History of Nova Scotia

After thousands of years of occupation by native peoples, the region came to the attention of Europeans, possibly during the Viking voyages of c. ad 1000 and surely by the late fifteenth hundred. The fat fisheries of the slide provided the major impulse for european affair in the area. In the early seventeenth century, a group of french merchants led by Pierre du Gua, sieur de Monts, and assisted by the explorer Samuel de Champlain, established trade posts in the region ; one founded at Port Royal ( near contemporary Annapolis Royal ) in 1605 was the foremost permanent wave european village in North America north of Florida. In 1621 the English baron James I granted the area to a scottish lord, Sir William Alexander. This led to a abbreviated, unsuccessful scots liquidation at Port Royal ( 1629–32 ) .Port Royal, Nova Scotia french settlement at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, from a map by Marc Lescarbot, 1609 .Library of Congress, Rare Book Division

For the future century and a one-half, the area was a focal steer for French-English competition for master of North America. This struggle for control retarded european liquidation of the region and greatly altered the lives of the french settlers, or Acadians. The territory passed back and forth between France and England until 1713, when one of the treaties of Utrecht conveyed mainland Nova Scotia to the English for the stopping point meter, although conflict continued for another 50 years. The french retain Cape Breton Island, where they built the potent fortress of Louisbourg, which the English attempted to counter by the initiation in 1749 of Halifax as the newfangled administrative and military center of their colony. In the 1750s the English expelled the Acadians from the region—an event romanticized and popularized by the New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his narrative poem Evangeline .
Offers of free land attracted immigrants from the british Isles, the Germanic states, and New England ; these newcomers gave the colony its first substantial Protestant population. By the time of the american english Revolution, New Englanders constituted approximately two-thirds of Nova Scotia ’ s population. In cattiness of some accompaniment for the rotation, the colony remained largely passive during the conflict, and approximately 35,000 loyalists immigrated to the state from the revolting colonies to the south. meanwhile, Prince Edward Island had split off from Nova Scotia in 1769, and New Brunswick and Cape Breton followed in 1784 ; the last was reunited with Nova Scotia in 1820. In 1848 Nova Scotia became the inaugural british colony in which the administration of government was responsible to the majority in the House of Assembly, the example outgrowth of colonial government. Despite opposition from some economic and political leaders, confederation with the colonies of New Brunswick and Canada ( contemporary Quebec and Ontario ) was carried out in 1867 .
As a separate british colony, Nova Scotia had prospered from its forestry, fisheries, and shipbuilding for the first two-thirds of the nineteenth hundred. Under the Reciprocity Treaty ( 1854 ) between the Canadian colonies and the United States, the north-south flow of commerce and Nova Scotia ’ s normal market and issue source in New England seemed secure. The colony benefited further from the increased necessitate by both the North and the South of the United States during the American Civil War. however, the result of reciprocity in 1866 and changing continental and populace trade patterns eroded much of Nova Scotia ’ s traditional economy. The yoke of Nova Scotia with central Canada via the railway did not bring all the expected benefits to the region ; preferably, it helped to make the state more economically dependent on Quebec and Ontario. The recently nineteenth hundred witnessed the extensive industrialization of parts of Nova Scotia, but in general the early twentieth hundred saw the consolidation of fiscal and industrial baron in Montreal and Toronto. The extensive emigration of Nova Scotians, chiefly to the New England states and westerly Canada, was a sign of the trouble economy.

During both of the 20th-century World Wars, Halifax played a key function in the exile of men and supplies to Europe ; the city experienced unprecedented prosperity as a result. During World War I, much of the city was destroyed when two ships collided in Halifax Harbour on Dec. 6, 1917. The collision resulted in the largest man-made plosion in history anterior to the advent of the atomic bombard. More than 1,500 Haligonians were killed .Halifax explosion of 1917 A midst cloud of fume billow over Halifax and nearby towns, such as Africville, in Nova Scotia, Canada, after a munitions ship exploded in the Halifax Harbour on December 6, 1917 .Paul Fearn/Alamy
Explore the myth of a pirate amplitude hidden below Oak Island ‘s surface in Nova Scotia, Canada Learn about a mysterious rumoured bury treasure treasure trove on Oak Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada .Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.See all videos for this article At the turn of the twenty-first hundred, Nova Scotia ’ s population and economy continued to experience modest emergence. The big likely of offshore gasoline reserves and an expanding technology-based industrial sector augured well for the future of the state, as did the tourism industry. however, increasing difficulties posed by border security and the high cost of gasoline led to a decline in the number of american tourists visiting the state.