces.
A new addition to the Images of Our Past series, New Brunswick’s Early Roads follows the development of the province’s roadways through the era of post and military roads, the rise of the Good Roads movement, to the dominance of the automobile and paved highways
Over 60 remarkable black and white images document the astonishing process.
Titanic Victims in Halifax Graveyards revised edition
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$29.95For eighty-five years dozens of victims of one of the most famous ships in history rested quietly in Halifax, Nova Scotia, until the 1997 film Titanic created a renewed interest in the burial sites.
Visitors to Halifax have many questions about the city’s connection to the infamous ship. Of the 328 bodies found, why were some buried at sea? Why were 59 bodies sent elsewhere for burial and the rest buried in Halifax? Titanic Victims in Halifax Graveyards answers those questions while telling the intriguing and little-known story of the 150 passengers and crew who were buried in the port city of Halifax. Using official reports and newspaper articles, author Blair Beed provides an outline of life on board the Titanic, describes society as it was in 1912, and highlights the care for the dead taken by the crews of the recovery ships and those who met them on arrival in Halifax.
This revised edition, with two new chapters and an updated design, is an important addition to any Titanic library.
Strange Nova Scotia
Publisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$14.95Strange Nova Scotia is a fun and, yes, STRANGE romp through this strange land. From Nova Scotia’s connection to why the White House is painted white, to the famed Shag Harbour UFO incident and the possible landing of Prince Henry Sinclair at Chedabucto Bay on June 2, 1398, this book will amuse and intrigue you on every page. From one of the province’s best-known folklorists and the wit of a budding young illustrator comes this instant classic. Welcome to Strange Nova Scotia.
Children of the Titanic
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95On April 10, 1912, the Titanic departed Southampton, England, on its first voyage across the Atlantic, carrying 2,240 passengers, 109 of them children. Introducing young readers to the ship that couldn’t sink, Children of the Titanic follows three children—Beth Cook, age six, travelling third class; Charlotte Murphy, age eight, second class; and John Crosby, age eleven, first class. We meet them as they board and get settled in their rooms in different parts of the vessel, witness their experience of the gripping sequence of events early in the morning of April 15, and see their eventual arrival in New York on the rescue ship Carpathia.
Bringing to life the sights and sounds of the ship from a child’s perspective, author Christine Welldon tours youngreaders through the plush first- and second-class staterooms, the gymnasium, swimming pool, library, and French café, as well as the humbler accommodations in third class.
The book includes over 40 photographs, highlighted glossary terms, and sidebars on aspects of shipbuilding, early twentieth-century life, and the events of April 15, 1912.
Sinking of the Titanic (2nd edition) Thrilling Stories of Survivors with Photographs and Sketches
Editor: Logan MarshallPublisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Originally published in 1912, The Sinking of the Titanic was an instant bestseller and remains an important account of the most famous marine disaster in history. Based on the personal testimony of Titanic survivors, this book tells in remarkable detail the complete history of Titanic—from the vessel’s construction to departure from Southampton, to the collision, ensuing panic, and ultimate sinking. The chronicle includes first-hand accounts of many of the survivors, and concludes with the efforts in New York and Halifax to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy.Illustrated throughout, this reprint contains the original drawings and photos of the “Great Ship” and some of its passengers—both those who survived to tell their remarkable tales, and those who perished on that fateful April night.
Irish
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$10.95Part of the series about the people who have come to the Maritimes. Their origins, settlement and cultural heritage which have given much to our Maritime life.
Daring, Devious and Deadly True Tales of Crime and Justice from Nova Scotia’s Past
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Welcome to a rogues’ gallery of murderers and pirates, a pair of brazen bank robbers and a fraud artist who fooled Halifax’s elite. A supporting cast includes a wise-cracking Cape Breton judge, legendary journalist-turned-politician Joseph Howe, circus showman P.T. Barnum, and future prime minister John Thompson. Daring, Devious and Deadly is a collection of fifteen true tales of crime and justice that spans more than 150 years of Nova Scotia’s history, from a triple murder in 1791 at a farm near Lunenburg to 1947, when Angus Walters, skipper of the racing schooner Bluenose, was attacked in the pages of an American magazine.
The stories are drawn from communities across the province, from Sydney and Amherst to Halifax, from the rugged coast of the Eastern Shore to the historic town of Annapolis Royal. Filled with surprising twists and courtroom drama, these stories of greed, murder and vengeance offer a window on the past. But justice can be far from blind. Religious hatred, partisan rivalry, social status, ethnicity, or political corruption sometimes invaded the courtroom, threatening to upset the delicate balance between guilt and innocence. Was justice done in each of these cases? You be the judge.
