Franco-Americans—and a larger community of French Canadians—were visible in 1921. This is the third part of a year-long tour of major stories concerning Quebec and its diaspora. See the second installment here. September Biddeford’s French-language newspaper runs a profile of a now-forgotten Franco-American known as “Mr. Zero.” The nickname belongs to a Mainer named Urbain […]
Continue readingFrench Canadians 100 Years Ago: May to August
Franco-Americans—and a larger community of French Canadians—were visible in 1921. This is the second part of a year-long tour of major stories concerning Quebec and its diaspora. See the first installment here. May All eyes turn to Manchester, New Hampshire, for a series of high-profile events. On May 11, Catholic residents celebrate the fiftieth anniversary […]
Continue readingFrench Canadians 100 Years Ago: January to April
Thanks to digitization projects, it’s now easy to find major news stories about the French-Canadian community in the era of mass immigration—but also easy to overlook just how common those stories were. Such press coverage came in all sorts of forms and on a wide variety of issues. Newspapers discussed immigration, the challenge of acculturation […]
Continue readingChalifoux, Part II: The Franco-American Who Won Boston
See Part I here. As it still does, commercial prominence translated into political influence. In the spring of 1891, the Chalifoux family welcome William Eustis Russell, the Bay State’s young Democratic governor, then visiting Lowell for the first time since his election. Former Lowell mayors, prominent businessmen, and editor Benjamin Lenthier of Le National were […]
Continue readingChalifoux, Part I: The Franco-American Rockefeller
Overwhelmingly, the hundreds of thousands of French Canadians who left their ancestral homeland in the nineteenth century were economic migrants. Most began their journey on American soil at the bottom of the economic ladder, an unenviable position reinforced by cultural barriers. The march towards middle-class status was typically multigenerational and marked by men’s ability to […]
Continue readingNew York State: Elements of Historical Geography
Regular readers know what’s coming—the well-worn rant about New York State’s unenviable place in Franco-American studies. Well, this time it comes with data. Briefly, for context, the major syntheses on the Franco-American experience in the eastern United States all focus explicitly on New England—and even then, large swaths of those six states are hardly acknowledged. […]
Continue readingOthering the Madawaska in Travel Narratives
Three month ago, this blog plunged into the Upper St. John Valley, an area whose history often falls on the margins of existing narratives. The hard work of reconstructing the history of the Madawaska, its relationship with neighboring regions, and its place within empires is complicated by surviving sources that tell (at best) a partial […]
Continue readingA French-Canadian Journey: Saint-Césaire to St. Albans
See Part I here. The development of Saint-Césaire, on the Yamaska River, announced the expansion of French-Canadian settlement into areas either previously unoccupied by white settlers or hegemonically English-speaking. It lay on the doorstep of the Eastern Townships, colonized successively by Loyalists, other Americans inching New England’s northern frontier onto Canadian soil, and British immigrants. […]
Continue readingA French-Canadian Journey: Bellechasse to Sweetsburg
Like thousands of other families, economic and demographic pressures carried them away from the ancestral heart of French Canada and into the breadbasket of the Richelieu and Yamaska rivers, into the “foreign” Eastern Townships, and into the fields and factories of the Great Republic. The descendants of Jean Lacroix and Marie Anne Fradet—both of them […]
Continue readingReview: Mayer, Congress’s Own
Book Review Holly A. Mayer. Congress’s Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. It may too trite to assert, as scholars have for generations, that the American struggle for independence was complex, messy, and far from linear. But, in the wake of the national holiday, the […]
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