May 13, 2021
We are pleased to be joined by Author David Vermette for this episode. David's 2018 Book, 'A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans' fills a significant need in telling the ethnic, labor and immigrant story of the more than 1 million Franco-Americans who immigrated to the US in the 19th and 20th centuries and their more than 10 million US descendants, 2 million in New England alone.
This is a truly special episode for M the Media Project founder and AWHY host Scott M. Graves, himself of French-Canadian extraction.
Read Scott M. Graves homage to the french-canadian women of his family.
David explained the immigration story of the Franco-Americans, who began to flood into New England mill-towns at the behest of mill owners after the US Civil War.
Our conversation tied the challenges and the resiliency inherent in the Franco-American story to the greater story of labor in the United States and how many of the tenants of an earlier time have had consequences on the patterns of development in the Unites States up to the present era.
David will be speaking May 6, 2021 at the University of Maine Orono.
Particularly poignant was our discussion of what our own witness to the ‘Great American Experiment in Suburbia’ meant to us personally, the change in language and customs, the gains in education and yet the dislocation of leaving little Canada for parts unknown.
Whether Franco-American yourself or not, you owe yourself the time to read David's book for its universally North American story of resiliency, pride, industrial history… the story of us all.
'On se souvient de toi'