Rum Tales Down Home Yarns Around a Pot-Bellied Stove
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95Welcome to The Shop.
Arthur Benjamin Lohnes was proprietor of a small country store known locally as The Shop in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, from 1919 through 1957. AB, as he was called, provided a welcoming haven to people eager to indulge in the venerable art of loafing and storytelling. The yarns were spun by some of the most colourful characters of the first half of the twentieth century.
With the blessing of their wives, menfolk met there regularly around the warmth of AB?s pot-bellied stove, a cozy forum in which to relate experiences and share their concerns of the day. The practice was carried out almost to the point of ceremony. Starring actors in this pageant of patriarchs ranged from grizzled old blue water sea captains through ordinary seamen to shore fishermen, a preacher, store owner, and a part-time postmaster. The tales are spliced with a biographical narrative – glimpses of adventures and misadventures ? of a gentle, kindly woman, once a child, to whom the book is dedicated.
The tales recounted within the walls of AB?s store take the reader back to a bygone era of daily poverty and everyday adventures in a coastal Nova Scotian community. Thanks to these storytellers, the past survives and comes alive for the modern reader.
Where Duty Lies A New Brunswick Soldier in the Trenches of World War I
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Frank Grimmer did not set out to earn honours on the field of battle nor did he readily choose to go to war. World powers were shifting. The future of nations was deemed dependant on their armies. It was left to the young men to face the gunfire of other young men who could have been friends under the right circumstances and in times of peace. Where Duty Lies tells the story of how a 23-year-old St. Andrews, New Brunswick, man ended up in the quicksand-like mud of Passchendaele labouring under heavy artillery fire helping construct supply lines that supported the Canadian advance during the Third Battle of Ypres, often referred to as the most horrific in a war of horrific battles.
The Mill Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$22.95The Mill –Fifty Years of Pulp and Protest explores the power that a single industry can wield. For fifty years, the pulp mill near Pictou in northern Nova Scotia has buoyed the local economy and found support from governments at all levels. But it has also pulped millions of acres of forests, spewed millions of tonnes of noxious emissions into the air, consumed quadrillions of litres of fresh water and then pumped them out again as toxic effluent into nearby Boat Harbour, and eventually into the Northumberland Strait.
From the day it began operation in 1967, the mill has fomented protest and created deep divisions and tensions in northern Nova Scotia. This story is about people whose livelihoods depend on the pulp mill and who are willing to live with the “smell of money.” It’s about people whose well-being, health, homes, water, air, and businesses have been harmed by the mill’s emissions and effluent. It’s about the heartache such divisions cause and about people who, for the sake of peace, keep their thoughts about the mill to themselves.
But it’s also about hope, giving voice to those who led the successive groups that have protested and campaigned for a cleaner mill–First Nations, fishers, doctors, local councillors, tourism operators, artists and musicians, teachers and woodlot owners. Their personal stories are interwoven into a historical arc that traces the mill’s origins and the persistent environmental and social problems it causes to this day.
Baxter weaves a rich tapestry of storytelling, relevant to everyone who is concerned about how we can start to renegotiate the relationship between economy, jobs, and profits on one hand, and human well-being, health, and the environment on the other. The Mill tells a local story with global relevance and appeal.
The Legacy Letters How Trauma Affects Our Lives
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Halifax author and journalist Janice Landry returns to her roots, as she revisits high-profile Canadian police investigations she covered as a novice television reporter during the 1980s and 1990s. One story involves the unsolved murder of British Columbia teenager Andrea King, whose remains were found in 1992, in Nova Scotia woods, nearly a year after she disappeared. Landry also discusses the 1989 disappearance of Nova Scotia teenager Kimberly McAndrew, who was last seen leaving a Halifax Canadian Tire store where she worked. McAndrew remains missing.
The victims and families have had a major impact on Landry and the public. She hopes this book leads to a break in both cases, as well as other unsolved crimes. It will also shed light on the pain the families continue to endure.
Landry also speaks with Canadians from five provinces, including first responders and front-line workers. These men and women bravely discuss how trauma, in and out of their work, has profoundly affected their lives, loved ones, and outlook.
