Last fall, I was looking through the items in the Fonds James Valentine Stuart at the Centre Acadien, Université Sainte-Anne. Born in Halifax in 1806, Stuart married an Acadian – Marguerite-Sophie Melanson – in 1839, and lived the remainder of his life in the port village of Church Point in the township of Clare, Nova Scotia. In the 1860s and 1870s he was a justice of the peace and the customs collector at Belliveau’s Cove, a key port at the time on St. Mary’s Bay.[1] His pap

I was recently examining the North American records of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) – the missionary arm of the Church of England, established in the early eighteenth century. I had begun my reading of these reports to learn more about the history of SPG missionaries stationed in Nova Scotia in the 1760s when the society was trying hard to establish Anglicanism in the province’s largest settlements. [1] I was especially interested in the reports of th

The prospect of the new film, The Testament of Ann Lee (about to be released), is exciting for a historian, such as myself, with a passion for studying eighteenth-century religion.