In the province of history : the making of the public past in twentieth-century Nova Scotia / Ian McKay and Robin Bates.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKay, Ian.

Contributor:

Bates, Robin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tourism--Social aspects--Nova Scotia.

Heritage tourism--Nova Scotia--History--20th century.

Tourism--Nova Scotia--History--20th century.

Tourism--Government policy--Nova Scotia.

Culture and tourism--Nova Scotia.

Collective memory--Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia--Historiography.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (494 p.)

Place of Publication:

Montreal ; Ithaca [N.Y.] : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Using archival sources, novels, government reports, and works on tourism and heritage, Ian McKay and Robin Bates look at how state planners, key politicians, and cultural figures such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, long-time premier Angus L. Macdonald, and novelist Thomas Raddall were all instrumental in forming "tourism/history." The authors argue that Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline - on the brutal British expulsion of Acadians from Nova Scotia - became a template a new kind of profit-making history that exalted whiteness and excluded ethnic minorities, women, and working class movements. A remarkable look at the intersection of politics, leisure, and the presentation of public history, In the Province of History is a revealing account of how a region has both used and distorted its own past.

Contents:

How a land without antiquities became the province of history

This is the province primeval : Evangeline and the beginnings of tourism/history

All the world was safe and happy : the innocence of Will R. Bird

Down the twisting path of destiny : the impossible libralism of Thomas Raddall

Marketing race : Angus L. Macdonald, Tartanism, and the cultural politics of whiteness

Of runic stones and Lockean dreams : the triumvirate and its treasures, 1935-1964

Is the romance ended?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-7735-8331-9

OCLC:

767732174