Archaeology in Acadie

Yesterday's News

Old newspapers are endlessly diverting. The events of the day appear afresh. Some of them we know through memory, but most of them have been forgotten. The language used is both familiar and distant. And then there are the ads. I'm tempted to order some "Ayer's Hair Vigor" now.

Newspapers were often the places where public conversations were held, and this includes news and announcements relating to archaeological discoveries. We often lament that antiquarian diggers did a poor job of documenting their work, but occasionally you catch pieces of it in the contemporary press.

Here's a fragment from the Sept. 18, 1891 edition of the "The Acadian and Kings County Times," aka the Wolfville Acadian. It was passed to me some years ago by Archivist Garry Shutlak of The Nova Scotia Archives, and now I'll share it with you.

Under the intriguing title of "An Interesting Archaeological Discovery," we learn that "Nearly everyone has placed the site of the old Acadian village of Grand Pre..."

This in itself is an interesting statement, as it pre-dates the establishment of the memorial park by more than a decade, and of the national historic site by more than half a century. It tells us that the site was well known and well visited, but this is not the scene of the action.

Rather, the story's focus is "About two miles west of modern Grand Pre," where "Mr. W. C. Archibald, while cutting away a dry sandy knoll, came suddenly, evidently, upon the remains of what was to be an old blacksmith shop."

Our anonymous reporter notes that about 4 feet of alluvial sediment covered this deposit, which consisted not only charcoal and slag (blacksmithing waste), but also two cartloads of foundation stones, some quite large.

The structure's floor was reportedly of clay that had been "beaten so hard that Mr. Archibald had to loosen it with the plow before the scoop would fill."

Not exactly modern archaeological methods.

It is further said that, about 12 years previously, Mr. Archibald "came upon the foundations of a house" a short distance away. Did it likewise fill his scoop?

The validity of claims like this are very difficult to assess on their own terms. Part of the problem is that testimony of this sort tends to blur the line between observation and inference. We can accept that 'something' was found, and even that that something was old and architectural, but how do we know whether it was part of the pre-Deportation Acadian landscape?

Diagnostic artifacts, like datable ceramics recovered from stratified deposits, are the archaeologist's preferred smoking guns. But those guns are silent here.

Nevertheless, the landscape itself may contain other clues. About two miles west of the Grand Pre rail station and its visible Acadian ruins (likely "the site of the old Acadian village of Grand Pre" to which our author refers), brings us to the eastern end of Wolfville. Here, two old Acadian roads met. And on the adjacent marsh, just east of Wolfville Harbour, an old Acadian d**e once stood.

Even so, we must resist the temptation to snap together puzzle pieces that do not quite fit. Mr. William Charles Archibald, who was a well known local figure, writer, businessman, and Civil War veteran (he fought with the Union Army), owned land and was active on the west side of Acadia University's campus in Wolfville. This stretches our two miles by some distance, breaking the association with the aforementioned roads and d**e.

Still, it's an interesting lead, and there may be other evidentiary associations.

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If you'd like to read yesterday's news, you'll find this article here, at the bottom of page 3.

https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.N_00092_18910918/1

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Archaeology at Louisbourg! Definitely worth a visit.

Mapping the Parish Cemetery of St-Charles-des-Mines, Grand-Pré

Soon, visitors to Grand-Pré National Historic Site will be able to better visualize the old parish cemetery of St-Charles-des-Mines, dating to 1688 - 1755. We’ve been working with Parks Canada to develop new interpretive signage for this part of the site, based on geophysical surveys conducted as part of our ongoing research program.

This cemetery has a fascinating back story and the history of its study is also pretty interesting.

To begin, establishing a parish was one of the first concerns of the early French inhabitants of Les Mines, the people we today call Acadians. They had come from the parish of St-Jean-Baptiste at Port-Royal in the early 1680s, and when Abbé St-Vallier, the future Bishop of Québec, visited Grand-Pré in 1686, the inhabitants asked him to send them a priest, promising in exchange to build a church and presbytery. By the time Joseph Gargas counted the inhabitants in his census of 1687-88, both priest and church were present.

The church, cemetery, and priest’s house were never mapped at large scale during the pre-Deportation period, and they make only the briefest of mentions in the historical record. Ironically, some of the best clues as to the lay of the ecclesiastical land at Grand-Pré come from the 1755 journal and orderly book of Lieut.-Col. John Winslow, the destroyer of the community and the man tasked with overseeing the deportation of the French inhabitants living in central Nova Scotia.