The author and her guests each have written a “Legacy Letter” for the public. Each letter is deeply personal and conveys a heartfelt message of loss and hope. This book is Landry’s attempt to help them regain some of what has been lost.
Rescue at Moose River
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On Easter weekend in 1936, three men went down into an old rundown gold mine at Moose River in a remote area of Nova Scotia. While below, they became trapped by a massive cave-in at the 141-foot level. One man was a pediatrician, the second a young lawyer, and the third the mining company timekeeper. They had entered the mine to assess its potential for possible sale to an unnamed United States interest.
With the heroic efforts of more than 150 men and women volunteers, including local miners, hard rock miners from Ontario, draegermen from Pictou County, and a tenacious young diamond drill operator from Pictou County, two of the men were recovered alive. The third man died underground on the eighth day of their entombment.
Halifax broadcaster J. Frank Willis made history with his live reports from the mine head that were broadcast on more than 700 radio stations around the world, including the major U.S. networks and the BBC. It marked the beginning of a new era in broadcasting and in journalism. Until then, radio was known chiefly as a music and entertainment medium; news gathering and reporting had been the bailiwick of newspapers and newswire services.
Little did Willis know when he filed his first report from the site that he was making broadcast history by pioneering live on-the-spot reporting. It would change the face of broadcasting forever. Rescue at Moose River is the story of how these two events, one tragic, one historic, came together in the backwoods of Nova Scotia more than 80 years ago.
Breaking Disaster Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95On December 6, 1917, the face of Halifax changed forever when the Imo, a Belgian Relief ship, collided with the French ship, the Mont Blanc. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the Mont Blanc, which was carrying a large cargo of explosives, blew up. It destroyed much of the city’s north end and neighbouring communities like Tuft’s Cove and Dartmouth. The effect was catastrophic.
In Breaking Disaster, Ingram traces these details and stories as she pieces together the different narratives from the week that followed December 6, 1917, many of which have long faded into the larger story of the Halifax Explosion.
Seven Grains of Paradise A Culinary Journey in Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Seven Grains of Paradise tells the fascinating and much neglected story about many kinds of food in Africa, a continent with a rich farming tradition, intricate cuisines, and a multitude of food cultures.
Here is the story of Baxter’s personal quest to learn about some fascinating and new (to her) foods in a handful of countries in sub-Sahara Africa as she visits African farms, markets, restaurants, and kitchens. The people who grow, sell, buy, prepare, and serve the foods help her explore the riddles of a continent better known for hunger than for its plentiful food resources. The author draws on stories and research conducted over the more than thirty years she has lived and worked in Africa.
From the fabled city of Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert to the rainforests of Central Africa, readers are invited along on a delightful journey of learning and eating–and some drinking too, of invigorating indigenous beverages, brews, and palm wine straight from the trees. The culinary journey takes the reader down garden paths, into forests that double as farms, through the chaos of markets, and into modest little roadside eateries.
Much Madness, Divinest Sense Women’s Stories of Mental Health and Health Care
Editor: Lori Hanson, Nili Kaplan - MyrthPublisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95It is time to shed some light on the dark halls and windowless rooms where women’s mental health has been hidden from view. Where are the stories? Where are their voices? In historical and psychiatric records, women’s mental health is reduced to verifiable symptoms and causes, devoid of the subjective, absent of the lived experience. When confronted with their protestations and self-representations, our medical system and our societal institutions further pathologize, retrauamtize or silence women. Much Madness, Divinest Sense is a collection of women’s stories and essays about mental health and health care. These women–physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, community activists, health researchers, Indigenous women, transgender women, our neighbors, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers who are the recipients, providers and critics of care–break the silence to talk about the polluted, heart-wrenching, stigmatized, messy subject that is mental illness today. As with their first collection, Women Who Care: Women’s stories of health care and caring, the stories, essays and poems of women receiving, accompanying, critiquing or giving mental health care are again in this compilation as raw as they are real.
Frontier Town: Bear River, Nova Scotia A Snapshot in Time
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$26.95Bear River photographer Ralph Nelson Harris captured the village’s waning days of sail and lumber through his camera lens in the early 1900s. Drawing upon hundreds of recently discovered Ralph Harris images, historian and author Mike Parker puts a newfound face to Bear River’s past while utilizing painstakingly researched excerpts from The Telephone, Bear River’s newspaper of the day, to add an informative and entertaining voice to the story. Includes 470 images.
