A Not-So-New World
A Not-So-New World

Author: Christopher M. Parsons

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-09-21

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0812250583

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When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. Following Champlain's example, fellow colonists nurtured similar gardens through the Saint Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes region. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind. As Parsons relates, colonists soon discovered that there were limits to what they could accomplish in their gardens. The strangeness of New France became woefully apparent, for example, when colonists found that they could not make French wine out of American grapes. They attributed the differences they discovered to Native American neglect and believed that the French colonial project would rehabilitate and restore the plant life in the region. However, the more colonists experimented with indigenous species and communicated their findings to the wider French Atlantic world, the more foreign New France appeared to French naturalists and even to the colonists themselves. Parsons demonstrates how the French experience of attempting to improve American environments supported not only the acquisition and incorporation of Native American knowledge but also the development of an emerging botanical science that focused on naming new species. Exploring the moment in which settlers, missionaries, merchants, and administrators believed in their ability to shape the environment to better resemble the country they left behind, A Not-So-New World reveals that French colonial ambitions were fueled by a vision of an ecologically sustainable empire.

In Search of Empire
In Search of Empire

Author: James Pritchard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-01-22

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 9780521827423

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Elusive Empire is the first full account of how during 1670 and 1730 French settlers came to the Americas. It examines how they and thousands of African slaves together with Amerindians constructed settlements and produced and traded commodities for export. Bringing together much new evidence, the author explores how the newly constructed societies and new economies, without precedent in France, interacted with the growing international violence in the Atlantic world in order to present a fresh perspective of the multifarious French colonizing experience in the Americas.

French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World
French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World

Author: Bradley G. Bond

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2005-07-01

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9780807130353

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French colonial Louisiana has failed to occupy a place in the historic consciousness of the United States, perhaps owing to its short duration (1699--1762) and its standing outside the dominant narrative of the British colonies in North America. This anthology seeks to locate early Louisiana in its proper place, bringing together a broad range of scholarship that depicts a complex and vibrant sphere. Colonial Louisiana comprised the vast center of what would become the United States. It lay between Spanish, British, and French colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and between woodland and eastern plains Indians. As such, it provided a meeting place for Europeans, Africans, and native Americans, functioning as a crossroads between the New World and other worlds. While acknowledging colonial Louisiana's peripheral position in U.S. and Atlantic World history, this volume demonstrates that the colony stands at the thematic center of the shared narratives and historiographies of diverse places. Through its twelve essays, French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World tells a whole story, the story of a place that belongs to the historic narrative of the Atlantic World.

In This Remote Country
In This Remote Country

Author: Edward Watts

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1469625865

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When Anglo-Americans looked west after the Revolution, they hoped to see a blank slate upon which to build their continental republic. However, French settlers had inhabited the territory stretching from Ohio to Oregon for over a century, blending into Native American networks, economies, and communities. Images of these French settlers saturated nearly every American text concerned with the West. Edward Watts argues that these representations of French colonial culture played a significant role in developing the identity of the new nation. In regard to land, labor, gender, family, race, and religion, American interpretations of the French frontier became a means of sorting the empire builders from those with a more moderate and contained nation in mind, says Watts. Romantic nationalists such as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Lyman Beecher used the French model to justify the construction of a nascent empire. Alternatively, writers such as Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Hall presented a less aggressive vision of the nation based on the colonial French themselves. By examining how representations of the French shaped these conversations, Watts offers an alternative view of antebellum culture wars.

French Colonies in the Americas
French Colonies in the Americas

Author: Lewis K. Parker

Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc

Published: 2002-12-15

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9780823964734

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Discusses the settlement of America by the French, discussing where they settled, key figures, the new way of life, and the end of the French colonies.

French Colonists and Exiles in the United States
French Colonists and Exiles in the United States

Author: J. G. Rosengarten

Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com

Published: 2009-06

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0806351446

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This volume is an attempt to gather together accounts of the various French pioneers and settlements established in the United States during the latter part of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The chapter on French Louisiana, for example, recounts the arrival in 1785 of a number of French Acadians whose transit was subsidized by the King of France. Following is a list of royalists and others who escaped the French Revolution for the safety of America. By the same token, the reader will encounter in 1794 Francois Vannier, who fled the insurrection of Toussaint L'Ouverture in Santo Domingo, taking up land in Monroe County, Pennsylvania. After the Louisiana Purchase, French expatriates served on Zebulon Pike's expedition, organized land companies in Ohio and elsewhere, established communities along the Mississippi, and served in the U.S. Army under Andrew Jackson. Still others, like Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, would write traveler's accounts of American life and culture. One even designed the plan for the new capital of the nation. This comprehensive work includes entire chapters on French soldier-settlers; the Huguenots; French travelers and their memoirs; the Bonapartes and other famous exiles; French settlements in Kentucky, Indiana, and Iowa; illustrious French members of the American Philosophical Society; and the French colony in Gallipolis, Ohio, and the ill-fated one in Asylum, Pennsylvania. Appended to the text, which places hundreds if not thousands of French émigrés in the United States at a particular moment in time, are an annotated bibliography, a list of French place names in America, and an index to names and subjects. Rosengarten's classic treatise on Franco-Americana following the War for Independence is the starting point on its subject and a good bet for any researcher with 18th- or 19th-century French ancestry.