Lockeport native, actor and radio announcer Hugh Mills began a children’s show on CHNS radio known as Uncle Mel’s. He read comics to children for fifteen minutes six days a week. The show lasted fifteen years. During World War Two, Mills also organized the Halifax Concert Parties. He was also a partner with his brother, Willett, in the popular Mills Brothers clothing store on Spring Garden Road, and was instrumental...

Dr. Mayann Elizabeth Francis (b. 1946 in Sydney) became the thirty-first lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. She was the first black person to hold the vice-regal position, and the second woman to serve in this role. The daughter of an Archpriest of the African Orthodox Church, her parents were both born in the Caribbean, relocating to Sydney in the early 1940s from New York City. She grew up in Whitney...

Captain William Owen (1737–1778) began his exploratory tour of Nova Scotia, journeying from Halifax to Minas Basin via Dartmouth Lakes and the Shubenacadie River. Owen had been commissioned by Nova Scotia Governor Lord William Campbell (1730–1778), whom Owen had served in India and Nova Scotia.

The first sod of the European and North American Railway (E&NA) was turned by Lady Anna Maria Head, the wife of New Brunswick Lieutenant Governor Edmund Head (he later served as governor general of Canada from 1854 to 1861).The railway, was conceived at a railway conference in Portland, Maine in 1850 by railroad entrepreneur John A. Poor, intended to link Portland (the eastern terminus of the US rail network) with...

The Supreme Court of Canada affirmed in the Donald Marshall case a 5–2 decision regarding treaty rights to hunt, fish and gather in pursuit of a moderate livelihood, stemming from the treaties of 1760–1761 that were signed by the Mi’kmaq, Malisset, Passamaquoddy and the British Crown. The Supreme Court did not define how these rights were to be implemented, but instead encouraged the parties to negotiate a resolution in a...

The weekly tabloid the Bedford-Sackville News began publishing. It expanded to six days a week in 1979. By 1981 it was renamed the Daily News, gaining a reputation for hard-hitting provincial news stories. The paper was bought out in 1985 and the original publishers began Frank magazine in 1987, focused on gossip and the private lives of the well-heeled and famous in the Maritime Provinces. In March 2001, they began...

Acadian deputies in the district around Annapolis Royal were summoned before Lieutenant Governor Lawrence Armstrong to sign an unqualified oath of allegiance. They insisted on freedom of religion and exemption from bearing arms. No agreement was reached. A year later, the inhabitants were encouraged by a written confirmation of a military exemption, but this was not ratified further. The Acadians mistakenly believed that they were entitled to neutrality in war...

After travelling in the United States, Upper and Lower Canada and New Brunswick, British Lieutenant E.T. Coke arrived in Nova Scotia in September. He made his way from Saint John, NB, to Digby, sailing up to Annapolis Royal and then going by coach up to Bridgetown and on to Kentville, where he stayed the night. He left the next morning for Windsor, where he stayed overnight, before leaving on his...

A.R. Mosher, former president of the Canadian Labour Congress and a native of Halifax, died.

The Pictou Landing Native Women’s Association / Group (PLNWG) announced a training initiative to support their multi-year, community based, participatory Health Survey Training Plan — Identifying, Documenting, Mapping, and Mobilizing Environment and Health Knowledge in Pictou Landing: An Environmental Health Survey. Out of concern for their children, families, and community, the PLNWG mobilized around the issue of Boat Harbour in 2010 to address the question, “Is Boat Harbour making us...