Cicero suggested that "to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it be woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"
History is both a discipline and a story, both an interpretation and a series of events. It is not simply chronology, though - one damn thing leading to another - as the ideas we have, and the kind of possibilities they allow, lead people to lean one way or another against the course of events. Without history, we suffer from a kind of "social dementia", not knowing who we are as a people, and finding it difficult to distinguish between good and bad, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. While imagination is necessary for culture and civilization, it works on the substrate of history.
"Doing justice to the reality of history is not a matter of noting the way in which the past provides a background to the present; it is a matter of treating what people do in the present as a struggle to create a future out of the past, of seeing that the past is not just the womb of the present but the only raw material out of which the present can be constructed." (Philip Abrams).
Our current projects are in five areas:
Historical Libraries Project
School Books
Kenny/Dennis Site (closed)
Cornwallis Issue
Leminster Parish
Anna Leonowens is known in Nova Scotia as one of the organizers of the Victoria School of Art (now NSCAD University) in 1887. She subsequently became involved in organizing the Women's Suffrage Association, where she became the first President. Although Anna was not to live to see it, the political coalition behind women's suffrage was eventually successful with the passing of the Nova Scotia Franchise Act of 26 April, 1918.
