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. […]
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Franco-Americans Since 1945: An Overview
“With a little more education and a forty-hour week and some time on our hands—and we’ve become mobile—we looked around,” he said recently. The world of quiet beaches and summer cottages and golf courses no longer seemed so remote. “We see all these things and, we say, ‘Hey, we’d like to have an ice-cream cone, […]
Continue readingTurning the Past into Policy with Quebec Historians
Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it a form. – Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945) The historical events we remember can be very revealing, not least because recollection is not a pure, spontaneous act. Collectively, it is a response to present-day concerns and the result of careful selection by well-placed […]
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 readingFinding Francos on the Margins
While at the Quebec Studies colloquium at Bishop’s University, last spring, I introduced part of my research on French Canadians and Franco-Americans in geographical margins—areas usually overlooked by scholars. What do we really know about French-Canadian immigrants and their descendants outside of Lewiston, Manchester, Lowell, Fall River, and the likes? Local historians have done tremendous […]
Continue readingThose Other Franco-Americans: Berlin, N.H., Part II
See Part I here. Among the “Little Canadas” of the U.S. Northeast, Berlin’s developed relatively late. In 1860, the town was home to little more than 400 people, only twenty of whom had been born in the Canadas. (That small number nevertheless exceeded the Irish-born.) Most of the men were either lumber workers or farm […]
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 readingQuebec and Hinterland Canadians
In several weeks, I will have the privilege and pleasure of sharing my work on Franco-Americans at a colloquium on Quebec Studies at my dear alma mater, Bishop’s University. Below is a sneak peak, which may touch on themes familiar to friends and frequenters of this blog. Though Franco-Americans in the hinterland were typically not […]
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 readingFinding Francos in Diocesan Archives: Balancing Opportunity and Empathy
Unless you are particularly generous with your time and opinion, if you have ever posted a Yelp review, it is likely that you were commenting on a bad experience. For most of us, it is much easier to complain about misfortune, and act on it, than to express appreciation or bestow praise. Through years of […]
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