Author Archives: The Acadiensis Blog

Fiona Polack, ed. Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). By Natasha Simon The vanishing Indian has been a persistent image in the settler imagination: it points to an indistinguishable time in the past … Continue reading →

By Henry Adam Svec Also an artist and a writer, Mary MacDonald was a curator who pushed back against the standard definition of the word (according to the OED, “guardian”) in favor of a more open and auditory orientation towards … Continue reading →

By Corey Slumkoski (and Martha Walls) Please Note: Today’s blog post is more personal than historical. Yesterday was my daughter’s sixth birthday. Today is World Down Syndrome Day. These two things are related. Seven years ago I knew nothing about … Continue reading →

By Paul Chafe In his hilarious one-man show, To the Wall, Newfoundland actor, comedian, and gift-to-the-world, Andy Jones, reflects on a particularly Newfoundland tendency to imagine the worst possible outcome for any situation: “I don’t know if you do this, … Continue reading →

By Kait Pinder A newly appointed senator, David Adams Richards is the author of more than a dozen novels and many more short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Richards’s creative work is usually set in New Brunswick’s Miramichi region … Continue reading →

 By Lyn Bennett Pre-modern medical remedies included some of the familiar and much of the strange. Among the strangest – at least to our 21st-century sensibilities – is the “frog spawn water” specified in medical recipes well into the 19th … Continue reading →

By Dana Campbell Every Cape Bretoner knows the heartache of leaving home – or, of having a loved one leave home. While the Sydney steel plant and the numerous coalmines use to prosper, most of the heavy industry in the … Continue reading →

By R. Blake Brown  Every historian hopes that their work will engage and interest the public. However, when I told friends and family the topic of my first book – a history of the jury system in nineteenth-century Canada – … Continue reading →

By Gail Campbell The retirement of Beckey Daniel at the end of this month [ed. note: Today is Beckey’s last day at Acadiensis] marks the end of an era in the history of Acadiensis. For nearly forty years, Beckey has … Continue reading →

By Paul W. Bennett Few subjects in Canadian sport arouse as much passion as debating the origins of ice hockey, Canada’s mythical national pastime.  Hockey fans, hobbyists, and even a few sports scholars have been known to “mix it up” … Continue reading →