For three years my great-grandmother, a Gagnon by birth, was a Lowell mill girl. She was not one of those off-the-farm Yankee mill girls of the 1830s—I’m not that old. But she was just off of a farm, only farther north. The Gagnon family moved from the Drummondville area of Quebec to Lowell in 1908. […]
Continue readingA Franco-American Rebuttal: The View from 1924
Charles Edmond Rouleau attributed a litany of moral failings to expatriated French Canadians—they were lazy but also greedy, improvident and very often intemperate, they betrayed their homeland and their faith. As the nineteenth century wore on, this type of rhetoric, tending to leave Franco-American communities to their own devices, became dominant among Quebec elites. I […]
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 readingReflections on the Franco “Acade-munity”
In a recent discussion of the Progressive Era, one of my students noted that scientists are ideally dedicated to the pursuit of a whole, unvarnished, and uncompromised truth, whereas activists are interested only in the truths that serve their cause. That may well be a fair portrayal of the social scientists and reformers of the […]
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 […]
Continue readingFranco-Americans and the U.S. History Survey
In the last twenty years, the emergence of transnational and borderlands history has profited many areas of historical research. Scholars have increasingly challenged portrayals of borders as immutable markers of national identity. The new approaches have helped us to better recognize the fluidity of identities across borders and, often, in spite of borders. But, as […]
Continue readingFrench Canada, Emigration, and Providence, 1880-1898
The fate of francophones outside of Quebec has recently attracted renewed public scrutiny. In September, New Brunswick’s People’s Alliance, a party hostile to official bilingualism, made a political breakthrough and secured a position of influence by supporting the Progressive Conservative government. The following month, columnist Denise Bombardier argued that the French language had largely disappeared […]
Continue readingResources: Scholarly Journal Articles on Franco-American History
Last week, on this blog, I listed ten major surveys and monographs on Franco-American history in hopes of providing a basis for preliminary research. Equally important are studies published in scholarly journals. I have selected the following ten partly because of their effect on the overall scholarly conversation, but also because they address topics sometimes […]
Continue readingResources: Monographs and Surveys of Franco-American History
With the publication of a series of “Image of America” tomes and David Vemette’s landmark work on Franco-American history, scholars and history enthusiasts alike have reason to be excited about the state of the field.[1] In hopes of helping researchers who are starting on the subject, I am offering here a beginner’s guide to secondary […]
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