Thomas Peace, The Slow Rush of Colonization: Spaces of Power in the Maritime Peninsula, 1680-1790, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2023. Un article de la revue Acadiensis (Volume 54, numéro 1, 2025, p. 4-137) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

In 1970 the oil barge Irving Whale, carrying a cargo of Bunker C oil, sank to the seafloor. During the weeks that followed a portion of the oil leaked into Gulf waters. Initial plans to recover the full cargo were frustrated and the barge rested on the seafloor for a further 25 years before the eventual remediation, by lifting. Over this time, the Canadian policy framework for marine environmental protection was transformed, from virtual laissez-faire to a multi-layered regulatory regime. The road to the eventual barge lift and remediation project reveals a complex interplay of forces that include salvage engineering, bio-physical science, and risk assessment, all mediated through federal bureaucratic politics and corporate-state bargaining.

This article uses the creation of Atlantic Motorsport Park (AMP), the only purpose-built road racing circuit in Atlantic Canada, as a lens to explain the wider efforts to modernize sports car competition in the region. Those efforts paralleled the contemporaneous regional political attempts to embrace industrial modernity that culminated in the illfated Bricklin sports car. Just as major changes in the auto industry helped to sink the Bricklin project, AMP eventually was overtaken by modernizing changes in Canadian motorsport, specifically commercialized professionalism. The voluntary efforts that built the track limited its ability to host the “big-league” races it was designed to attract. Ironically, while professional racing shifted to city-based circuits, the modest scale and the volunteer character of AMP ensured its survival as a club-operated venue for amateur motorsport.

Cet article découle d’une analyse de données compilées à partir des minutes notariales du notaire Jacques Cousseau, actif à La Rochelle de 1602 à 1653 et dont les minutes sont conservées aux Archives départementales de la Charente-Maritime, également à La Rochelle. Un examen général de cette source a confirmé la valeur exceptionnelle de ces archives pour une meilleure compréhension de la place spécifique des Basques dans l’histoire de la pêche et du commerce français en Amérique du Nord. Parmi les notaires de La Rochelle au XVIIe siècle, Cousseau est celui desservant la plus grande clientèle basque. Ses minutes notariales remplissent 21 registres et 11 paquets de documents, couvrant environ un demisiècle d’activité maritime rochelaise. En dépouillant ces archives, nous avons identifié et photographié 814 actes fort éclairants sur les pêches transatlantiques. Le fonds de Jacques Cousseau s’avère donc exceptionnellement riche, ce qui rend sa consultation fondamentale pour quiconque aspire à mieux comprendre les pêches basques autour du golfe du Saint-Laurent et sur les côtes atlantiques de Terre-Neuve et d’Acadie.

In 2023 Quebec’s Anticosti Island became a World Heritage site in recognition of the “exceptional universal value” of its nature and culture. Nature, paradoxically, has historically been closely associated with industry and metropolitan tourism on this immense but sparsely populated island in the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence. Drawing on insights from regional tourism histories, this study elucidates how Anticosti’s nature, specifically its nordicity and peripherality, were reimagined by the tourism industry from locational impediments to attractions. Nature tourism – a cultural construction – became an economic mainstay that never resolved locational impediments without the complementarity of industry and urbanity.

Anne Marie Creamer, A Desperate Asylum: Crisis in a Canadian Psychiatric Hospital During Wartime, Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2023. Un article de la revue Acadiensis (Volume 54, numéro 1, 2025, p. 4-137) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

This article analyzes the creation and implementation of mothers’ allowances in New Brunswick from 1944-1966. After exploring the ideological framework and national context of this social welfare legislation, Mothers’ Allowance Board case files are examined to highlight the agency and advocacy of women recipients as they navigated gendered and class-based challenges to claiming their rights.