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The emergence, dominance, and alarmingly rapid retreat of modernist industrial capitalism on Cape Breton Island during the "long twentieth century" offers a particularly captivating window on the lasting and varied effects of deindustrialization. Now, at the tail end of the industrial moment in North American history, the story of Cape Breton Island presents an opportunity to reflect on how industrialization and deindustrialization have shaped human experiences. Covering the period between 1860 and the early 2000s, this volume looks at trade unionism, state and cultural responses to deindustrialization, including the more recent pivot towards the tourist industry, and the lived experiences of Indigenous and Black people. Rather than focusing on the separate or distinct nature of Cape Breton, contributors place the island within broad transnational networks such as the financial world of the Anglo-Atlantic, the Celtic music revival, the Black diaspora, Canadian development programs, and more. In capturing the vital elements of a region on the rural resource frontier that was battered by deindustrialization, the histories included here show how the interplay of the state, cultures, and transnational connections shaped how people navigated these heavy pressures, both individually and collectively.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Cape Breton in the Long Twentieth Century
Part 1: Formations1. Empire, Colonial Enterprise, and Speculation: Cape Breton's Coal Boom of the 1860s
Don Nerbas
2. "The Grand Old Game": The Complex History of Cricket in Cape Breton to 1863-1914
John G. Reid
3. Bridging Religion and Black Nationalism: The Founding of St. Philips African Orthodox Church and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Hall in Whitney Pier, 1900-1930
Claudine Bonner
4. An Invisible Minority: Acadians in Industrial Cape Breton
Ronald Labelle
5. The Disposition of the Ladies: Mi'kmaw Women and the Removal of Kun'tewiktuk / I King's Road Reserve, Sydney, Nova Scotia
Martha Walls
Part 2: Legacies6. C. B. Wade, Research Director and Labour Historian, 1944-50
David Frank
7. "Everybody Was Crying": Ella Barron, Dutch War Bride in Amsterdam and Ingonish, Cape Breton, 1923-2020
Ken Donovan
8. Twenty-First-Century Uses for Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Gaelic Song Collections: From Language Preservation to Revitalization and the Articulation of Cultural Values
Heather Sparling
9. Industrial Crisis and the Cape Breton Coal Miners at the End of the Long Twentieth Century, 1981-86
Lachlan MacKinnon
10. The Great Spawn: Aquaculture and Development on the Bras d'Or Lake
Will Langford
11. From Artifact to Living Cultures: Cape Breton's Tourism History and the Emergence of the Celtic Colours International Festival
Anne-Louise Semple and Del Muise
Afterword: Cape Breton as Microcosm of Capitalist Modernity
Alvin Finkel
List of Contributors
About the author
Lachlan MacKinnon is the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Post-industrial Communities and an associate professor of History at Cape Breton University. He is an active member of the Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time research partnership, and has published extensively on topics related to deindustrialization, labour history, and historical memory. His recent book,
Closing Sysco: Industrial Decline in Atlantic Canada's Steel City, examined the structural decline of the steel industry in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Andrew Parnaby is an associate professor of History and dean of Arts and Social Sciences at Cape Breton University. He is the author of many articles and books, including
Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from Fenians to Fortress America, with Reg Whitaker and Gregory S. Kealey, which received the Canada Prize in the Social Sciences by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2013.
