The latest issue of Le Forum, published by the Franco-American Centre in Orono, carries my article on Hattie LeBlanc, an Acadian migrant accused of murder in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the early twentieth century. We know of Hattie from the extensive press coverage of her trial. Yet, in many respects, she is an exception, for the […]
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British 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 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 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 readingTraveling with a Bishop in 1815, Part I
Four men joined the expedition—men of the cloth, all with a strong constitution, able to carry a heavy load of personal belongings, supplies, and religious items that would eventually fill up Quebeckers’ deep well of curse words. De Boucherville, Gaulin, Gauvreau, and Bolduc had as their esteemed companion and leader the bishop of Quebec, Joseph-Octave […]
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 […]
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