For your friendly, neighborhood director of archives, October was intellectually rich. Maine Archives and Museums, the Center for French Colonial Studies, and the Institut d’histoire de l’Amérique française (IHAF) held their respective annual conferences. All three yielded fascinating insights and proved particularly special for the engaging conversations with colleagues. The professional and scholarly organizations behind […]
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Exploring the Acadian Peninsula
The deportation of thousands of Acadians that began in 1755 left human fragments across the Atlantic world. Few areas are known specifically for their Acadian culture—or named after the culture. New Brunswick’s Acadian peninsula stands out… figuratively and literally. It is the horn that juts easterly from northeastern New Brunswick. It is bound by the […]
Continue readingBritish Acadia Unraveled: The Deportation
See Part II here. The appointment of a professional soldier like Edward Cornwallis, with a mission to build, settle, and develop Nova Scotia, announced a new British seriousness in a colony that the metropole had long neglected. The new governor proved scornful of the past management of the colony and he sought to assert his […]
Continue readingBritish Acadia and French Neutrals
See Part I here. As we read through imperial correspondence, we begin to understand why, despite security concerns, early British Acadia was also the golden-age Acadia of our historical imagination. We can sense British governors’ frustration not with the Acadian people so much as their own superiors in London. Richard Philipps, a long-time absentee governor, […]
Continue readingBritish Acadia: The Beginnings
This three-part series was first presented as “British Acadia Between Imperial Imagination and Colonial Reality” for the Acadian Archives’ annual lecture series in 2022. Please cite appropriately. Recordings of past lectures are available through the Archives. “British Acadia”: The expression may, at first glance, seem like a contradiction in terms. We easily think of Acadia […]
Continue readingSilent But Visible? French Canadians on Stage and Screen
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 […]
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 […]
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