History
The first premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Joey Smallwood, coined the term "Atlantic Canada" when Newfoundland and Labrador joined the Canadian Confederation (the Commonwealth of Canada) in 1949. He believed that it would have been presumptuous for Newfoundland and Labrador to assume that it could include itself within the existing term "Maritime Provinces", used to describe the cultural similarities shared by New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. The three Maritime provinces joined Confederation during the 19th century: New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were founding members of the Canadian Confederation in 1867, and Prince Edward Island joined in 1873.
Smallwood and others have excluded Quebec from Atlantic Canada because of Quebec's dramatically different culture. This is despite the fact that Quebec has physical Atlantic coasts on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Ungava Bay, and the Hudson Strait.
Read more about this topic: Atlantic Canada
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)