Following the deportations, New England immigrants from Connecticut took up these lands and established Horton Township. They and their descendants preserved a few memories of St-Charles-des-Mines, including its general location. Following the publication of Longfellow’s famous poem, Evangeline, in 1847, and the subsequent tourism boom facilitated by steam travel, these half-forgotten memories were reactivated.

Treasure hunters soon started digging for ‘relics’ at the supposed site of the old church. Two depressions had long been noted in this field, one said to be the church and the other the priest’s house. Near the first, an old well was found and immediately christened ‘Evangelin’s Well’. You can still see it on the site today.

Next, out in the field about 100m (330’) to the east, a wooden coffin was disinterred. Several, in fact, were exhumed over the next couple of decades. One was put on display at the local train station, and another in the parlour of a nearby guest house. It was largely in response to these actions that local businessman, politician, poet, and historian (and Acadian descendant) John Frederic Herbin purchased the land and sought to transform it into a commemorative park.

Herbin quarried stones from the nearby ruined cellars and built a monumental cross to mark the cemetery’s location. You can still see this as well, but it is not the original one. Decades of deterioration prompted Parks Canada staff to completely rebuild it in the early 1980s. This project afforded an opportunity to conduct archaeological investigations to see if graves were indeed present nearby. And, there were.

A modestly-sized excavation unit was opened on the north side of Herbin’s cross and the topsoil was removed. There, neatly outlined in the subsoil, four closely-spaced grave shafts could be discerned in the subsoil. They were visible because the natural soil layers were mixed during those long-ago burials. Parks Canada archaeologists continued their investigations by completely excavating one of the grave shafts, but instead of a coffin, they found only coffin nails and decayed traces of wood where the coffin had been. No human remains were observed.

This was largely where matters rested for a few more decades. Cultural memory had identified the cemetery’s location, John Frederic Herbin had memorialized it, and modern archaeology had verified it. Still, we did not know the cemetery’s extent. Was Herbin’s cross in the middle of the cemetery, or at one side?

There is also some question as to the number of burials. The surviving parish registers date only from 1707 – 1748. The settlement’s first 20 years and last 7 years are missing because the first and last of these books were destroyed by flooding caused by a hurricane in Louisiana in the late 1800s. The surviving books record 118 burials in which the individual’s remains were explicitly stated as having been interred in the parish cemetery, but dozens of others are listed as being buried - approximately 180 in total – and certainly most of these were interred in the parish cemetery.

We first attempted to map the unmarked burials with geophysics and additional archaeological excavations around 2010. By 2013-14, we had conducted a thorough program of geophysical investigations with electrical conductivity and magnetic susceptibility, but the results did not reveal convincing evidence of the cemetery. With Parks Canada’s permission, therefore, we took a more basic approach: archaeological excavation. Our method was non-intrusive, and we proceeded by removing only the topsoil in a narrow excavation unit, and the results successfully mapped the cemetery’s east and west boundaries. More impressive still, we uncovered part of the palisade line that John Winslow’s men erected in 1755 to protect their camp. It is important to note that no human remains were encountered during these investigations, as our excavations were only deep enough to detect and map the tops of the grave shafts.

Our most recent investigations took place between 2017-20 and were aided by ground-penetrating radar (GPR). This method is generally more effective for mapping graves than the previous methods, and this was certainly the case here. We used a 500MHz Noggin instrument and detected a great many unmarked burials: 289 to be specific.

The radar detected more burials than are listed in the parish registers, but we have already seen that this important documentary source is incomplete. There are also many years for which no burials are recorded in the surviving registers, and we know that there were stretches of time when no priests were present. Perhaps there are gaps in the record.

Even if so, the number of likely graves we mapped with GPR probably falls short of the total. Modern features such as hedges, rose bushes, trees, and even Herbin’s cross itself, obstructed the survey in many places. We can’t do very much about this. Therefore, I suspect the true number of burials likely exceeds 300.

Many of the reflective features we observed in the GPR data that we identified as graves were small in spatial extent. Sometimes with this kind of work, the instrument will detect only a part of a burial; sometimes it won’t see a burial at all. In many cases with this particular set of surveys, and you can see them in the map below, I think we are seeing the burials of infants and children.

