French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of “Frenchness” and “Frenchification,” this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate “spheres” of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.

This is a story beginning in French Canada, of the early colonial experience in North America with particular reference to the colonists' relations with Indian tribes and competition for the fur trade. It also gives a detailed background of the French failure on this continent.

This history of early European colonial efforts in North America (specifically, the portion north of Mexico and the Caribbean) examines why three colonies-St. Augustine, Jamestown and Quebec-succeeded where many before them had failed. Chapters cover Columbus' exploration and the Treaty of Tordesillas; other Spanish explorers and settlements in the New World; French attempts at settlement prior to Quebec; early English settlements, including Roanoke; failed settlements dating to the Norse enclaves on Greenland; and in-depth studies of the three colonies that survived.

Explores the North American campaigns in relation to events elsewhere in the world, from the ministries of Whitehall and Versailles to the land and sea battles in Europe, Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean.