Alanna Loucks Montréal was always a crossroads. Located along the St. Lawrence River, the continental highway, the city developed as a space defined by mobility and fluidity. This connected and dynamic character influenced the diverse demographic landscape of Montréal, and facilitated and encouraged the relationships that inhabitants developed within the city and across the French… Continue Reading
Latest in: French Atlantic
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Christopher Hodson [Welcome to our summer series on Acadian history! We are very excited to be presenting this special four-week series, cross-posting on Unwritten Histories, Borealia, and Acadiensis, and in collaboration with the Fredericton Regional Museum, the York Sunbury Historical Society, an Open Academy grant from the Royal Society, the UNB Departments of History and… Continue Reading
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Samuel Derksen The 45th Annual Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (FCHS) was held from June 13-15 at the Université de Sherbrooke campus in Longueuil, Quebec. In many ways, Longueuil was a perfect setting for reflection about French colonial history, particularly in the Americas. No, I’m not referring to the charming new Université de… Continue Reading
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Stephanie Pettigrew [This essay first appeared at UnwrittenHistories on August 21, 2018, and is re-posted here through collaboration with editors Andrea Eidinger and Stephanie Pettigrew.] French Canadian history has always been locked in a struggle to define its history and separate it from its nationalism. Even when discussing the origins of French settlers in New… Continue Reading
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Allan Greer I am grateful to Benoît Grenier and Alain Laberge for having taken the trouble to read my book and comment on my short polemic, “There was no Seigneurial System.” Indeed, I’m doubly grateful since I relied heavily on the extensive and rigorous research of these two historians in preparing Property and Dispossession. Why… Continue Reading
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Allan Greer From elementary school books to encyclopedia entries to scholarly treatises, no work on New France is complete without a section on the “seigneurial system,” a phenomenon that supposedly shaped the agrarian society of this colony and set it apart from other colonial settlements.[1] Imposed upon Canada by absolutist France, so the story goes,… Continue Reading
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Michael J. Davis “We are at present working on the establishment of New Orleans, thirty leagues above the entry of the Mississippi,” wrote the newly-commissioned commandant-général of Louisiana, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on June 12, 1718 to the Council of the Marine at Versailles.[1] Work on New Orleans, however, had been underway since the… Continue Reading
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Philippe Halbert In 1726, the earthly possessions of Philippe de Rigaud, marquis de Vaudreuil and governor-general of New France, were inventoried at his Quebec residence. The late governor-general’s château Saint-Louis ranked among the most sumptuous households in the capital city, and the royal notary Jacques Barbel appraised an array of French and Flemish tapestries, Chinese… Continue Reading
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Mairi Cowan The early modernism of early Canadian history made a good showing last week in Williamsburg, Virginia. There, at the Emerging Histories of the Early Modern French Atlantic conference sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, about a hundred scholars gathered to discuss the connections around and across the Atlantic… Continue Reading
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