Cape Breton Island’s Sydney coalfield had been an arena of intense conflict long before the
storied labour wars of the early twentieth century. The Lingan strike of 1882-83 was the last in
a series of strikes over a two-decade period that revealed significant shifts in the political order
of the coalfield. With the use of untapped local sources, Don Nerbas reconstructs this neglected
history of social conflict in the forthcoming issue of Labour/Le Travail. It is a story that brings us
to Sydney Mines and the emerging coal mining villages across Sydney Harbour near Lingan,
such as Little Glace Bay, and that considers the relationship of these mining centres to the
wider Cape Breton countryside and its impact upon emergent forms of popular agency on the
coalfield in a new era of Canadian industrialism.
Subscribe here and look for it in Volume 92 in Fall 2023.
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