TBT: Harvey Amani Whitfield’s “The Struggle over Slavery in the Maritime Colonies.”

I have to apologize for being late to get a blog post up this week as I have just returned from a week’s vacation with no internet, cellular network coverage, or television. My initial plans to post an excellent piece by a history MA student – a post that will appear next week – were derailed when I saw what had happened in Virginia, and by the President’s initially muted response to it – a response that soon evolved into a full-throated defence of white supremacy. And while I hold hope that these sorts of sentiments are not to be found in Atlantic Canada, reading the comments on any news article detailing the controversy in Halifax over the Edward Cornwallis statue suggests otherwise. Indeed, I recently co-authored a post about Cornwallis that received a fair amount of attention, and part of that attention came in the form of racist comments posted to the Acadiensis blog – comments that, as blog editor, I chose not to make public for obvious reasons. In light of these ongoing issues, today’s Throwback Thursday piece is Harvey Amani Whitfield’s “The Struggle over Slavery in the Maritime Colonies.” As Whitfield reminds us, the demise of slavery in the Maritimes unleashed a new and unprecedented wave of racism in the region.

https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/view/20066/23079