Travelling in Time to Cape Breton Island in the 1920s: Protest Songs, Murals and Island Identity

Islands are places that foster a unique sense of place-attachment and community identity among their populations. Scholarship focusing on the distinctive values, attitudes and perspectives of ‘island people’ from around the world reveals the layers of meaning that are attached to island life. Lowenthal writes: ‘Islands are fantasized as antitheses of the all-engrossing gargantuan mainstream-small, quiet, untroubled, remote from the busy, crowded, turbulent everyday scene. In reality, most of them are nothing like that. …’ 1 1 D. Lowenthal, ‘Islands, Lovers and Others’, The Geographical Review 97 (2007): 203. Islands, for many people, are ‘imagined places’ in our increasingly globalised world; the perceptions of island culture and reality often differ. Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in eastern North America, a locale with a rich history of class struggle surrounding its former coal and steel industries, provides an excellent case study for the ways that local history, collective memory and cultural expression might combine to combat the ‘untroubled fantasy’ that Lowenthal describes.

Author and article information

Contributors

MacKinnon Richard:

Bio :

Richard MacKinnon is the former Tier One Canada Research Chair in Intangible Cultural Heritage and currently teaches Folklore in the Department of History and Culture, Cape Breton University. His research interests include all aspects of Atlantic Canada’s culture including oral traditions, music, language, material culture and vernacular architecture. He has authored articles and books and has worked in the multimedia field developing CD-ROMS, DVDs, web sites and audio CDs. Some of these include ‘Protest Songs of Cape Breton Island’ (www.protestsongs.ca<http://www.protestsongs.ca>); ‘Time Travel to the Eighteenth Century’ and ‘The Peopling of Atlantic Canada’.

MacKinnon Lachlan:

Bio :

Lachlan MacKinnon is a Ph.D. student in History at Concordia University in Montreal. His work focuses on workers’ experiences of deindustrialisation in Atlantic Canada and the decline of the steel industry in Sydney, Nova Scotia. His research interests include issues of public memory and commemoration, oral history and the history of the working class.

Journal

Journal ID (publisher-id): LJCS

Title: London Journal of Canadian Studies

Publisher: UCL Press

ISSN (Electronic):

Publication date (Electronic): September 2015

Volume: 30

Issue: 1

Article

DOI: 10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2015v30.004

SO-VID: 2a6f7636-9891-4767-84b0-fed2842dffc0

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

History

Page count

Figures: 9, Tables: 0, Equations: 0, References: 0, Pages: 25

ScienceOpen disciplines: Sociology,Political science,Anglo-American studies,Americas,Cultural studies,History

London Journal of Canadian Studies