The province's premier journalist tells the story he was born to write. No journalist has travelled the back roads, hidden vales and fog-soaked coves of Nova Scotia as widely as John DeMont. No writer has spent as much time considering its peculiar warp and weft of humanity, geography and history. The Long Way Home is the summation of DeMont's years of travel, research and thought. It tells the story of what is, from the European view of things, the oldest part of Canada. Before Confederation it was also the richest, but now Nova Scotia is among the poorest. Its defining myths and stories are mostly about loss and sheer determination. Equal parts narrative, memoir and meditation, The Long Way Home chronicles with enthralling clarity a complex and multi-dimensional story: the overwhelming of the first peoples and the arrival of a mélange of pioneers who carved out pockets of the wilderness; the random acts and unexplained mysteries; the shameful achievements and noble failures; the rapture and misery; the twists of destiny and the cold-heartedness of fate. This is the biography of a place that has been hardened by history. A place full of reminders of how great a province it has been and how great—with the right circumstances and a little luck—it could be again.

This is a new release of the original 1937 edition.

By extending their voyages to all oceans from the 1760s onward, whaling vessels from North America and Europe spanned a novel net of hunting grounds, maritime routes, supply posts, and transport chains across the globe. For obtaining provisions, cutting firewood, recruiting additional men, and transshipping whale products, these highly mobile hunters regularly frequented coastal places and islands along their routes, which were largely determined by the migratory movements of their prey. American-style pelagic whaling thus constituted a significant, though often overlooked factor in connecting people and places between distant world regions during the long nineteenth century. Focusing on Africa, this book investigates side-effects resulting from stopovers by whalers for littoral societies on the economic, social, political, and cultural level. For this purpose it draws on eight local case studies, four from Africa’s west coast and four from its east coast. In the overall picture, the book shows a broad range of effects and side-effects of different forms and strengths, which it figures as a "grey undercurrent" of global history.

The largest estuary in the world, the Gulf of St Lawrence is defined broadly by an ecology that stretches from the upper reaches of the St Lawrence River to the Gulf Stream, and by a web of influences that reach from the heart of the continent to northern Europe. For more than a millennium, the gulf's strategic location and rich marine resources have made it a destination and a gateway, a cockpit and a crossroads, and a highway and a home. From Vinland the Good to the novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the Gulf has haunted the Western imagination. A transborder collaboration between Canadian and American scholars, The Greater Gulf represents the first concerted exploration of the environmental history – marine and terrestrial – of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Contributors tell many histories of a place that has been fished, fought over, explored, and exploited. The essays' defining themes resonate in today's charged atmosphere of quickening climate change as they recount stories of resilience played against ecological fragility, resistance at odds with accommodation, considered versus reckless exploitation, and real, imagined, and imposed identities. Reconsidering perceptions about borders and the spaces between and across land and sea, The Greater Gulf draws attention to a central place and part of North Atlantic and North American history. Contributors include Rainer Baehre (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jack Bouchard (Folger Institute), Claire Campbell (Bucknell University), Caitlin Charman (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Jack Little (Simon Fraser University), Edward MacDonald (University of Prince Edward Island), Matthew McKenzie (University of Connecticut), Suzanne Morton (McGill University), Brian Payne (Bridgewater State University), John G. Reid (St. Mary's University), and Daniel Soucier (University of Maine).