Patrick Lacroix, Director of Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, will give a talk on early French-Canadian migrations to the United States for the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Museum of Work and Culture on Sunday, March 6, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time.
The event is virtual, free, and all are welcome.
The American immigration story is typically told in terms of “pull” and “push” factors. It is easy to lose sight of the connective tissue that had to develop between Canadian and American communities to make large-scale emigration from Quebec possible. That interconnectedness was not a product of the 1860s; it developed in overlapping phases in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was the product of infrastructure projects, which accelerated information flows and laid the basis for the cross-border kinship networks. This talk explores such early phases of development to highlight the truly impressive scale of French-Canadian mobility prior to the US Civil War.
Registration is required.
