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.

Tidewater Books is pleased to host an author event with Dr. David Beatty and Dr. Tom Edgett, co-authors of “The World War 1 Diaries and Letters of Lieut. Louis Stanley Edgett”, on Saturday, January 21st from 1-4 pm. The authors will be in-store to sign and discuss the book. Everyone is welcome.
Lieut. Louis Stanley Edgett grew up in Hillsborough, and attended the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. Ultimately he died in the trenches of France during the WW1. He began a diary in 1915 whose events are faithfully reproduced in this book.
Dr. Tom Edgett, a Physician in Moncton, is his nephew. Dr. David Beatty is a retired Professor of History at Mount Allison University.

One of the darkest events in Canadian history, Le grand derangement, is replete with the drama of war, politics and untold human suffering. Award-winning author Dean Jobb has written a dramatic and compelling account. The year 2005 marks the 250th anniversary of the expulsion. This book is a bridge across the centuries for the descendants of a founding people of this nation, whose courage and resourcefulness still resonate in modern-day Acadie.

Please join us for a reading and book signing on Wednesday, July 13th at 7:00 p.m. at St. Paul’s Anglican Church Hall, 125 Main St., Sackville.

Our thanks to the Tantramar Heritage Trust for co-sponsoring this event.

Everyone is welcome. Admission is free.

Tidewater Books and the Tantramar Heritage Trust are thrilled to launch “At the Crossroads: A History of Sackville, New Brunswick” by renowned local historian William B. Hamilton. A reading and signing will take place Friday, Sept. 24, 2004 at 7 pm at St. Paul’s Anglican Hall, West Main St., Sackville. A reception will follow.

At the Crossroads is a history of settlement on the Isthmus of Chignecto and the place that would become the town of Sackville, New Brunswick. William B. Hamilton takes us from the earliest Mi’kmaq activity 4000 years ago through to the town’s centennial celebrations in 2003. Along the way, we are introduced to life in the Acadian communities of the eighteenth century, later waves of settlement, agricultural pursuits, the foundries, the establishment of the Mount Allison University facilities, the town’s shipbuilding era, issues of governance and incorporation, the wars, the local building boom of the 1960s and the increasing focus on tourism, heritage and arts that characterize the most recent decades. Throughout the centuries, Hamilton draws our attention to the town’s continuous reliance on its position as a crossroads.

At the Crossroads is the result of Hamilton’s keen and conscientious fascination with how people understand and engage with the past. His method, which he calls “working backward into history” incorporates varied perspectives and sources of information, and operates from a local experience, first and foremost. Throughout the book Hamilton provides a colourful and active picture of Sackville’s history and its position in regional, national and international affairs.

This is a community and a history filled with newspaper wars, fires, political fervor, ambitious building projects, undying volunteer efforts, dedication to learning, radio waves, business savvy and more. This is a book not only for those who know and love Sackville, but for anyone seeking a local perspective on Maritime and Canadian history, and a new and engaging approach to the past.

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.

hardcover | 298 pages | ISBN:0-86492-303-1
Year Published:2001 – Goose Lane | Tidewater Price: $35.00

Almost four years after stepping down as Premier of New Brunswick, Frank McKenna is as much on the minds of political watchers across Canada as ever. The question today, however, is will he or won’t he get back into the political ring? While the guessing game continues, Philip Lee’s new book Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank McKenna provides fresh insight into the man and his politics.

Frank takes readers on a journey into the political backrooms and corporate boardrooms that make up McKenna’s world and offers a compelling glimpse of the private life and hidden agendas of a consummate insider. The book examines McKenna’s unique brand of entrepreneurial politics and his staunch determination to transform New Brunswick into a vibrant, self-reliant partner in Canada.

In Frank, Lee uncovers the private man behind the public dealmaker, revealing an ambitious, calculating, passionate and highly intelligent individual. By providing an intimate look at McKenna’s childhood on a subsistence farm, his marriage and family life, and his early fame as the lawyer who successfully defended boxing legend Yvon Durelle against a murder charge, Lee lays out the foundation that enabled McKenna to become one of the most successful and scrutinized politicians in Canadian history.

Lee casts new light on McKenna’s leadership during the Liberals’ historic clean-sweep election victory in 1987, and the ten-year whirlwind of innovative social and economic policy that followed. McKenna’s driven, no-holds-barred approach to governing frequently attracted controversy in his home province, and his forays onto the national stage made him one of the most fascinating politicians in the country. Whether he was voicing strong opposition to the Meech Lake Accord or convincing large companies to create jobs in New Brunswick at the expense of more prosperous provinces, McKenna always attracted the rabid interest of friend and foe alike.

Drawing on his skill and experience as an investigative journalist, Lee based Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank McKenna on a wide range of published material, on diaries and other confidential records, and on interviews with McKenna and those around him, from family friends to political enemies.

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.