Some might regard a high number of such burials as conflicting with the notion that old Acadie was an especially healthy and prosperous place. Compared with peer societies, it was relatively healthy and prosperous. However, in a world before modern medicine, especially before antibiotics and antivirals, even mild infections could be deadly. The first year of life was especially precarious, and we see confirmatory evidence of this fact in the surviving parish registers. Of the ca. 180 recorded burials in the parish registers, at least 32 are of infants.

Generally speaking, the graves we observed both archaeologically and through GPR are aligned east-west, in accordance with standard practices of the day. And, unlike in modern cemeteries, in which burials are arranged in orderly rows, this was a burying ground. Graves were often closely spaced, sometimes cutting into one another. If I had to guess, I’d suspect that families buried their dead loved ones in certain areas of the burying ground.

They may have once been memorialized with perishable markers, such as wooden crosses, but these have long ago disappeared and we have seen no evidence of carved stone grave markers. Burials at St-Charles-des-Mines – like others from this period – are also quite shallow. The one excavated by Parks Canada in 1982 was found to be only 70cm (or 2.3’) deep. Others are deeper, as detected by radar, and still others may exist at a greater depth, but beyond the range of the radar, whose effective depth of pe*******on was limited to about 1.4m (4.5’) in this dense, clay-rich soil.

All the above is an outline only. One could write a hefty article, or indeed a small book, on this fascinating place. In fact, we’ve applied for funding for an even more advanced GPR, and if we are successful in obtaining this instrument, this is one of the sites to which we hope to return.

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If you’d like to read more about this work, elements of it have been published in the following places (with more to come):

Fowler, Jonathan and Lockerby, Earle. 2025. John Winslow at Grand-Pré: Diaries of the Acadian Deportations Volume 2. Kentville: Gaspereau Press.

Fowler, Jonathan and Noël, Stéphane. 2017. Poetry is Always Truer than History: The Curious Parentage of Acadian Archaeology, in Brooks, A. and Mehler, N. (eds.) The Country Where My Heart Is: Historical Archaeologies of Nationalism and National Identity. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, pp. 37-68.

Fowler, Jonathan. 2016. John Winslow's Fingerprints: A Case of Archaeological Detection. American-Canadian Genealogist, vol. 42, no. 145, pp. 39-45.

Also, here are a couple of great articles that involve interpretations of the parish registers of St-Jean-Baptiste in Port-Royal / Annapolis Royal:

Hynes, Gisa. 1973. Some Aspects of the Demography of Port Royal, 1650-1755. Acadiensis, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 3-17.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/view/11337

LeBlanc, Ronnie-Gilles. 2015. La Société historique acadienne, Les Cahiers, vol. 46, no. 2, pp. 57-78.
https://societehistoriqueacadienne.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/vol-46-no-2.pdf

Free Public Lecture:
"Fashioning Acadians: Clothing and Cultural Identity Before 1755"
with Hilary Doda

Tues., Jul. 14, 2026
6pm (Atlantic Standard Time)
Pictou Library, 99 Water St., Pictou, NS
and online via Zoom (details below)

The Pictou Library's summer lecture series will conclude next week with what is certain to be a fascinating illustrated talk by Hilary Doda.

As an archaeologist, I am especially looking forward to this talk, which draws heavily from Hilary's excellent book, "Fashioning Acadians: Clothing in the Atlantic World, 1650–1750," published in 2023. Not only is it beautifully written, this book brings a great deal of hitherto disarticulated and unpublished archaeological evidence into a compelling interpretive frame.

Clothing and dress - encompassing what is available, to whom, and the choices made in combining and modifying elements - offer a very special kind of access into the mind in the past. Through clothing and dress, we can see not only macroeconomic history, but skill and choice at the most intimate and local levels of the community, the family, and the individual. I'll put a link to it below to Hilary's book, which I highly recommend.

Here is the library's posted description of the lecture and the presenter:

"The Acadians of Nova Scotia have a long and proud history, but as much as we know about the big events that shaped their world, more remains unknown about their daily routines and domestic lives prior to the Deportation. One way of getting at that unwritten history is by looking at the artifacts, the material culture, that they left behind. Hilary Doda’s study of the material culture of dress and textiles of pre-Deportation Acadia paints a new and different picture of fashionable life in “the forest primeval.” Based on her book, Fashioning Acadians, this talk will highlight some of the small luxuries and broad questions of identity that made the Acadians distinct."

