The Mount Allison Department of Geography & Environment, The Centre for Canadian Studies and McGill Queens University Press invite you to join Joan Marshall at Meet the Author Wine & Cheese Reception, Thursday, March 5 from 7:00-9:00 pm at the Marshlands Inn, 55 Bridge St., Sackville, N.B.

Joan Marshall is the author of “Tides of Change on Grand Manan Island: Culture and Belonging in a Fishing Community”.  Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Everyone is welcome.  There is no fee for this event.

A book launch for Painted Poems is scheduled for Sunday, June 1, 2008 at 3:00 p.m. at Owen’s Art Gallery, Mount Allison University Campus, 61 York St., Sackville, NB. There will also be an exhibit of some of the twenty paintings in the book. Sackville artist, Angelica De Benedetti and Moncton poet, Margaret Patricia Eaton, have combined their talents to produce a book entitled Painted Poems: inspired by the natural beauty and history of south-east New Brunswick. This publication is supported by the ‘08 Cultural Capitals of Canada Project, Town of Sackville and the Westmorland Historical Society. Both the artist and poet are passionate about the beauty of the area as well as the intriguing history. When they realised that their work complimented each other’s in the portrayal of the Chignecto region, the idea of a book was born.  While De Benedetti and Eaton have been actively engaged in producing the book since January 2007, it really represents a lifetime of work. One of the twenty paintings reproduced was actually completed in 1977, while the earliest poem was written in 1985. There are also paintings and poems completed as recently as 2007. Also included are detailed historical/geographical notes and a map drawn by artist Peter Manchester of Sackville.  

Tidewater Books is thrilled to present local author Peter Manchester reading from his newest publication, “Fabulous Fabrications from Busted Hockey Gear”, Wednesday, December 1, 2004 at 7:30 pm at Tidewater Books. All are welcome.

In his breakaway bestseller “50 Things to Make with a Broken Hockey Stick”, Peter Manchester transformed the agony of defeated sticks into the thrill of a new creation, with a slap of good humour that kept readers chuckling all the way through the book. Now, with the publication of “Fabulous Fabrications from Busted Hockey Gear”, the hockey stick handyman has turned his creative talents to the rest of the equipment left to fester in the basement – helmets, pads, gloves, skates, and even cast-off hockey uniforms.

In this oh-so-Canadian book of how-to humour, a wonderland of ‘construct-o-rama experiences” awaits devotees of rink junk. Who would have thought of an electric guitar for only $15 or a drum set made entirely of cast-off helmets? A leather skate becomes a bird or a ball cap; a dismantled helmet becomes a mask; a pair of pants becomes an amazing sling chair. Basement artistes can build a lap steel guitar from sticks, fashion a guiro from a bit of stick and a plastic knee protector, mount a row of helmets into a set of timbales, and presto! a garage band like no other. A tent, a crouching dog, a mechanical cheerleader – with Manchester’s step-by-step instructions and clear, humorous illustrations, all these things and more can rise like, well, like a squawking bird, if not a phoenix, from a mound of hockey detritus.

Hockey and art may seem like an unlikely mix but don’t tell that to artist/illustrator Peter Manchester. A long-time practitioner of eco-art, he has been turning trash into treasures for over a decade. Transforming hockey sticks into works of useful art was a natural transition for someone with his unique sense of humour and vision.

The son of a Methodist missionary, Manchester spent his childhood in the US, Europe, and Africa. He moved to New Mexico in the 1970s to attend university and stayed for 25 years. In the late 1990s, he followed his wife and children to Sackville, New Brunswick, where he ‘discovered” hockey. He has been huge fan ever since. When he isn’t dreaming up new uses for hockey sticks or goalie masks, Peter Manchester is a busy illustrator and painter. His paintings have been exhibited at galleries such as the Albuquerque Museum, the Tamarind Institute, the Owens Art Gallery, and the Confederation Centre of the Arts Gallery, and can be found in numerous private and public collections.

trade | 297 pages | ISBN:0-921415-08-7
Year Published:2000 – German-Canadian Historical Association | Tidewater Price: $29.95

