Articles

This essay draws on my doctoral research on Halifax during the Second World War. It was originally presented at a conference in Stuttgart, West Germany in September 1989.

In 1992, I wrote a paper challenging the popular belief that the 1917 Halifax Explosion was the “largest man-made explosion before the atomic bomb.” Click here to read it. The illustrations were omitted due to lack of space, but I’ve posted them on my Flickr site here 

In the early 1980s I interviewed a retired merchant mariner, Mr. Mel LeBlanc of Mount Hope, Ontario, who shared a list of Canadian merchant seamen lost due to enemy action during the Second World War. I compiled a database from this list and analyzed the results. Another version of the list later appeared on the web here.

So-called “instant books” were one of the most pervasive sources about the 1912 Titanic disaster. I created a website about these books in 1997. An article published in Acadiensis in 1999 was a product of that work.

In the early 1990s, I delivered a public lecture about Portia White for the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. The lecture was later published in their journal. This 2001 article was part of a special issue on “Legends of Nova Scotia” in the Halifax Daily News.

Captain Tony Ross was retired and living in Darnley, PEI when I met him in 1991. This interview was published in four parts in Argonauta, an offshoot of The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord.

In 2007, I had the pleasure of meeting HMS Jervis Bay survivor Art Taylor (left) at the Crows’ Nest Club in St. John’s, NL. In the early 1980s I traveled to Saint John NB to attend a reunion of other Jervis Bay survivors.