"Hilary Doda is the Project Coordinator at the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy, and teaches global dress history at Dalhousie University’s Costume Studies program. She holds an Interdisciplinary PhD from Dalhousie, and her research focuses on the material culture of dress and textiles in the early modern Atlantic. Her first book, Fashioning Acadians (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023), examined the development of new clothing vernaculars and the shaping of colonial identity in pre-deportation Acadia, and was shortlisted for the Canadian Historical Society’s “Best Book in Canadian History” prize in 2024. Her next project is an exploration of garment remaking in colonial families, and what that can tell us about the role of luxury textiles in social and domestic spaces."

Please feel free to share widely, as it would be great to end this successful lecture series on a high note.

To attend this lecture via ZOOM,
email [email protected] for a streaming link.

For a poster highlighting the talk, scroll through the library's page at https://www.facebook.com/PARLevents

Finally, to order a copy of Hilary's very interesting book, "Fashioning Acadians" (2023), have a look here:
https://www.mqup.ca/Books/F/Fashioning-Acadians2

Free Public Lecture:
Dr. James Lees presents: "Sap and Sea Power: Nova Scotia, Tar-Making, and the Naval Stores Industry in the long 18th-Century"

Tues. July 7, at 11:00 a.m. (Atlantic Standard Time) [note the morning start time]
at the Pictou Library, 99 Water St., Pictou, N.S., or on Zoom (details below)

This is an example of a subject that almost none of us think about today, but was very front-and-center in the minds of people long ago. Tar was a very important and versatile commodity.

Come to think of it, even the Sieur de Poutrincourt proved this in 1607 at Port Royal. When preparing two longboats, he and his men discovered that they had neglected to bring tar from La Rochelle for caulking the vessels. Marc Lescarbot tells how Poutrincourt collected "a quantity of spruce gum" from the forests.

"He had a quantity of bricks made, whereof he fashioned an open furnace, in which he put an alembic, made of a number of kettles set one inside the other, which he filled with these gums and barks; then having carefully covered it, we lit a fire round about it, by the force of which the gum enclosed in the said alembic was melted and fell down into a basin."

Presto: another example of early colonial industry at the Port Royal habitation.

James will not be dwelling on this site, however. According to the talk description:

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In the early modern world, tar was as essential to a fleet of wooden ships as paint is to the steel-hulled vessels of today. Without it, ships would have foundered from rot as quickly as they could be launched. Tar was so important to the Royal Navy that officials were obsessed with securing access to tar, finding new ways to distill it from pine trees, assaying its quality, and promoting its manufacture in the colonies.

Despite Nova Scotia being a richly-forested possession in the maritime empires of both France and Britain, tar receives little mention in histories of our province, such that we know precious little about it. Was tar being manufactured in Nova Scotia, and if so, by whom? Who was using it and how important was it to the colonial economy? More tangibly, how exactly was it being made?

In this presentation, Dr. James G. Lees will discuss his latest findings in his ongoing pursuit of these questions, highlighting the place of Nova Scotia in the wider naval stores economy of the eighteenth century, the realities of naval shipbuilding in the age of sail, and the evidence he has unearthed for the practice of tar making in our province. He will also discuss a planned reenactment of the tar-making process based on his research, and will present a replica eighteenth-century outfit created for that purpose.

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Knowing James, and appreciating his many talents and capabilities, I am really looking forward to this presentation.

A little bit about him:

"Dr. James G. Lees is an historian, archaeologist, and museum curator based in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. He is the owner of Dominion Historical Consulting Ltd., and the curator of the Pictou County History Museum. He is also an adjunct professor at St. Mary’s University. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar, and an MA and BA from Dalhousie University.

Dr. Lees’ areas of historical expertise and interest are wide-ranging, and include the history of empire, colonisation, environment, surveying, cartography, and state formation. He possesses expert skills in archival research methods, palaeography, transcription, and secondary source research, and is adept at analysing a wide range of archival sources, from surveys and maps to council minutes and legislation, with particularly strong experience in records created by colonial governments.

