Rise Again!

Rise Again!, a non-fiction book published in two volumes in 2008 and 2009 by American author Robert J. Morgan, provides a comprehensive history of Cape Breton Island, an island off the Atlantic coast of Canada that is part of Nova Scotia. Morgan's narrative covers the island's earliest indigenous inhabitants through to the present.

According to Morgan, Cape Breton Island was first settled during the Archaic period in North America around 7,000 BCE. The settlers were ancestors of the Mi'kmaq First Nations people who lived on the island when European explorers first landed there and who still live there today. Because of the rocky soil and unfavorable farming conditions, the Mi'kmaqs were predominantly hunters and fishermen. Aside from maybe the Norse people, John Cabot was the first European to visit Cape Breton Island; a historic landing site and provincial park commemorate the event.

In the 1520s, the Mi'kmaq began to trade with European fishermen. The Portuguese explorer Joao Alvares Fagundes established the earliest European colony on the island. While two hundred settlers lived in the colony, the village ceased to exist sometime after 1570, its exact fate unknown. A second European colony was established in the 1620s during the Anglo-French War. After Charles I's army took Quebec City, the Scottish nobleman Sir James Stewart established a colony on Cape Breton Island in what is now Baleine. The name "Nova Scotia" means "New Scotland," a term coined for the area by the Scottish courtier and poet William Alexander. Despite the fact that Scotland promptly lost all of these territories in the 1632 Treaty of Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, the name Nova Scotia stuck.



The French settlements lasted only a generation, and for a fifty-four year period following 1659, no Europeans lived on the island. That changed in 1713 when the French established Louisbourg, which would become an important commercial and military center for France. During the French and Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century, the community came under siege on numerous occasions as the French and the British colonial allies fought over it. After the 1764 Treaty of Paris ended the conflict between Great Britain and France, settlers from Ireland and Scotland began to populate the island, merging with the French population and creating a rich tradition of music and culture.

During the American Revolution, Great Britain used hundreds of American prisoners as slave laborers in the coal mines of Cape Breton Island. The island's importance in supplying coal to the British war effort made it a frequent target of both American naval ships and pirate attacks. After the American Revolution, Great Britain retained control of Cape Breton Island, establishing the Colony of Cape Breton. In 1820, Cape Breton merged with Nova Scotia. In addition to the coal industry, Cape Breton Island became a major center for shipbuilding, an industry that peaked there in the 1850s.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Cape Breton Island became a major hub of innovation thanks to two major inventors: Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi. Having amassed a sizable fortune thanks to the success of the telephone, Bell bought land on Cape Breton Island because the scenery reminded him of his native Scotland. He built a laboratory complex where he researched such varied topics as deafness—with the assistance of Helen Keller—and hydrofoil technology. While on the island, Bell also invented an early precursor to the iron lung and launched the first powered flight on Canadian soil. Meanwhile, Marconi transmitted the first-ever North American transatlantic radio message from Cape Breton Island, a landmark achievement in the development of modern radio technology.



The 1920s were a turbulent period on Cape Breton Island marked by a series of violent labor disputes. The most famous of these events was the murder of coal miner William Davis by strikebreakers. Faced with a pattern of intimidation and violence from company police working on behalf of the British Empire Steel Corporation, thousands of striking miners marched on the Waterford Lake. The company police charged the group of miners, and one of the officers shot Davis in the heart deliberately. Davis left behind nine children and a wife who was pregnant with a tenth. In retribution, the miners seized the New Waterford power plant resulting in a standoff that only ended when the Canadian Army deployed 2,000 troops to retake the facility.

Rise Again! examines a number of major North American trends and events through the lens of Cape Breton Island.