Wednesday, October 16th, 2024, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Halifax Public Library and online through Zoom. Here is the Zoom link.

Born and raised in Toronto, Brian Tennyson studied history at the University of Toronto (Hons BA and MA) and the Commonwealth Institute, University of London (PhD). In 1966 he made the wise decision to move to Nova Scotia to teach history at what was then Xavier Junior College in Sydney, now Cape Breton University. He has never regretted that decision. He is the author or editor of eighteen books and is presently working on the nineteenth and has published forty scholarly journal articles and forty-seven book reviews, mostly on aspects of Nova Scotian history. He was also the founder of the Centre for International Studies, which introduced international student recruitment, international exchange agreements, and managed a number of overseas development projects, all funded by $5 million by the federal government. He retired in 2023, having completed fifty-seven years of service.

Abstract: 
In 2017, Tennyson published a book entitled Nova Scotia at War, 1914-1919, the first attempt to tell the story of the province’s experience of the First World War. This led him to determine how many Nova Scotian soldiers served in the war. Tennyson included military nurses, of course, but didn’t give them the attention that he came to realize they deserved. Somewhat to his surprise, only one book, Sister Soldiers of the Great War: The Nurses of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, has been written, by Cynthia Toman and published in 2016 but she only included nurses who served in the Canadian Army Medical Nursing Service (CAMCNS). The result was that 250 of Canada’s 2,845 military nurses were Nova Scotians. Because Tennyson includes nurses who served in other military organizations such as Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS), the nursing service of the British army and other similar organizations, his number is 303 and there may have been more. Tennyson’s study of Nova Scotia’s military nurses not only identifies all Nova Scotian nurses who served in the war, it includes brief biographies including as much as possible about their prewar and postwar lives.