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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Those Other Franco-Americans: Somersworth, N.H.
Testimony of Emory J. Randall, shareholders’ clerk of the Great Falls Manufacturing Company (in present-day Somersworth), before the U.S. Senate Committee Upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital, Manchester, N.H., October 15, 1883. Randall estimated that the combined population of Great Falls [Somersworth], N.H., and Berwick, Maine amounted to 7,200-7,500 residents. All of the mills […]
Continue readingAmerican and French: Robert Desty (1827-1895), Part II
Please see Part I here. By the mid-1870s, Robert Desty’s life was apparently more settled. He began the work that considerably eased the burden of generations of American attorneys and scholars, and through which his became a household name in the legal community. He compiled and indexed laws and court cases; he wrote digests; he […]
Continue readingAmerican and French: Robert Desty (1827-1895), Part I
Nobleman. Common Soldier. Legal scholar. Disqualified candidate. French. American. The contradictions of Robert Desty’s life cannot but make for interesting reading. That he is not better known—another victim of history—is remarkable. For one thing, to know him by his American name, under which he earned passing fame, misses much of his identity. Desty was christened […]
Continue readingIt’s a Big Country
Please indulge my truisms for a moment—and entertain a post which, in true scholarly spirit, offers more questions than answers. To say that the Great Republic is a big country—physically—usually means something very abstract, except for those of us who have a habit of driving when air travel is available. My better half and I […]
Continue readingXenophobia and Possibilities for History
I am often reminded that the prejudice I encounter in archival or other primary source research—the xenophobia and bigotry with which my historical subjects contended—is also the prejudice that members of minority groups currently face in their daily lives. While at Brock University, I studied marginalization and discrimination in postwar Canada and in Canadian immigration […]
Continue readingCanadians in the Mexican-American War
As previously noted on this blog, my research on British North Americans in the Mexican-American War will be appearing in the International Journal of Canadian Studies. I appreciate the opportunity to bring greater attention to cross-border migrations in the 1840s. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with genealogist Sandra Goodwin, host of the Maple […]
Continue readingWhy Franco-American History?
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 […]
Continue readingThose 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 […]
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