No detailed description available for "Acadie de 1686 a 1784".

In 1600 there were no such people as the Acadians; by 1700 the Acadians, who numbered almost 2,000, lived in an area now covered by northern Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and the southern Gaspé region of Quebec. While most of their ancestors had come to live there from France, a number had arrived from Scotland and England. Their relations with the original inhabitants of the region, the Micmac and Malecite peoples, were generally peaceful. In 1713 the Treaty of Utrecht recognized the Acadian community and gave their territory -- on the frontier between New England and New France -- to Great Britain. During the next forty years the Acadians continued to prosper and to develop their political life and distinctive culture. The deportation of 1755, however, exiled the majority of Acadians to other British colonies in North America. Some went on from their original destination to England, France, or Santo Domingo; many of those who arrived in France continued on to Louisiana; some Acadians eventually returned to Nova Scotia, but not to the lands they once held. The deportation, however, did not destroy the Acadian community. In spite of a horrific death toll, nine years of proscription, and the forfeiture of property and political rights, the Acadians continued to be part of Nova Scotia. The communal existence they were able to sustain, Griffiths shows, formed the basis for the recovery of Acadian society when, in 1764, they were again permitted to own land in the colony. Instead of destroying the Acadian community, the deportation proved to be a source of power for the formation of Acadian identity in the nineteenth century. By placing Acadian history in the context of North American and European realities, Griffiths removes it from the realms of folklore and partisan political interpretation. She brings into play the current historiographical concerns about the development of the trans-Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, considerably sharpening our focus on this period of North American history.

Despite their position between warring French and British empires, European settlers in the Maritimes eventually developed from a migrant community into a distinctive Acadian society. From Migrant to Acadian is a comprehensive narrative history of how the Acadian community came into being. Acadian culture not only survived, despite attempts to extinguish it, but developed into a complex society with a unique identity and traditions that still exist in present day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

This book investigates and assesses how and to what extent the French Catholic missionaries carried out their evangelical activity amid the natives of Acadia/Nova Scotia from the mid-seventeenth century until 1755, the year of the Great Deportation of the Acadians. It provides a new understanding of the role played by the French missionaries in the most peripheral and less populated area of Canada during the colonial period. The decision to focus on this period is dictated by the need to investigate how and to which extent the French missionaries sought to carry out their activity within a contested territory which was exposed to the pressures coming out of both French and British imperial interests.

Acadians remain one of the few North American historical minorities which has been able to survive as a distinct ethno-cultural and linguistic group. This fact is all the more striking since this people suffered a deportation and dispersion, and it does not possess its own territory, nor does it have a government of its own. Acadians therefore have continually had to face the issue of autonomy in all its varied forms. The central issue addressed by this book is an inquiry into the nature of the process which has maintained the unique Acadian minority in existence right up to the present day. This study differs from other multidisciplinary analyses of this community principally because it studies the historical continuity of the dynamic of autonomy that has evolved since the beginning of Acadia. The research for this complete chronological framework encompasses a number of intersecting disciplinary approaches at the historical, political, socio-cultural and existential levels. These differing perspectives are harmonized by their common objective of defining the process of autonomization, and the counter-process of heteronomization, which lie at the heart of each of the periods studied. These approaches allow critical openings between the framework of social history, power relationships and the fundamental aspirations of the minority.

Although Spain was never a formal ally of the United States during the American Revolution, its entry into the war definitively tipped the balance against Britain. Led by Bernardo de Galvez, supreme commander of the Spanish forces in North America, their military campaigns against British settlements on the Mississippi River—and later against Mobile and Pensacola—were crucial in preventing Britain from concentrating all its North American military and naval forces on the fight against George Washington's Continental army. In this first comprehensive biography of Galvez (1746@–86), Gonzalo M. Quintero Saravia assesses the commander's considerable historical impact and expands our understanding of Spain's contribution to the war. A man of both empire and the Enlightenment, as viceroy of New Spain (1785@–86), Galvez was also pivotal in the design and implementation of Spanish colonial reforms, which included the reorganization of Spain's Northern Frontier that brought peace to the region for the duration of the Spanish presence in North America. Extensively researched through Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. archives, Quintero Saravia's portrait of Galvez reveals him as central to the histories of the Revolution and late eighteenth-century America and offers a reinterpretation of the international factors involved in the American War for Independence.

Were Acadians better off than their rural counterparts in old regime France? Did they enjoy a Golden Age? To what degree did a distinct Acadian identity emerge before the wars and deportations of the mid-eighteenth century? In Something of a Peasant Paradise?, Gregory Kennedy compares Acadie in North America with a region of western France, the Loudunais, from which a number of the colonists originated. Kennedy considers the natural environment, the role of the state, the economy, the seigneury, and local governance in each place to show that similarities between the two societies have been greatly underestimated or ignored. The Acadian colonists and the people of the Loudunais were frontier peoples, with dispersed settlement patterns based on kin groups, who sought to make the best use of the land and to profit from trade opportunities. Both societies were hierarchical, demonstrated a high degree of political agency, and employed the same institutions of local governance to organize their affairs and negotiate state demands. Neither group was inherently more prosperous, egalitarian, or independent-minded than the other. Rather, the emergence of a distinct Acadian identity can be traced to the gradual adaptation of traditional methods, institutions, and ideas to their new environmental and political situations. A compelling comparative analysis based on archival evidence on both sides of the Atlantic, Something of a Peasant Paradise? Challenges the traditional historiography and demonstrates that Acadian society shared many of its characteristics with other French rural societies of the period.