Preserving and promoting the history of Nova Scotia
About the Society
The Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society was founded in 1878. The society meets monthly from September to May, inclusive to hear and to discuss individual papers about personalities, places and events integral to the history of Nova Scotia. Monthly meetings are held at 7:00 pm in the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Genealogical Association of Nova Scotia Heritage Lecture and Dinner, 14 November 2026
Our friends at the Genealogical Association of Nova Scotia cordially invite you to join them for their annual Heritage Lecture & Dinner, to be held on November 14 at 5:30PM, located at St. Agnes Church Hall (6903 Mumford Rd., Halifax). Join them for a wonderful evening, highlighted by a lecture presented by Dr. Shamus Y. MacDonald, Manager of Gaelic Language and Culture at the Highland Village Museum. Complete event details included on the attached flyer.
Tickets are $60.00 and can be purchased directly from the RNSHS. Please contact membership@rnshs.ca to inquire after tickets. We will also be selling tickets in-person (cash only) at this month's Public Lecture at the Halifax Central Library on October 21, 2026.
We hope you will participate in this wonderful event!
Upcoming Lecture
“‘I will try & tell you some of our trouble’: Exploring Contested Truths of Violence and Murder Onboard the Selkirk, 1894” by Grace McNutt
Wednesday, 21 October 2026, 7:00 pm (Atlantic), in-person at the Lindsay Children’s Room on the 2nd floor at the Halifax Central Library, 5440 Spring Garden Road, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Click here for the Zoom link.
Abstract:
In 1894, Patrick Flinn, a sailor employed on the Nova Scotian barque Selkirk, reported to Hong Kong police that the ship’s first mate had thrown a man overboard and that Captain Jim Crowe had abused members of the crew during their passage from New York. What followed was a weeks-long contest of competing stories unfolding in courtrooms, in the Hong Kong press, and in the private letters of Janie Crowe, Jim Crowe’s wife. In this talk, Dr. Grace McNutt traces those surviving records to reconstruct how an alleged murder at sea became a public scandal. Rather than seeking a definitive “truth,” this talk will examine nineteenth-century ideas of “truthfulness”: who did the public in colonial Hong Kong believe at different moments, and why? It will also consider how the central figures in the “Selkirk Scandal” crafted their own credibility, revealing the cultural logics that shaped trust, authority, and reputation in the nineteenth-century British sphere of influence, drawing on notions of gender, sexuality, and nationality.
Dr. Grace McNutt is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Cape Breton University, and in 2027, she will be joining the University of Prince Edward Island as an Assistant Professor of History. She has also been a member of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society’s council since 2022. Her research investigates the gendering of the shipping trade in Atlantic Canada, using women’s firsthand accounts to explore the interplay among sailing, authorship, and gender identity in the nineteenth century.
