À lire ce qui s’écrit sur les réseaux sociaux, bon nombre de Québécoises et de Québécois vivent un combat quotidien—une petite guerre amorcée à la fin du régime français et loin d’être achevée, une petite guerre qui anime tous les aspects de la vie publique du Québec. Entendons-nous : le fait français est minoritaire dans son […]
Continue readingCategory: Rebellion of 1837
Migratory Beachheads and Marauding Canadians
We might call it a consensus. Whereas most works of Franco-American history focus on the period between the U.S. Civil War and the Great Depression, scholars would generally agree that the great hemorrhage, la grande saignée, began around 1840. Amid the economic and political turbulence that followed the Canadian Rebellions of 1837-1838, French Canadians settled […]
Continue readingA Complete 180? Webster-Ashburton in Hindsight
This year, August 9 marks the 180th anniversary of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. In 1842, the American and British governments, respectively represented by Daniel Webster and Alexander Baring, Baron Ashburton, resolved longstanding points of contention and established grounds for better relations in North America. The first point of contention involved the still-unsettled boundary between Maine and […]
Continue readingThe Many Trials of Lower Canada
In the last blog post, we considered how Lower Canadian agriculture may or may not have traversed a period of crisis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Historians still debate whether the colony experienced a sustained production crisis. The challenges were unquestionably many, however: soil exhaustion; fluke climatic events; fluctuating demand in Britain […]
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 readingJean Rivard: A Pioneering Novel
How easily we overlook what was happening in Lower Canada in the early 1860s. While bloody conflict wrecked Mexico, the American giant was embroiled in a devastating civil war that would claim 700,000 lives and lead to “a new birth of freedom.” For a time, it seemed that the winds of war would sweep over […]
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 readingFinding Francos in Le Forum (1988)
Making Connections By the end of the 1980s, the Forum had broadened its horizons considerably by bringing in more voices and carrying items from other publications. (For background, see last week’s post.) It still included genealogical content and poetry—and in 1988 its pages captured new perspectives with short texts by Fort Kent high school students. […]
Continue readingFrench Canadians and the American Political Promise
In recent decades, Quebec scholars have paid special attention to the américanité of French Canadians—the extent to which they have been culturally, economically, and politically American, whether they be on Canadian soil or in the United States. This conceptual lens has proven its worth not merely in studies of recent Quebec history. When projected over […]
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