The Agricultural Background of Settlement in Eastern Nova Scotia

Gentilcore, R. Louis

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1956.tb01516.x

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Peasant agncultural methods, a partial inheritance of the Middle Ages and threatened even in Europe, did not survive in areas of commercial agriculture. Kitchen gardens revealed ethnic memories as fields did not, unless those fields were in areas of subsistent agriculture, as in the Newfoundland outports (Mannion, 1974) or the Nova Scotian uplands (Gentilcore, 1956). Houses, particularly their internal appointments, were more durable ethnic transplants than barns, and churches were more durable again.…”

Section: The Common Influence Of Environmental Opportunitymentioning

confidence: 97%

The Historical Geography of North American Regions

Harris

1978

American Behavioral Scientist

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There is no more fascinating question about North Americans than whether our civilization is unitary or plural. In 1793 the geographer Jedediah Morse suggested that &dquo;The American Republic consists of three grand divisions, denominated the Northern, or more properly Eastern, Middle, and Southern States&dquo; (Morse, 1793: 1). But, forty years later, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835-1840) dwelt on the &dquo;great degree of likeness&dquo; in all the former British colonies. His Democracy In America noted two branches of American life-a northern and a southern-but appraised a unitary civilization. If Tocqueville were right, then there had been common cause and pattern in the North American divergence from Europe. If so, then what was the cause, what were the common patterns, and what was the balance between the regional and the North American experience,.' i Although these questions are geographical as much as they are historical or political, historical geographers have hesitated to broach them directly. For this there are good reasons. A few individuals aside, professional historical geography in North America is barely a generation old. The principal pioneers, Ralph Brown at Minnesota (1943, 1948) and Andrew Clark at Wisconsin (1959, 1968), established the subject as a secure branch of North American geography; but, although Clark often talked and even wrote about comparative opportunities, neither of them left a body of general ideas. The subject was launched by methodology rather then by theory, while the theory produced by the abstract and geometrical geography of the 1960s seemed and and irrelevant to geographers whose interests were essentially humanistic. Historical geographers, therefore, have not had a clear point of theoretical attachment. Our work is heavily archival and empirical and has been preoccupied with the factors that have differentiated particular areas. Moreover, we are not very numerous and generally we work alone. If there are scholarly advantages in a &dquo;critical mass,&dquo;historical geography hardly provides them. Typically, we find that scholars outside geography offer the most informed comment on. our particular researches. Our own literature is not internally argumentative, except at a methodological level. And yet our scattered literature, grown out of a common geographical interest in man and land, is more connected than it seems and has generalizing implications that we have not quite seized. In this article I will suggest that, in sum, it offers a coherent, even tolerably comprehensive interpretation of Euro-

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Section: The Common Influence Of Environmental Opportunitymentioning

confidence: 97%

The Historical Geography of North American Regions

Harris

1978

American Behavioral Scientist

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“…Descendants of the settlers understandably wished to memorialize the accomplishments of their ancestors. This aim is achieved through the narrative layers of the map that document the toil and resilience, solidarity and good humour of the settlers, layers that also correct some of the historical misconceptions about the sophistication of their agricultural practices and their capacity to innovate and adapt (Gentilcore, 1956). Still, there has always been the stubborn fact of the abandonment of the Eigg Mountain settlement and the failure of dreams that that seems to imply.…”

Section: The Nature-culture Hybridmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping as Making Space: The Case of a Nature–Culture Hybrid

Bantjes¹

2018

giforum

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The once-settled 'wilderness' region that is the subject of this paper is marked by historic layers of physical inscription and erasure -a nature-culture hybrid that offers a readable surface with temporal depth. In this paper I discuss the mapping of these spatial surfaces as an interpretive and constructive practice. In the process of searching for longabandoned farms in a designated 'wilderness' landscape, my collaborators and I were reading topography and vegetation, aerial photos and archival documents as though all were obscure texts which confronted us with silences, anomalies and uncertainties. In writing up this discursive work in the form of an online GIS map hyperlinked to a web of texts and documentary images, I argue that we were both recording and constituting the layers of meaning that make the landscape. I am interested in the subtle power dynamic of such map-making. We were re-reading what the state has designated as 'wilderness' or 'nature' as, instead, non-nature -a cultural artefact. Yet I am sensible of the tension between my collaborators, for whom the map articulates ancestral claims to the landscape, and myself, happy to see the state protect, under the guise of 'wilderness', what I see as a nature-culture hybrid.

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“…Nevertheless, the scatter of studies on peripheral regions indicates a range of pertinent investigation and the need for more in-depth study of the processes of marginalization. Several studies have documented the process of decline in the Maritimes (Gentilcore 1956;Troughton 1988), in Quebec (Clibbon 1971Parson 1977), and particularly in Ontario, including the southern Shield (Maxwell 1966;Parson 1979) and the Clay Belts (McDermott 1961 ;Troughton 1983b). In the Ontario context, most rural geography studies are pessimistic as to any rurally based reversal offortune, and as such, contrast…”

Section: Geographic Response To the Marginsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rural Canada and Canadian Rural Geography–an Appraisal

Troughton

1995

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes

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The Agricultural Background of Settlement in Eastern Nova Scotia

Cited by 7 publications

References 1 publication

The Historical Geography of North American Regions

The Historical Geography of North American Regions

Mapping as Making Space: The Case of a Nature–Culture Hybrid

Rural Canada and Canadian Rural Geography–an Appraisal

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