Category: Borderlands

Traveling with a Bishop in 1815, Part I

Four men joined the expedition—men of the cloth, all with a strong constitution, able to carry a heavy load of personal belongings, supplies, and religious items that would eventually fill up Quebeckers’ deep well of curse words. De Boucherville, Gaulin, Gauvreau, and Bolduc had as their esteemed companion and leader the bishop of Quebec, Joseph-Octave […]

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Farewell, Jerry

An earlier version of this essay appeared en français in the spring 2018 issue of Le Forum, the quarterly publication of the Franco-American Centre (University of Maine). *          *          * We stopped at Mountain View on a gloomy and intensely cold December day. Thanks to a volunteer who tends to the cemetery, we had at […]

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The Franco-American Origin Story in Parish Records

They went to Corbeau and Whitehall. They went to Vergennes and Highgate. They returned, and again to the Great Republic they went. This was a proto-industrial era, a time before ubiquitous factories, before national parishes, before the idea of Franco-America could form as something succinct and coherent. These were the early days of French Canadians’ […]

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Review: Licursi and Paquette, Franco-Americans in the Champlain Valley

Book Review Kimberly Lamay Licursi and Céline Racine Paquette. Franco-Americans in the Champlain Valley. Images of America. Charleston: Arcadia, 2018. The nearly seven years I spent in the United States were as enriching outside of the classroom as in—and, mind you, I was there to study and teach. From one academic environment to the next, […]

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Those Other Franco-Americans: New York State

Prior posts in this series include studies of Exeter, Somersworth, and Berlin, New Hampshire. For research on early migrations to economic hinterlands, please see my posts on the Revolutionary War veterans in New York State, early migrations, the formation of hinterland communities, and numerical assessments. In the last two weeks, I had the immense pleasure […]

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Finding Francos on the Margins

While at the Quebec Studies colloquium at Bishop’s University, last spring, I introduced part of my research on French Canadians and Franco-Americans in geographical margins—areas usually overlooked by scholars. What do we really know about French-Canadian immigrants and their descendants outside of Lewiston, Manchester, Lowell, Fall River, and the likes? Local historians have done tremendous […]

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Those Other Franco-Americans: Berlin, N.H., Part III

See Part II here. Like prior studies on this blog (here, here, and here), attention to Berlin highlights the extremely diverse experiences of French Canadians on U.S. soil. These “migrants on the margins” enrich the overall story of Franco-America. In Berlin’s case, this is especially true as we enter the 1930s. French Canadians were long […]

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Those Other Franco-Americans: Berlin, N.H., Part II

See Part I here. Among the “Little Canadas” of the U.S. Northeast, Berlin’s developed relatively late. In 1860, the town was home to little more than 400 people, only twenty of whom had been born in the Canadas. (That small number nevertheless exceeded the Irish-born.) Most of the men were either lumber workers or farm […]

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Those Other Franco-Americans: Berlin, N.H., Part I

The Canadian element found in Berlin a safe, reliable place to live; and every year sees new families arrive from Canada. Berlin found in the Canadian a willing, obedient, and conscientious worker. The two combined are what has made Berlin what Berlin is today. – The Brown Bulletin, January 1927. There is something decidedly poetic […]

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The 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 […]

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