By Michael Boudreau On 23 April 1955, following an eleven-day trial, twenty-six-year-old Lina Thibodeau was sentenced to death for the murder of her husband, Joseph Claude Thibodeau, in Madawaska County, New Brunswick.  In announcing its guilty verdict, the jury also added a recommendation of mercy. The presiding judge then informed Thibodeau that her execution, by hanging, was scheduled for 28 June 1955.  According to the Telegraph Journal, Lina Thibodeau, an “attractive blond”, was the first “member of her sex to face the death penalty in this province in modern times.” Lina Thibod ..read more

SARAH ELIZABETH CHUTE Des témoignages historiques d’esclaves et de Loyalistes noirs attestent de la façon dont les colonies des Maritimes et des Antilles furent liées par l’esclavage. Ces sources fournissent parfois des preuves des émotions, des attitudes et des actions de personnes noires qui furent confrontées à une violence extrême. Les Noirs affranchis et les esclaves noirs étaient aux prises avec leur propre non-liberté et faisaient face à la même oppression que leurs pairs antillais. Les variations qu’on observe dans leurs vies soulignent toute la gamme des conséquences subies et des lut ..read more

STEFANIE R. SLAUNWHITE L’école secondaire Graham Creighton, située dans la région relativement isolée d’Eastern Shore, dans le comté d’Halifax, a fait l’objet d’un projet pilote en faveur de l’intégration en Nouvelle-Écosse. Situé à Cherry Brook, l’établissement a ouvert en tant qu’école intégrée en 1964 et a servi d’endroit où l’on rassemblait les élèves des communautés noires environnantes et ceux des communautés blanches adjacentes pour se conformer à la politique d’intégration du conseil scolaire local. Cependant, si elle était une politique du conseil scolaire, l’intégration n’était pas s ..read more

By Wade Pfaff THE STUDY OF JAZZ IN CANADA’S BLACK COMMUNITIES must begin with the fascinating stories of the lives of the first generation of big band leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, who overcame grave personal and professional obstacles due to their skin color in a turbulent time. Although these African Canadian musicians struggled to make lives for themselves as professionals, the fast-paced changes taking place in the music industry after the Second World War and the Canadian media’s lack of attention combined to make them invisible to all but a few historians. This research note examines t ..read more

By J.B. McLachlan Scotsmen everywhere will, on the 25th, be celebrating the hundred and forty-ninth anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. He is more of a patron saint to Scotsmen than St. Andrew, his name and life being better known and his anniversary more generally kept. Not more than one Scotsman in a hundred, if asked when is St. Andrew’s Day, could answer correctly straightaway, while ninety-nine out of every hundred of them could do so in regard to Burns Day. Robert Burns Why the memory of Burns should thus be enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen seems the more strange when it i ..read more

Everyone at Acadiensis would like to congratulate Chantal Richard and Nicole Boudreau for winning an Author Recognition Award by the York Sunbury Historical Society for their research note “Applying a Gender Lens to Vocabularies of Identity in French- and English-Language Newspapers in New Brunswick and Acadie, 1880–1900.” You can read the award winning note here: https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/view/31559 Nicole Boudreau and Chantal Richard receive their Author Recognition Award, presented by the York Sunbury Historical Society at a ceremony hosted by the lieutenant-g ..read more

Richard Judd and Brian Payne, editors How have you engaged the nature around you during the COVID-19 pandemic? Have you found new or renewed appreciation for the nature of a local environment? What methodological challenges did you face as a result of pandemic-induced isolation? The editors for this anthology are soliciting papers on local and community environments in the northeast region.  We wish to engage environmental scholars in a discussion on local, backyard, neighborhood, or community environments including, but not limited to, parks, playgrounds, sanctuaries, waterscapes, nature ..read more

Coming soon ..read more

By Jacob Remes In March 2022, I returned to Halifax for the first time since 2009. Even though I cut my teeth in Nova Scotia history, I hadn’t been back since the summer I finished the research for the dissertation that became my first book. When I returned 13 years later, I did so leading a group of mostly American students as part of a program my university runs called the Americas Scholars. Top undergraduate students apply for an almost free study trip led by a professor, preceded and followed by a zero-credit seminar that places the trip in an intellectual and thematic context.[1] Students ..read more

LE FRANÇAIS SUIT CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS In May 2023, York University in Toronto, Ontario will host the 102nd annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The CHA annual meeting will be in-person with a very limited number of hybrid sessions. Reflective of the Congress 2023 theme “Reckonings and Re-Imaginings,” the CHA conference theme for 2023 is Difficult Histories in a Global Context. The identification of unmarked graves on the grounds of Residential Schools in 2021 has brought Canadians face-to-face with one of the most ..read more