Booze 1829 — 1920 From my book, About Canada, Toronto, Civil Sector Press, 2012. For more than a century-and-a-half, Europeans had been killing North America’s Indians by giving them firewater—whisky, brandy, rum, port, sherry—in exchange for furs. Now, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Canada’s pioneer settlers were killing themselves with their […]
A daring female preacher in Nova Scotia was “completely extinguished,” the Halifax Novascotian reported, April 3, 1828 in the following item. We received by the Mail from Miramichi, a printed discourse, delivered at Newcastle, by a Mr. Coony, from the text “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” It was delivered for the purpose of […]
Nova Scotia needs “a general system of education,” financed by direct taxation, with teachers who are better than half-educated “lazy vagabonds,” George Young writes in the Halifax Novascotian. As elsewhere in British North America in the early 19th century, most Nova Scotians were illiterate, and relatively few children attended the only elementary schools, offered by […]