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
“The Sisterhood at Work for the Benefit of the Country”: Anna Leonowens and Social Reform in 1890s Halifax” by Lois Yorke
Wednesday, 18 November 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:
Anna Leonowens always loved the limelight, played to it well, and excelled at personal reinvention. Her final years in Halifax, largely forgotten today, were no exception. In 1894 she shared the platform with the Countess of Aberdeen in founding the city’s Local Council of Women, and in 1895 became president of the short-lived Halifax chapter of the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association. In 1897 she left the city, never to return. Her colleague Edith Archibald remembered her as “essentially and before all a Reformer,” while historian Ernest Forbes called her “the Dean of Halifax feminists.” This paper explores her late-career transition into social reform, and concludes that neither assessment was completely right….nor completely wrong.
Lois Yorke is the former Provincial Archivist and Director, Nova Scotia Archives, and a past president (2020-23) of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. A graduate of Dalhousie University, her career spans five decades as an archivist, editor, researcher, contributor to the Canadian archival community, and consultant in cultural heritage. Her long-standing interest in feminist biography has produced various articles on “interesting” women from Nova Scotia’s past, including most recently Anna Harriette Leonowens (1831-1915), “The English Governess at the Siamese Court.” She is currently completing the first biography of Leonowens to explore fully her life and times across seven countries, eight decades, and at least nine lives.
