Good luck finding a French Canadian who has no personal connection to the grande saignée, the wave of emigration that afflicted Canada from 1840 to the Great Depression. I, for one, could mention my own great-, great-, great-, great-grandparents, Joseph and Dorothée Royer, who spent several years in the United States around 1830. Wave after […]
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Those Other Franco-Americans: Exeter, N.H.
Much has been made of unconventional Franco-American experiences and stories, on this blog. (See here, here, and here, for instance.) Franco-Americans living in rural parts of New England and New York State are perpetually in the shadow of those who settled in industrial cities and worked in factories. A similar neglect is apparent when it […]
Continue readingMaska, Mexico, and Pre-Civil War Migrations
It’s a long way from the lowlands of the St. Lawrence to the Valle de México. As someone who once spent eleven hours simply trying to cross Montana, I can vouch for the almost unimaginable size of this continent. So too will anyone who has crossed North America by land. It is all the more […]
Continue readingThe First Franco-Americans Revisited: Revolutionaries and Refugees
Last spring, on this website, I wrote of Clément Gosselin and other French Canadians who participated in the American War of Independence. After three years, a lengthy labor of love now comes to fruition with the publication of my “Promises to Keep: French Canadians as Revolutionaries and Refugees, 1775-1800,” which will appear in the next […]
Continue readingLa Journée de la Francophonie in Exeter, N.H.
Yesterday, in celebration of Francophonie Day at Phillips Exeter Academy, I was invited to deliver the event’s keynote address. I gladly share my prepared remarks here. Thank you, all, for your presence here. I salute your interest in this language that bring us together—not merely today, I hope, but throughout the year. Thank you especially […]
Continue readingQuebec and Hinterland Canadians
In several weeks, I will have the privilege and pleasure of sharing my work on Franco-Americans at a colloquium on Quebec Studies at my dear alma mater, Bishop’s University. Below is a sneak peak, which may touch on themes familiar to friends and frequenters of this blog. Though Franco-Americans in the hinterland were typically not […]
Continue readingWomen’s History Month: La Femme Franco-Américaine
For three years my great-grandmother, a Gagnon by birth, was a Lowell mill girl. She was not one of those off-the-farm Yankee mill girls of the 1830s—I’m not that old. But she was just off of a farm, only farther north. The Gagnon family moved from the Drummondville area of Quebec to Lowell in 1908. […]
Continue readingA Franco-American Rebuttal: The View from 1924
Charles Edmond Rouleau attributed a litany of moral failings to expatriated French Canadians—they were lazy but also greedy, improvident and very often intemperate, they betrayed their homeland and their faith. As the nineteenth century wore on, this type of rhetoric, tending to leave Franco-American communities to their own devices, became dominant among Quebec elites. I […]
Continue readingReporting Failure: The National Project That Wasn’t
Let us leave those American factories where our health wilts like a flower kept from the sun’s invigorating light, and seize the land, such as to be a strong, great, happy, and prosperous people. Charles Edmond Rouleau’s words, published in 1896, were very much in the spirit of the times, at least among Quebec’s elites. […]
Continue readingReflections on the Franco “Acade-munity”
In a recent discussion of the Progressive Era, one of my students noted that scientists are ideally dedicated to the pursuit of a whole, unvarnished, and uncompromised truth, whereas activists are interested only in the truths that serve their cause. That may well be a fair portrayal of the social scientists and reformers of the […]
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