A History of Nova Scotia Page


Book #1: The Lion & The Lily. (Now Available As A Book)

Introduction

My book on Acadia consists of seven parts: Acadia#1, Early Settlement and Baronial Battles: 1605-90; Acadia#2, Port Royal and The English Takeover: 1690-1712; Acadia#3, The Early Days of Louisbourg: 1713-1744; Acadia#4, First Siege of Louisbourg: 1745; Acadia#5, Intermission: 1746-1754; Acadia#6, 1755: The Taking of Beauséjour and the Deportation of the Acadians; and Acadia#7, Second Siege of Louisbourg: 1758. It is my goal to link, by using Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), the variously listed matters directly to within my work, exactly to the place where I treat the subject. The person using this site may "click" in to any place and to read, and, maybe, in time, to see and to hear the stirring historical events that have occurred in Nova Scotia since its beginnings.

Permit me a few short prefatory remarks:

History, in a perfect world, it is thought, should occupy a pure place on the larger canvas of literature: to take its place amongst all forms of literature -- unadulterated. The brilliant English writer, Macaulay, contrasted1 the following notions: poetry and philosophy; imagination and truth; and, romantic literature and history. Macaulay observed that each element in the pair is hostile to the another, each, having an exclusive right to the territory occupied. Good histories, in the proper sense of the word - we have not. But we have good historical romances2 and good historical essays. My goal is to write a series of good historical essays on the early history of Nova Scotia which might turn, metamorphic like, into a whole history, someday; but, it will never be a pure history. The people, the dates, the places: they are all as accurate as I possibly can make them after much research carried out over many years amongst the published materials on Nova Scotia, of which we have a wealth.3 The persons to whom I refer are in fact real people who made indelible marks on the Nova Scotia that I have come to know. These people, however, including the historical characters who kept contemporaneous notes, were each, like everyone else in the human race, tinged with romance and subject to the uncontrollable events in which they turned: this is the stuff of which "true romance" is made. These romantic events glisten like diamonds in the pages of Nova Scotia history.

And now, I direct the reader to Book 1, Part 1, "Early Settlement & Baronial Battles: 1605-90."

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NOTES:

1 See Macaulay's first paragraph in his essay on the English constitutional expert, Henry Hallam.

2 Thomas Raddall, a very readable author of Nova Scotia history, is one, however, who pretty well stuck to the romantic vain.

3 Nova Scotian historians are fortunate as they have several relations written by persons who were eye-witnesses to our most interesting history, including, as for example, Amherst, Knox, Lawrence, Mascarene, Warren, and Wolfe. "Yet," as Macaulay has said, "whoever attempts to digest this vast mass of materials into a consistent narrative will find the task a difficult one."

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[The Lion & The Lily -- Book 1 (1500-1763)]
[Settlement, Revolution & War -- Book 2 (1760-1815)]
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