Jeff A. Webb

Culture, Art, and the Sense of Place

PIONEERS, COMMODITY PRODUCTION, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY once dominated the historiography of the Atlantic Provinces. Attention to popular culture came much later, and it was then usually understood either as examples of the oral transmission of tradition or of an antimodernist impulse implicit in mature capitalism. Each of the Atlantic Provinces is different from its neighbours, and regions within provinces often share more in common with regions in other provinces than they do with other parts of their own provinces. The four books under consideration here – Michael Eamon’s Imprinting Britain: Newspapers, Sociability, and the Shaping of British North America; Janet Kitz’s Andrew Cobb: Architect and Artist; Kirk Niergarth’s The Dignity of Every Human Being: New Brunswick Artists and Canadian Culture between the Great Depression and the Cold War; and Darrell Varga’s Shooting from the East: Filmmaking in the Canadian Atlantic – span provinces, including some outside “Atlantic Canada,” as well as several cultural forms, from newspapers to architecture and painting to filmmaking. As such, they provide interpretive opportunities that transcend the “regional.” While a few 20thcentury historians reduced culture to manifestations of class struggle, or the ephemera of ethnic performance, the authors of these books take cultural products seriously on their own terms. This set of books about the cultural work of artists, architects, printers, and filmmakers show scholars engaging with the most recent scholarship of the cultural realm. They also embody the authors’ thoughts about the ways in which the local engages with the tendrils of globalism. They make for rewarding reading beyond our own communities. Historians have always been comfortable reading texts from the past as sources, and in recent decades have considered the process through which the text was created as well as its content. Michael Eamon’s Imprinting Britain delves deeply into the history of 18th-century print culture in two British colonial capitals: Halifax and Quebec City. These two colonial outposts are not often considered together. The subtitle of the book signals that it is a study of “newspapers, sociability and the shaping of British North America,” indicating a shift in emphasis from the content to the medium of transmission – from the cultural cargo to the vessel that carries it. Locally produced culture receives less of Eamon’s attention, as the colonial elites he examined continue to mentally inhabit the British world.