Come Together: A Reflection on the Atlantic Canada Studies Conference

The bi-annual Atlantic Canada Studies Conference will soon be rolling around again, and I have fallen into anecdotage. Actually, it is someone else’s anecdotage. A friend of mine, a former provincial archivist now fulfilling his passion for history in retirement, was telling me the other week about attending the first ACS conferences in the 1970s, back when regional history suddenly become “a thing,” a righteous assertion that region matters – and, by extension, that Atlantic Canada should matter – in the telling of Canadian history.

My friend remembers himself as a something of a bit player (a conspicuously underpaid assistant archivist at the time), but he also remembers how exciting those early gatherings were. (And bibulous, apparently.) There was an air of (self-) discovery and a shared sense of community. Although they grow fewer, some of the great rebels in that regional studies revolution remain with us. I am not among them. But even as a callow undergraduate in the mid-1970s, the Atlantic Canada studies contagion infected me from a distance. Several of my professors at UPEI affirmed the relevance of my own place and my own story in the practice of history. It would shape my whole career...