Winds of Change Life and Legacy of Calvin W. Ruck
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$16.95Calvin Woodrow Ruck, born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, to Bajan immigrants, saw roadblocks not as barriers, but as hurdles that he would eventually leap over.
From working in the steel plant and as a sleeping car porter to being awarded the Order of Canada and appointed to the Senate of Canada, Calvin worked diligently to ensure that his children, and his children’s children, wouldn’t have to go through the same things he went through. Although he was turned away from many opportunities, he was determined to provide for his family and took on a heavy workload in the Halifax community.
An Ordinary Hero Story of David Goldberg, WWII Canadian Spitfire Pilot
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$21.95Imagine you are a pilot, shot from the sky, alone in enemy territory where no one speaks your language. It is winter, and soon will be dark. You could freeze to death, starve or be captured by the Nazis. And you are a Jew. This is David Goldberg’s predicament on March 8, 1944. An Ordinary Hero is Goldberg’s account of how, assisted by the French Underground, he made his way through occupied France and Spain and evaded capture by the enemy. He returned to combat in ground support as a dive-bomber to become the decorated (Distinguished Flying Cross) commander of the only Canadian fighter squadron in Italy.
From Nova Scotia to North Africa
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95When Canada went to war in 1939, the life of twenty-year-old Clayton Graham changed in a heartbeat. From a small rural community, he never expected he would travel the world so extensively or under such circumstances.
From Nova Scotia to North Africa is a largely first-person account of Clayton’s experiences and adventures as a pilot in the Royal Air Force. He recounts in detail the sometimes exhilarating but often terrifying process of learning to fly fighter aircraft, training first in Canada, then in England and later flying with #250 Squadron in Africa and the Middle East: performing spins and loops, becoming adept with Hurricanes and Spitfires, evading enemy aircraft, flying on dangerous missions. He survives bombings on the ground and dogfights in the air. He sees comrades die in service to their country and the devastation war brings to ordinary people swept up in historic events.
Along the way, Clayton manages to get engaged, carrying the engagement ring around with him before he mails it back to his sweetheart in Canada. Shot down while serving in North Africa, it seems Clayton may not get back to marry the woman he loves.
Told with humour and insight, and packed with historical information about places, public figures, and events, From Nova Scotia to North Africa chronicles an important part of Nova Scotia, Canadian, and world history, capturing in a veteran’s own words the experience of war.
Cornwallis The Violent Birth of Halifax
Publisher: Pottersfield Press$19.95In June of 1749, Edward Cornwallis set into motion events that would determine the destiny of tens of thousands of people across half a continent. His actions in the following three years would also determine the future of not only Nova Scotia, but of the vast land that would become Canada.To the Mi’kmaq people, the British governor stood on their ancestral home of “Mi’kma’ki” – the millennial-old name for the Seven Districts that comprised the main Mi’kmaq government in what is today Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Maine. For France, Cornwallis was entering “Acadie,” heartland of their territorialambitions on the New World. For Cornwallis, and for the British crown he represented, it was Nova Scotia – territory France had ceded to Britain on paper in 1713 and a land heintended to claim in the flesh with his massive influx of soldiers and settlers.Steeped in a brutal militaristic philosophy he learned in the bloody fields of Scotland’s Battle of Culloden, Cornwallis devised a plan to force the Acadians and Mi’kmaq to swear loyalty to his king, be forced off the land, or face massacre. His conquest of Nova Scotia laid the groundwork for the Expulsion of the Acadians and createdthe conditions that allowed his close colleague, James Wolfe, to claim a final British victory over France on thePlains of Abraham a decade later. His conquest also pushed the Mi’kmaq toward the brink of extinction.But who was Edward Cornwallis? He remains an elusive, controversial figure to this day, but his full story hasnever been told. This in-depth biography makes use of Cornwallis’s own words to tell his story. It also draws ona range of sources to provide a detailed account of his life, with rare first-hand accounts of his childhood growingup with the future king of Britain; his rise in the military; the formative Pacification mission he led to successfully suppress Scotland’s Highland rebellion; his central role in the birth of Halifax; the military disasters that saw himface the threat of execution by his own government and that compelled Voltaire to write of “a million regimentedassassins” tormenting Europe; and Cornwallis’s death in exile on Gibraltar.Whether you see Cornwallis as the heroic founder of Halifax or a genocidaltyrant who ruthlessly destroyed those who dared stand against him, you cannotdeny his crucial role in Canadian history. This book presents the evidence ofhis life: it is up to the reader to make the final judgment.