His doctoral research focused on the state use of forestry surveys to assert control over timber resources in the British Atlantic. In the archaeological realm, Dr. Lees’ experience spans sites ranging from the early seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries. He is familiar with a range of traditional and modern archaeological methods, including the use of LiDAR and ground penetrating radar, and actively works on consultation projects with the Mi’kmaq. His current research projects include a Nova Scotia Museum funded project exploring the manufacture of tar in the eighteenth century, and two archaeological reconnaissance projects – one to locate French and Acadian settlements in Merigomish harbour, and another surveying the East River of Pictou, both in partnership with the Pictou County Historical Society."

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As usual, refreshments will be provided (come 25-20 minutes early to enjoy some sandwiches, sweets, tea and coffee). All are welcome to attend.

If you are unable to attend in person, you can watch live on ZOOM. Please email [email protected] for a streaming link.

Finally, a Facebook event for the July 7th talk can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/856553640856021

Fort Point, LaHave

We spent a fun day in the field last week dodging rain showers and collecting geophysical data at Fort Point, the site of Fort Sainte-Marie-de-Grâce. This was, for a brief time in the early 1630s, the capital of Acadia.

These days, our student archaeologists and community partners, under the direction of the talented Wesley Weatherbee (who took this photo), are getting back to work exploring the site through excavation. The team has already found several features and artifacts dating back to the early 1600s, and we are using geophysics to target further explorations.

Archaeological geophysics encompasses a variety of methods, of which ground-penetrating radar is probably the most well known. The instrument pictured here is a Geonics EM38B, an electromagnetic induction instrument, which we have found over the years to be especially good at detecting buried stone features, like foundations of buildings. We can thank our friend, colleague, and retired businessman-geophysicist Duncan McNeill not only for this instrument, but also for helping to pioneer its archaeological application.

Archaeologists tend to use geophysics to:

1. Find sites;
2. Determine their limits/boundaries; and
3. Map them carefully and in detail, often preparatory to excavation.

In this case - not an unfamiliar circumstance for us - the site was already significantly excavated in the 1970s, without the benefit of geophysics. The whole area has also been heavily transformed by construction activities through the 19th, 20th, and even early 21st centuries. Geophysics is therefore assisting us in mapping and interpreting all of these changes. Only then can we hope that it will guide our team of excavators to targets of value and interest.

We'll have more to say about this project and its fascinating results in the coming weeks. And if the timing and weather co-operate, you may be able to see the excavation yourself.

More soon (we still have data to process), and please consider supporting the good people at the Fort Point Museum:

https://www.facebook.com/fortpointmuseum/

"Nova Scotia's 'No': Rejecting the American Revolution, 1775-1781"
Free Public Lecture
Tues., June 30, at 6pm (Atlantic Standard Time)
Pictou Library, 99 Water Street, Pictou, NS
And Zoom (details below)

The second talk in the Pictou Library's summer lecture series will feature Dr. Adam Jortner. As he describes it:

"Nova Scotia got an invitation to join the USA in 1776, and they said no thanks. The British province and its waters became a battleground for the next four years. Why did Nova Scotians and their government steer clear of America in 1776? And does that affect the way our province faces the USA today?"

Investigations like this are interesting for the way in which they can draw connections between past and present. In so doing, they often reveal how dispositions and decisions from long ago can have long - if often unacknowledged - legacies.

I've never met Adam Jortner but he strikes me as a very interesting guy. His bio describes him as:

"...an affiliated faculty member at Acadia University and former Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Professor of Religion in the Department of History at Auburn University (Auburn, Alabama). Adam now makes his home in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Adam is the creator of "Years That Changed History: 1776", which premieres online in June 2026. You can learn more about this 24-episode podcast at https://plus.thegreatcourses.com/years-that-changed-history-1776 (and episodes are also available on AppleTV, Roku, and Amazon FireTV, too)."

"Adam received his PhD in History from the University of Virginia. He has written and lectured extensively on the history of religion and democracy and the history of imagination. He is the author of four books, including The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier (Oxford University Press, 2011); Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2017); No Place for Saints: Mobs and Mormons in Jacksonian America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) and A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2024). In addition, Adam formerly worked on the script team of the TV show "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?" Adam is available as a speaker and presenter on the American Revolution, the history of democracy, freedom of religion, U.S. religious history, and monster movies."

At least somebody who attends this lecture, either in person or via Zoom, should ask a question about monsters.

Refreshments will be provided for those who attend the talk in person (arrive 30-20 minutes in advance so you don't miss the sandwiches, sweets, tea and coffee). All are welcome.

