Book Review Bill Schubart. The Lamoille Stories: Uncle Benoit’s Wake and Other Tales from Vermont. Hinesburg: Magic Hill Press, 2013 [2008]. Yet, the rural Franco-Vermonters have a sense of their identity as French people, both those who live on family-owned farms, and those who live in mini-mill towns like Beecher Falls. The French-Vermonter’s identity is […]
Continue readingCategory: Immigration
A Canadian Excursion to New York City in 1851
Surely we will all agree that transportation history is inherently interesting. If, somehow, we can’t, we should recognize that we can’t understand the history of commerce and migration without it. We have previously seen (here and here) the challenges Bishop Plessis faced while traveling around the Maritime colonies and down to New York in the […]
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 readingNew York State: Elements of Historical Geography
Regular readers know what’s coming—the well-worn rant about New York State’s unenviable place in Franco-American studies. Well, this time it comes with data. Briefly, for context, the major syntheses on the Franco-American experience in the eastern United States all focus explicitly on New England—and even then, large swaths of those six states are hardly acknowledged. […]
Continue readingThose Other Franco-Americans: St. Albans, Part I
One particular claim to fame dominates the history of St. Albans, Vermont: the Confederate raid on local banks that was staged from Canadian soil in 1864. Other events that truly made the city remain little known to outsiders, as is the history of the region as a whole. The Confederate raid at least has the […]
Continue reading“This province is your country”: Understanding the Acadian Deportation
In all the said places and colonies to be yielded and restored by the most Christian King [Louis XIV], in pursuance of this treaty, the subjects of the said King may have liberty to remove themselves, within a year, to any other place. . . But those who are willing to remain there, and to […]
Continue readingReview: Brettell, Following Father Chiniquy
Book Review Caroline B. Brettell. Following Father Chiniquy: Immigration, Religious Schism, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Illinois. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Regular readers of this blog will recognize that it is chiefly concerned with the Franco-Americans of New England and New York State and their connection to Quebec history, with occasional attention to […]
Continue reading“Annexed by Their Own Act”: The Nova Scotian Exodus
The story of the French-Canadian diaspora that began in the nineteenth century is perhaps not as well-known now as it should be. Yet some aspects of Canada’s emigration history are even more obscure. One easily overlooks the fact that English Canada experienced a comparable exodus from the 1850s to the 1920s. Nova Scotia was particularly […]
Continue readingInternet Resources on Acadian History
As many of you know, I will be teaching a course on Acadian history this fall. In the process of building the curriculum, I have been discovering an immense amount of trustworthy educational resources online. Although this blog focuses primarily on the French-Canadian diaspora, Acadians merit considerable attention in the larger story of transnational North […]
Continue readingFranco-American Clippings
I never tire of jumping into newspaper archives in search of one item, only to find something far more eye-opening, or intriguing, or informative. I am always happy to share those findings, but seldom do my press clippings fit in perfectly with one of my regular blog posts. Since the beginning of the year I […]
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