From Canadien to American : The Acculturation of French-Canadian Descendants in Lewiston, Maine, 1860 to the Present

From Canadien to American : The Acculturation of French-Canadian Descendants in Lewiston, Maine, 1860 to the Present

Dissertation from the author of "Loyal but French: The Negotiation of Identity by French-Canadian Descendants in the United States." From the author: "Using Lewiston, Maine, as a community study, this dissertation examines how individuals of French-Canadian descent negotiated their entry into U.S. society from 1860 to 2001. Descriptive statistics compiled from federal manuscript censuses, city directories, and naturalization records provide portraits of the community at different points in time. The French language newspaper of Lewiston and materials from Catholic archives provide much of the literary evidence in this work....This study challenges our understanding of what we call "assimilation." It suggests that acculturation rather than "assimilation" better describes the process by which ethnic populations join the host society. Historians tend to oversimplify ethnic preservation and acculturation by depicting them as binary opposites. This study argues that, rather than struggling between ethnic retention and acculturation, French-Canadian migrants and their Franco-American descendants in Lewiston pursued them as intertwined goals from the 1870s to the 1950s. It also contends that their Americanization was anything but linear. Lewiston's francophones challenged, rejected, or redefined some of the norms of the host society, as they renegotiated their identity in the United States. Yet, modeling good citizenship was integral to their interconnected identity as ethnic Americans. The experiences of Lewiston's French-Canadian descendants challenge contemporary assumptions about the incompatibility of ethnic retention and Americanization."

Richard, Mark Paul

2001

en

Thesis/Dissertation

1860-2000; Lewiston, Maine

No

583

Durham, North Carolina

Ph. D., History

Duke University

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