New Brunswick Scholarly Book Award Winner

While the committee was impressed with the quality of books submitted for the New Brunswick Scholarly Book Award, Alan MacEachern’s The Miramichi Fire: A History (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020, https://www.mqup.ca/miramichi-fire--the-products-9780228001492.php?page_id=73&) was selected as this year’s winner. Not only does MacEachern’s comprehensive archival research delve deeply into provincial
history, economics, and lore, but it also brings environmental, climatic, and hydrological understandings to bear on how such conflagrations start and spread; how they change ecosystems, work patterns, and populations; and how they are remembered in the popular imagination. As such, the book makes important contributions to our understanding of New Brunswick’s resource-dependent culture, both past and present. The book is thoroughly researched and written in a style that is scholarly and at times playful in its presentation of the facts and stories that have accompanied this momentous event in provincial history.

The Editorial Board of the Journal of New Brunswick Studies/Revue d’études sur le NouveauBrunswick (JNBS/RÉNB) thanks Drs. Thomas Hodd, Mario Levesque, and Tony Tremblay for serving on this year’s award committee.