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 readingCategory: Lake Champlain
A French-Canadian Journey: Bellechasse to Sweetsburg
Like thousands of other families, economic and demographic pressures carried them away from the ancestral heart of French Canada and into the breadbasket of the Richelieu and Yamaska rivers, into the “foreign” Eastern Townships, and into the fields and factories of the Great Republic. The descendants of Jean Lacroix and Marie Anne Fradet—both of them […]
Continue readingReview: Mayer, Congress’s Own
Book Review Holly A. Mayer. Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. It may too trite to assert, as scholars have for generations, that the American struggle for independence was complex, messy, and far from linear. But, in the wake of the national holiday, the […]
Continue readingCrossing a Closed Border in 1808, Part II
The story of the commercial embargo on Lake Champlain continues with E. A. Kendall. See Part I here. “I was in pursuit of no palace for my lodging; but, even I was destined to adventure. On the Province Point, on the north side of the boundary, I was taught to expect to find a store, […]
Continue readingCrossing a Closed Border in 1808, Part I
The Canada–U.S. boundary is often represented as the longest undefended border in the world, symbolizing centuries of peace and amity between the two nations—or whatever Canada was prior to the twentieth century. As is often the case in history, this easy trope conceals a more complex and arguably more interesting tale—of which the current ban […]
Continue readingThose Other Franco-Americans: St. Albans, Part II
See Part I here. Six years after the invasion of St. Albans by Confederate agents, a different spectacle played out in the town center, though this one, too, was the doing of people who had descended from Canada: At 11 o’clock in the forenoon the Convention formed in procession, under escort of the St. John […]
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 readingTraveling with a Bishop in 1815, Part II
See Part I here. His arduous journey was still far from over as Bishop Plessis definitively left Halifax on July 27. A carriage provided by a Mr. Conroy took them overland to Windsor, a town with a small estuary opening on the Bay of Fundy. Plessis seemed startled to find a good number of Black […]
Continue readingFarewell, 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 […]
Continue readingThe 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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