This is When Walls Come Tumbling Down, the podcast about mysterious objects tumbling to earth, the people who hid them, and the haunting rituals in which they were used. In this second episode, we look at the organization behind those objects – the Orange Order – and the strange part their rituals played in Cape Breton and Canadian life at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Reading List: 

Seamus Heaney, North (Faber and Faber, 1975). 

Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada wore: A historical geography of the Orange Order in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1980).

S. Karly Kehoe, Empire and Emancipation: Scottish and Irish Catholics at the Atlantic Fringe, 1780–1850 (University of Toronto Press, 2022).

Joseph Webster, The Religion of Orange Politics: Protestantism and Fraternity in contemporary Scotland (Manchester University Press, 2020).

David A. Wilson ed., The Orange Order in Canada (Four Courts Press, 2007).

Credits:  

When Walls Come Tumbling Down was written by Christian Cowper and Naomi Kent for St. Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. The narrator was Naomi Kent; the studio engineer was Christian Cowper, and the editor was Christian Cowper. The poem quoted in this episode was Orange Drums, Tyrone, 1966, written by Seamus Heaney in North, published in 1975 by Faber and Faber. The poem was read by Marcus Brady. If you enjoyed the episode, you can help us by sharing it wherever you can; and thank you for listening.  The theme music is 'Order' by ComaStudio.