At first glance, reading Rainer Hempel’s New Voices on the Shores:Early Pennsylvania German Settlements in New Brunswick appears as a monumental task. Without including the preface, list of abbreviations, and other apparatus, the text runs 486 pages inclusive of documentation, family genealogies, illustrations, maps, and an extensive index. The thickness of New Voices, however, disguises a remarkably effective presentation that marks an important contribution to German-Canadian history and to CanadianStudies in general.
The seven chapters, epilogue, and introduction of New Voices trace an important chapter in Atlantic Canadian history: the early stage of European Atlantic re-settlement after the British Empire secured its hold over the former French colony of Acadia. From the British imperial perspective, rapid re-settlement was essential to the development of the colony and to ensuring its control over a region in which both First Nations and scattered Acadians lived. As Hempel explains, however, the reasons why Pennsylvania Germans elected to come to what is now New Brunswick were markedly different than those of the British. For the Pennsylvania Germans who settled in southern New Brunswick, migration to Atlantic Canada was part of an older and on-going history of population movement occasioned by a wide variety of factors.
What is important about New Voices on the Shores, however, is not Hempel’s investigation of the causes of German and German-American migration. On a macro level, Hempel’s argument about migration follows already well-established interpretive contours. What makes this book important is its focused analysis of a series of specific New Brunswick-German families.
Here Hempel allows the individual details of each family history to move to the forefront of his narrative. By doing so, the myriad of individual
considerations that any particular family needed to contemplate before and
after migrating can be understood on an intensely human level. Exactly why the Stieffs (later anglicized as Steeves in Atlantic Canada) or the Lutz family left Germany for Pennsylvania and then Pennsylvania for Atlantic Canada, how they lived and established themselves in New Brunswick, and the fate of these families after two or three generations, becomes the real focus of this book.
There might be a temptation to view Hempel’s focus on what we might call the micro-history of the family as more the work of genealogists than historians. This temptation would be not only be wrong, it would obscure the contribution that micro-history can make to a variety of important matters of historical study. My bet is that New Voices on the Shores will be read extensively by genealogists because of the wealth of family detail it contains, but it should also be read by Atlantic Canadian historians, historians of immigration, social historians, and those teaching Canadian Studies.
For scholars of Canadian Studies the real value of this book lies in the
last two chapters and the epilogue. The burgeoning literature on Canadian
multiculturalism includes innumerable studies of immigration. Very few explore the integration of a particular ethnic group into Canadian society in the ways Hempel does. For Hempel, the story of Pennsylvania German settlement in New Brunswick is a success story. The same argument could be made for other German settler groups in Canada and for a range of other ethnic groups, too, but exactly how re-settlement became a success is not often explained. Here generalizations about the particular contributions of one group or another to Canada are made to stand in for precise historical analysis. This is a weakness that Hempel rectifies. Through the detailed
study of individual families, he tracks not only their migration, but also their growth, marriages, the effects that later migrations to the region had on them, their increasing use of English as a language of communication, and their diffusion throughout the province and to other regions of Canada and the United States. What this book allows its readers to see is how migration functioned on the level of the family and how one group of migrants became increasingly at home in their adopted homeland, to the point where names like Steeves (Stieff) have become virtually synonymous with this Canadian region.
In making these points, Hempel reminds us that the identity of a people is not frozen at their moment of entry and that the history of German Canadians is, in many ways, a history that is about Canada . He also reminds us that the successful integration of “new voices” into the Canadian experiences need not mean the loss of a distinctive heritage in this country. This is a lesson that is well worth learning.

By Christopher Mackay and Choleena DiTullio; Forward by Dan Steeves.

360-degree photographs of the Tantramar region of New Brunswick, Canada. Includes cross platform CD-ROM with 18 bonus images.

These photographs are unusual in that they present a full 360 degree horizontal field of view. You literally have eyes on the back of your head – things in front of you look as though they are next to things that are behind you. These extrordinary images are achieved through a digital stitching process which blends a series of photographs together into a single, seamless cylinder. When sliced and unwrapped the cylinder becomes a very long rectangle.

softcover | 224 pages | ISBN:1-896647-26-X
Year Published:1999 – Broken Jaw Press | Tidewater Price:$18.69 CDN

Reader Be Thou Also Ready is a fictionalized account of the murder of William Fawcett of Sackville in 1832. A third great grandson of William Fawcett, author Robert James breathes life into a long ago family tragedy. Interestingly, James knew nothing of this murder until he came across a passage in Peter Penner’s The Chignecto Connexion. Intrigued, he started to investigate.

William Fawcett’s headstone in the old Methodist graveyard in Middle Sackville and two newspaper articles from the New Brunswick Royal Gazette provided the only known details of the murder. William Fawcett was shot through his kitchen window while reading his Bible around 10 p.m. on the evening of June 19, 1832. Subsequent investigation led to the arrest and trial of his 17-year-old son Rufus. While the evidence was strong, Rufus was acquitted and left the area, never to be seen again.

While the known details are few, and the characterizations speculation, the reader will be fascinated by this glimpse of life in Sackville in the early 1800’s. James aptly details the rewards and difficulties of farmsteading a new land for these recently arrived Yorkshire immigrants. Such well-known names as George, Fisher, Botsford, and Chandler appear throughout. For descendants of these early Sackville families, and for anyone interested in early Canadian history, this novel will prove fascinating.

Trade Paper | 101 pages | ISBN:0968304214
Year Published:1999 – Glen Margaret Publishing | Tidewater Price:$12.95

Tastes of the Tantramar- Recipes & Remedies from Our Yorkshire Roots is a publication in support of Yorkshire 2000. Compiled and edited by Betty Dobson, a descendant of the Yorkshire immigration to this region of the late 1700’s, this book features both recipes and snippets of personal information from the contributors. There are also notes from some of the original settlers. Altogether, a fascinating blend of history and an interesting glimpse into the daily lives of the Yorkshire ancestors. Included in the section on Main Dishes is Yorkshire Pudding (of course), Cornish Pasties, Chicken Hobo Dinner and Baked Beans, just to mention a few. Side Dishes & Condiments include Fried Wild Tantramar Mushrooms, Black Pudding and Malt Bread. Sweets & Treats include Cat Pudding and Tea Time Dainties, while sections on Christmas, Beverages and Remedies finish the book. A listing of the contributors is almost like looking through today’s phone book- names like Lowerison, Trenholm, Smith, Blenkhorn and Estabrooks demonstrate the longevity of their family roots in this area. For these Yorkshire descendants, Tastes of the Tantramar will be a book to treasure. For those who cannot claim Yorkshire lineage, this book will still provide a unique glimpse into the lives of the immigrants who settled the Tantramar area.