"'Atlantic Canada' is a relatively new entity. Only in the last few decades has the term become the convenient shorthand for the old 'Maritime' provinces - New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island - together with Newfoundland and Labrador, and even now powerful local identities resist calls for a more formal union. Yet, Margaret Conrad and James Hill suggest, attitudes in the four provinces are converging.

Having long combined a profound sense of place, pride, and optimism with a fatalistic resignation, today the people of Atlantic Canada are increasingly coming to share a determination to overcome their position as poor cousins within the Canadian federation. Atlantic Canada tells the story of the region from its geological origins through its settlers, Aboriginal and European, to their descendants' lives on a series of margins: first of the French and British empires, then of Confederation, now of the global 'free market'.

Together, a vivid narrative and some 150 illustrations trace not only the four provinces' varied social, economic, and political histories, but the distinctive 'regions of the mind' that have played an equally important role in their evolution as a region 'in the making'."--BOOK JACKET.