Frequent readers of the blog may roll their eyes here: New York State deserves greater attention and study in the field of Franco-American history. It is a case I have made before; every now and then, I put my money where my mouth (or pen… or keyboard) is and try to make some humble contribution […]
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Wright Revisited: The Frank Foster Controversy
Frank Foster wasn’t a nobody, but he was no Colonel Wright. In other words, Franco-Americans could with reason object to the disparaging remarks written into Carroll Wright’s report on labor conditions in 1881. This was a public report issued by a government agency whose claims were informed by Irish workers rather than Franco-Americans themselves. Foster […]
Continue readingPlacemen, Knights, and Laborers: The Politics of Jeanne la Fileuse
Emigration was political. Most late nineteenth-century French-Canadian emigrants left Quebec for economic reasons. But there were political causes underlying the province’s economic woes; efforts to stanch this demographic hemorrhage and to repatriate the exiles inevitably reverberated into partisan politics. Early reports on emigration to the United States (issued in 1849 and 1857) suggested solutions; policies […]
Continue readingPlacemen, Knights, and Laborers: Honoré Beaugrand on Emigration
What’s in a name? For illustrious Quebeckers of the late nineteenth century, we might think that it was destiny. Honoré Mercier, Faucher de Saint-Maurice, and Prosper Bender, all born in the 1840s, each had a name to match his personality and preeminence. So it was with Honoré Beaugrand, who survives in Quebec’s historical memory chiefly […]
Continue readingEthnic Anxiety and the Race Problem
One of my most challenging moments as a teacher occurred ten years ago, when, as a fresh-faced teaching assistant at Brock University, I was leading a seminar on the Holocaust. Among my students was an Indigenous girl who eagerly raised her hand to make—quite tangentially—a comparison between Nazi-led ethnic cleansing and the historical experience of […]
Continue reading“The most stupid reports and slanders”: The Repatriation Crusade in 1889
As previously noted on this blog, the first efforts to halt French-Canadian emigration to the United States were made not during the deluge of the 1880s, nor even in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Civil War. As early as the 1840s, statesmen in Lower Canada (by now joined legislatively with Upper Canada) raised a […]
Continue readingThe Long Life of the Wright Report
It has become a rite of passage for any scholar of Franco-American history to address the report issued by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1881. The Bureau was one of many publicly-funded agencies created in the late nineteenth century to provide policymakers with information on industrialization, urban life, the workforce, and general economic […]
Continue readingReporting Failure: The National Project That Wasn’t
Let us leave those American factories where our health wilts like a flower kept from the sun’s invigorating light, and seize the land, such as to be a strong, great, happy, and prosperous people. Charles Edmond Rouleau’s words, published in 1896, were very much in the spirit of the times, at least among Quebec’s elites. […]
Continue readingStories of a Sick Country? Emigration from Canada, 1849-1857, Part II
This is the second part of an essay on nineteenth-century emigration reports. Please find the first half here. In retrospect, the great demographic hemorrhage that weakened Canada in the 1840s might come as little surprise. There was a clear disparity between available labor, at a time of tremendous population growth in the St. Lawrence River […]
Continue readingStories of a Sick Country? Emigration from Canada, 1849-1857, Part I
In the United States and much of Europe, immigration and nativism have provided ample fodder for the front page in recent years. So it has often been. When it comes to geographic mobility, politicians and policymakers worry far more about those who cross into their country than about those who leave. In Canada’s case, such […]
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