Ian McKay shows how the tourism industry & cultural producers have manipulated the cultural identity of Nova Scotia to project traditional folk values. He offers analysis of the infusion of folk ideology into the art & literature of the region, & the use of the idea of the 'simple life' in tourism promotion.

This study reconstructs the history of the folk-music revival in the States, tracing its origins to the early decades of the 20th century. Drawing on scores of interviews and numerous manuscript collections, as well as his own extensive files, Cohen shows how a broad range of traditions - from hillbilly, gospel, blues and sea shanties to cowboy, ethnic and political-protest music - all contributed to the genre known as folk.

As the evil Nacht spreads his darkness across the valley, Tom and his friends, the Bone family, desperately try to find the Spark that will heal the Dreaming and save the world.

In Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s, Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson present a transatlantic history of folk's midcentury resurgence that juxtaposes the related but distinct revivals that took place in the United States and Great Britain. After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the authors explore the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. Cohen and Donaldson place the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over "authenticity" in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream. From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, Roots of the Revival offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.

Folk art emerged in twentieth-century Nova Scotia not as an accident of history, but in tandem with cultural policy developments that shaped art institutions across the province between 1967 and 1997. For Folk’s Sake charts how woodcarvings and paintings by well-known and obscure self-taught makers - and their connection to handwork, local history, and place - fed the public’s nostalgia for a simpler past. The folk artists examined here range from the well-known self-taught painter Maud Lewis to the relatively anonymous woodcarvers Charles Atkinson, Ralph Boutilier, Collins Eisenhauer, and Clarence Mooers. These artists are connected by the ways in which their work fascinated those active in the contemporary Canadian art world at a time when modernism – and the art market that once sustained it – had reached a crisis. As folk art entered the public collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the private collections of professors at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, it evolved under the direction of collectors and curators who sought it out according to a particular modernist aesthetic language. Morton engages national and transnational developments that helped to shape ideas about folk art to show how a conceptual category took material form. Generously illustrated, For Folk’s Sake interrogates the emotive pull of folk art and reconstructs the relationships that emerged between relatively impoverished self-taught artists, a new brand of middle-class collector, and academically trained professors and curators in Nova Scotia’s most important art institutions.

In 1919, Bolshevik Russia and its followers formed the Communist International, also known as the Comintern, to oversee the global communist movement. From the very beginning, the Comintern committed itself to ending world imperialism, supporting colonial liberation, and promoting racial equality. Coinciding with the centenary of the Comintern's founding, Left Transnationalism highlights the different approaches interwar communists took in responding to these issues. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars on the Communist International, individual communist parties, and national and colonial questions, this collection moves beyond the hyperpoliticized scholarship of the Cold War era and re-energizes the field. Contributors focus on transnational diasporic and cultural networks, comparative studies of key debates on race and anti-colonialism, the internationalizing impulse of the movement, and the evolution of communist platforms through transnational exchange. Essays further emphasize the involvement of communist and socialist parties across Canada, Australia, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, South Africa, and Europe. Highlighting the active discussions on nationality, race, and imperialism that took place in Comintern circles, Left Transnationalism demonstrates that this organization - as well as communism in general - was, especially in the years before 1935, far more heterogeneous, creative, and unpredictable than the rubber stamp of the Soviet Union described in conventional historiography. Contributors include Michel Beaulieu (Lakehead University), Marc Becker (Truman State University), Anna Belogurova (Freie Universitat Berlin), Oleksa Drachewych (University of Guelph), Daria Dyakonova (Université de Montréal), Alastair Kocho-Williams (Clarkson University), Andrée Lévesque (McGill University), Lars T. Lih (Independent Scholar), Ian McKay (McMaster University), Sandra Pujals (University of Puerto Rico), John Riddell (Ontario Institute of Studies in Education), Evan Smith (Flinders University), S.A. Smith (All Souls College, Oxford), Xiaofei Tu (Appalachian State University), and Kankan Xie (Peking University).