An earlier version of this essay appeared in the fall 2021 issue of Le Forum, the quarterly publication of the Franco-American Centre (University of Maine). Please cite appropriately. * * * In early nineteenth-century Michigan, a Chippewa couple adopted four-year-old Leah Campeau, whom they had found wandering alone in the wilderness. After the War of […]
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QTP at 150: Back to Ding-a-Long Street
The several million Americans of French or French-Canadian origin, who are among the oldest Americans of European stock, are for the most part human vestiges of the vast continental French empire in North America. With these words, quoted from historian Mason Wade’s work, Query the Past launched into the story of the transnational French-Canadian community. […]
Continue readingFinding Franco-Americans in Agricultural Reports
As we’ve previously seen on this blog, nineteenth-century government reports contain abundant information about French-Canadian emigration. Legislative committees studied the issue in 1849 and again eight years later. Emigration was also a matter of debate in the halls of Quebec’s provincial legislature after 1867. Studies and commentaries commissioned (or received) by the contemporary Canadian press […]
Continue readingNuancing Native-French Relations
The arrival of European peoples in the Americas had a cataclysmic effect on the original occupants of the land. Initially, the devastation of Indigenous nations owed primarily to the spread of unknown diseases. As Europeans became more numerous and asserted their influence, Natives suffered from war, the loss of their ancestral territory, heightened competition for […]
Continue readingA Bash for Quebec
For more on Franco-American history, please check out the following links: Franco-American political history from our friends at the French-Canadian Legacy Podcast; A history of religious and public education in the St. John River valley on the Acadian Archives blog; An essay on the “prehistory” of the great migration from the St. Lawrence River valley […]
Continue readingWinter Customs from Louis Fréchette
In prior years, this blog has looked at customs surrounding nineteenth-century holidays and shared a unique, French-Canadian take on A Christmas Carol. Following Prosper Bender and Honoré Beaugrand, our guide this year is again a prominent French-Canadian writer—one roughly of the same generation. In Christmas in French Canada, Louis Fréchette penned short stories in English—without […]
Continue readingFrench Canadians 100 Years Ago: May to August
Franco-Americans—and a larger community of French Canadians—were visible in 1921. This is the second part of a year-long tour of major stories concerning Quebec and its diaspora. See the first installment here. May All eyes turn to Manchester, New Hampshire, for a series of high-profile events. On May 11, Catholic residents celebrate the fiftieth anniversary […]
Continue readingFrench Canadians 100 Years Ago: January to April
Thanks to digitization projects, it’s now easy to find major news stories about the French-Canadian community in the era of mass immigration—but also easy to overlook just how common those stories were. Such press coverage came in all sorts of forms and on a wide variety of issues. Newspapers discussed immigration, the challenge of acculturation […]
Continue readingChalifoux, Part I: The Franco-American Rockefeller
Overwhelmingly, the hundreds of thousands of French Canadians who left their ancestral homeland in the nineteenth century were economic migrants. Most began their journey on American soil at the bottom of the economic ladder, an unenviable position reinforced by cultural barriers. The march towards middle-class status was typically multigenerational and marked by men’s ability to […]
Continue readingOthering the Madawaska in Travel Narratives
Three month ago, this blog plunged into the Upper St. John Valley, an area whose history often falls on the margins of existing narratives. The hard work of reconstructing the history of the Madawaska, its relationship with neighboring regions, and its place within empires is complicated by surviving sources that tell (at best) a partial […]
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