If you can't be there in person, pop some popcorn and fire up the ZOOM. Be sure to email [email protected] in advance for a streaming link.

Finally, a Facebook event for the talk can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/27104458145878776

L.M. Montgomery in Halifax

One of the great things about old places is the stories they contain. Sometimes, their stories help to create new stories.

This was the case with Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the immensely popular 'Anne of Green Gables' books. We tend to associate her with PEI, home of her fictional heroine, or Ontario, where she lived for much of her later life.

But Montgomery also lived for a time in Halifax, studying English at Dalhousie University. Archibald MacMechan, the prominent writer and historian, was one of her teachers (he also taught Ernest Buckler, Helen Creighton, and Hugh MacLennan). Later, she worked at a downtown newspaper office that is now a well-known pub. Her lively journal of these years makes fascinating reading.

A fictionalized version of Halifax appears in Montgomery's work as Kingsport, and now you can see how both places - the real and the imagined - meet.

A team at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island has created a really interesting digital StoryMap, "Walking Tour of Montgomery’s Halifax," which I just learned about from the CBC's website.

Here is the link:
https://lmmontgomery.ca/research-and-resources/walking-tour-of-montgomerys-halifax/

Late Victorian (and early 20th century) Halifax was a smallish place. The 1901 census counted just under 41,000 inhabitants. Sometimes, these people and their interests also mingle in interesting ways.

I've already mentioned some of Montgomery's old professor's other students. MacMechan was no stranger to local history, and in the early 20th century he edited two important collections of primary source documents relating to the early colonial period for the Nova Scotia Archives (links below). Shortly before his death, he published 'Red Snow on Grand Pre', a curious little history book based on incidents in Acadian history. The title, as well as the largest section of the book, relates to the 1747 Battle of Grand-Pré, a subject in which we have written previously. Around the same time, he was instrumental in erecting a bronze statue of Edward Cornwallis in a park across the railway station in south end Halifax.

Whether Montgomery and MacMechan ever discussed any of these subjects is unknown, at least to me, but it they had done so, it would have been a fascinating conversation to overhear.

MacMechan's primary source volumes are available here:
https://archives.novascotia.ca/heartland/

Free Public Lecture:
"French and Acadians in 18th-Century Nova Scotia: Upheaval and Beyond" by A.J.B. Johnston

Tues. Jun 23, 6:00 p.m. (Atlantic Standard Time)
Pictou Library, 99 Water St., Pictou, N.S.
(also via Zoom - details below)

To those less familiar with this period, the title of this talk may seem slightly odd. Aren't the Acadians French? But the distinction being drawn here is important: the French immigrants we now call Acadians had, by the middle of the 18th century, developed patterns of living - economic, political, demographic - that distinguished their society from those of the Old World (which itself was a cultural mosaic), and from those of other colonies.

When trying to understand this period, therefore, historians tend to separate the Acadians political community not only from the state officials who administered France's overseas empire, but also from other French colonial populations. The people of the St. Lawrence River valley are one such group, and the fisherfolk and town-dwellers of Fortress Louisbourg are another. Most of this latter group were French, but few of them had Acadian origins.

Differences like these contributed to the varied and even divergent outlooks from which events were perceived and political action was taken in those consequential years of the mid-18th century.

Historian (and more recently, novelist), A. J. B. Johnston is one of a relatively small number of researchers who has spent decades coming to grips with these and related details of colonial life in northeastern North America. He was for many years a historian with Parks Canada, where he wrote extensively on French colonial history. His work on Louisbourg and Grand-Pré is essential reading for anyone who is serious about understanding those places and their people. Such is the quality of his scholarly output that the government of France named Johnston a chevalier of its Ordre des Palmes académiques (Order of Academic Laurels) in 2008. I don't know if he has a round table, but I think it is safe to assert that he is a knight.

In this extensively illustrated presentation, Johnston plans to speak about "the fascinating history of Louisbourg, Grand-Pré, and the dramatic upheaval that took place in the Maritimes during the 1750s. Those far-reaching and dramatic events shaped our region's history going forward."

This event offers us an opportunity to engage with one of the great minds in this field, who is also a very down-to-earth and approachable guy/knight. Mark those calendars.

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We have received intelligence that refreshments will be provided for those attending the lecture in person.

The unrefreshed - and I may be one of these - may still participate by emailing [email protected] to obtain a Zoom link.

The organizers have also posted an event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1500885264746768/