La Grande Hémorragie (The Great Hemorrhage) (In-person)
Spring (14 hrs or more) | Available (Membership Required)
In the 1800s, New England drove the industrialization of the USA; cotton textile manufacturing drove New England’s industrialization; and Franco-Americans, after 1865, drove the New England cotton textile industry.
But why would almost one million Canadien français and Acadians migrate from Canada to New England, the North American epicenter of antipathy towards francophone Catholics?
In this course we will explore the emergence of the ethno-culturally cohesive Canadien français; the reasons for their migration (Le Grande Hémorragie) from Canada to the USA during the 1840s to the 1930s; their lives as immigrants; their transformation into Franco-Americans despite the ideology of la survivance; and finally, their assimilation into the English-speaking, Protestant dominated, capitalist oriented culture of New England.
Lecture will be combined with discussion, and there will be both required and suggested readings concerning this unique migration of North Americans within North America.
Peter Paquette
I have an AB in history from Dartmouth and an MBA from Tuck. In the 1990s, I read my first history about the Franco-Americans in New England. Around 2020, I started to research this subject more extensively and found the fascinating, complicated, and evolving story of the French in North America. This will be the second course which explores some aspect of this story; in this case, the migration from francophone Canada to anglophone New England from the 1840s to the 1930s.