Volume 28, 2025 Access to current issues of this journal requires a subscription.

EN:

George Harvey lingers in our cultural history today only as a footnote, faintly remembered as the first headmaster of Halifax’s new Victoria School of Art and Design in 1887. His wife Priscilla is not remembered at all. Their early lives were lived in bohemian London. Once settled in Halifax, they were well liked and respected, but their local roots ran neither deep nor strong. After the events of 2–3 June 1889 and George Harvey’s subsequent departure from the city six years later, they were briefly subjects of interest, then gradually forgotten. This article revisits their world, reclaims their lives, and gives them the voices they so richly deserve.

EN:

Robert Borden, the political leader who led Canada through the Great War, has been largely overlooked. This paper attempts to answer two questions: what was Sir Robert Borden’s leadership style and how effective was it?

The first portion of the paper provides a brief overview of Borden’s early life and political career. This is followed by an examination of his early tenure as prime minister prior to the outbreak of war, starting with his appointment in 1911 and covering topics such as the naval debate and the associated stonewalling of Borden’s policies by the Liberals. The paper continues by describing Borden’s leadership style and its effectiveness during the First World War by examining notable issues, such as the conscription crisis, the 1917 election, and issues caused by members of his cabinet, including Samuel Hughes. The paper concludes by stating that while Borden’s leadership was ill suited to peacetime and largely overshadowed by more charismatic politicians, he was a capable, methodical, calculating, and determined leader who successfully led Canada through the crucible of the Great War.

EN:

More than a century after the outbreak of the First World War, the perception of a monolithically enthusiastic public response to the war’s commencement has endured in the popular imagination. While scholars have produced a large corpus of works dissecting and refuting the myth of unchallenged war enthusiasm among European populations during the summer of 1914, there have been relatively few comparable challenges to the narrative in a Canadian context. By comparing the attitudes expressed by Halifax’s two most widely circulated daily newspapers—the Liberal-leaning Morning Chronicle and the Conservative-affiliated Halifax Morning Herald—between the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the British Empire’s first bloodletting at Mons, this article explores how initially divisive the popular press reaction was toward the possibility, and eventual reality, of Halifax’s participation in a major European War. Considering these divisions within the Halifax press as symptomatic of wider popular dissention of opinion, it is demonstrated how the Maritimes’ largest urban population was far from unanimous in their reaction to the July Crisis and the outbreak of the First World War.

EN:

In 1892 Joseph Bernstein arrived in Halifax, where he shared with other members of the small Jewish community a typical pattern of commercial/trades employment until 1899 when he became an immigration interpreter at the deepwater terminus. His stable work life came to an abrupt halt in 1908 when he was dismissed from the federal government service. At first, he blamed this turn of events on the vindictiveness of five Jewish families involved in a dispute over the suitability of a marriage partner for his third daughter. But when Bernstein delved deeper and realized that his fate was worse than that of two Gentile immigration physicians in Halifax who misbehaved in the same season, he decided that antisemitism had determined his fate. His identification with Alfred Dreyfus may have been inspired by cinematic depictions of the injustice endured by that Jewish French soldier.

EN:

While the reciprocal relationship between law and race is complex and multifaceted, it has deep historical roots in colonial legal systems that played a crucial role in producing and perpetuating racial inequalities. The effects of these historical injustices persist today, evident in the numerous examples of racial disparities across various aspects of life, including land ownership. This article aims to uncover the role of settler-colonial land laws in creating and exacerbating land-based racial inequalities in colonial land grants, with a specific focus on those affecting the Black Refugees of the War of 1812.