My book A Distinct
Alien Race is available for pre-order here through the publisher Baraka Books of
Montréal. Pre-ordered books will be shipped in August, and the book will be
published officially in September 2018.
A Distinct Alien Race
tells the story of the Franco-Americans who labored in the New England textile industry between about 1865 and 1930. Boston merchants, flush with
profits from the West Indies and China trades, created this new industry in New
England at the dawn of the 19th century. After the Civil War, these
corporations imported a large labor force from Québec and the former Acadia which grew to number
one-seventh of the population of New England by the 1920s. The book's title comes from an 1889 Boston newspaper that described the workers from the North using this phrase.
The book presents a fresh approach to the question of why the rural poor of Québec emigrated
in such numbers and who the emigrants
were in Québec before they came to the USA. It explores the conditions in which
Franco-Americans lived based on contemporary reports and primary sources. It then
discusses the reception of Franco-Americans in the USA including a bizarre
conspiracy theory about them floated in the press in the last two decades of
the 19th century.
A Distinct Alien Race
describes the strenuous efforts of Protestant clergy to convert the
Franco-American newcomers, so tightly were Americanism and Protestantism
identified in the period in question. The book also exposes the anti-Franco-American
agitation of the 1920s KKK and the eugenics movement. Finally, it discusses the
situation of Franco-Americans today, now that the mills have fallen silent.
I sold my book from this blog. The blog was always intended
as research & development for a book rather than as an end in itself. Reading it over, I can now look back and see how I have developed particular pieces of research. Although I stand behind
what I have written here, there are bits I might word differently
today.
