Selling Tradition

Picture this: a group of federal civil servants who work at Cape Breton Highlands National Park in the early 1950s receive a memo from their minister, acting at the request of the Nova Scotia premier, Angus L. Macdonald. These stolid Canadians are to go out and plant imported Scottish heatherall over the hills of the park, and they are to do so wearing kilts and blue Highland bonnets. Given typical staff sensitivities to uniform design, one can only imagine how park workers might react to this edict.

Ian McKay and Robin Bates’s In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia is a book about reconstruction. Not just the reconstruction of buildings such as Champlain’s Habitation at Port Royal. It is also about the reconstruction of history to transform it into a marketable commodity. The authors have chosen as their field of study Nova Scotia and its evolution toward the Province of History, as the title cleverly...