| This paper considers the career of James Stuart Martell (1911--1946), an archivist-historian at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia during its early years. His life and work provide an entry point into the milieu of mid-twentieth-century historiography, his corpus forming a nodal point in an interwoven web of tensions between progress and nostalgia, heritage and history, Canadian nationalism and British Imperialism, liberalism and nationalism, patriotism and professionalism, objectivity and subjectivity. In Martell's oeuvre the two terms of each of these binaries at the same time depend upon and oppose each other. His Anglo-Canadian patriotism undermined his professional ethics as an historian, but he would invoke those same ethics to justify his decisions to write history in conformity with his patriotism. The untrammelled progress of capitalism that he favoured annihilated the world of small farmers for which he felt nostalgia, but his vision of progress was in itself nostalgic. When interpreted too narrowly, the objectivity to which he aspired in his writing could hobble his efforts to self-expression, but that objectivity licensed him to speak in the first place, revealing his subjectivity in a way he otherwise would not have permitted.; A study of Martell quickly becomes a study of history as a discipline, liberalism as an ideology, and Nova Scotia as a site of history. And perhaps his problems remain our problems. How do liberal nationalists reconcile their allegiance to the progress of humanity as a whole with their adherence to a modular nationalism? How do scholars regulate their very personal affinity for their subject such that it does not cancel out the possibility of intersubjective truth claims? How do human societies face the future without losing the past?... |
