There is a subtle but significant French heritage in North Carolina. Towns such as Bath, Beaufort, New Bern, and La Grange are testimony to the settlements of French Huguenots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The city of Fayetteville is named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French ally during the American Revolution. The first European explorers to the North Carolina region were, in fact, French (1524). French Huguenots migrated to the state as early as 1690 and many North Carolinians have last names of French origin. North Carolina has many other place names and remnants of French presence since the early colonial period. This book traces the historical presence of the French in NC from the state's origins to the present and tells the story of a little-known part of the state's cultural heritage. (Color photos and images).

There is a significant French heritage in North Carolina. The first European explorers to the North Carolina region were, in fact, French (1524). French Huguenots migrated to the state as early as 1690, and many North Carolinians have family names of French origin. Towns such as Bath, Beaufort, New Bern, and La Grange are a testimony to French settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the city of Fayetteville is named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French ally during the American Revolution. Beyond names, North Carolina has many other remnants of the French presence. With materials gathered from archives, libraries, interviews, and photographs, this book traces the French heritage in North Carolina from its origins to the present, an important part of North Carolina's cultural history.

There is a subtle but significant French heritage in North Carolina. Towns such as Bath, Beaufort, New Bern, and La Grange are testimony to the settlements of French Huguenots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The city of Fayetteville is named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French ally during the American Revolution. The first European explorers to the North Carolina region were, in fact, French (1524). French Huguenots migrated to the state as early as 1690 and many North Carolinians have last names of French origin. North Carolina has many other place names and remnants of French presence since the early colonial period. This book traces the historical presence of the French in NC from the state's origins to the present and tells the story of a little-known but important part of the state's cultural heritage. (Black and white photos and images).

There is a subtle but significant French heritage in North Carolina. Towns such as Bath, Beaufort, New Bern, and La Grange are a testimony to French settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The city of Fayetteville is named after the Marquis de Lafayette, a French ally during the American Revolution. The first European explorers to the North Carolina region were, in fact, French (1524). French Huguenots migrated to the state as early as 1690, and many North Carolinians have family names of French origin. North Carolina has many other remnants of French presence. This study traces the French heritage in NC from its origins to the present and tells the story of a little-known but important part of NC's cultural history. "La Colonie perdue" is one of these fascinating stories that takes place in and around New Bern.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, French colonists and their Native allies participated in a slave trade that spanned half of North America, carrying thousands of Native Americans into bondage in the Great Lakes, Canada, and the Caribbean. In Bonds of Alliance, Brett Rushforth reveals the dynamics of this system from its origins to the end of French colonial rule. Balancing a vast geographic and chronological scope with careful attention to the lives of enslaved individuals, this book gives voice to those who lived through the ordeal of slavery and, along the way, shaped French and Native societies. Rather than telling a simple story of colonial domination and Native victimization, Rushforth argues that Indian slavery in New France emerged at the nexus of two very different forms of slavery: one indigenous to North America and the other rooted in the Atlantic world. The alliances that bound French and Natives together forced a century-long negotiation over the nature of slavery and its place in early American society. Neither fully Indian nor entirely French, slavery in New France drew upon and transformed indigenous and Atlantic cultures in complex and surprising ways. Based on thousands of French and Algonquian-language manuscripts archived in Canada, France, the United States and the Caribbean, Bonds of Alliance bridges the divide between continental and Atlantic approaches to early American history. By discovering unexpected connections between distant peoples and places, Rushforth sheds new light on a wide range of subjects, including intercultural diplomacy, colonial law, gender and sexuality, and the history of race.

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.

France is often held up as a bastion of gastronomic refinement and as a model of artisanal agriculture and husbandry. But French farming is not at all what it seems. Countering the standard stories of gastronomy, tourism, and leisure associated with the French countryside, Venus Bivar portrays French farmers as hard-nosed businessmen preoccupied with global trade and mass production. With a focus on both the rise of big agriculture and the organic movement, Bivar examines the tumult of postwar rural France, a place fiercely engaged with crucial national and global developments. Delving into the intersecting narratives of economic modernization, the birth of organic farming, the development of a strong agricultural protest movement, and the rise of environmentalism, Bivar reveals a movement as preoccupied with maintaining the purity of the French race as of French food. What emerges is a story of how French farming conquered the world, bringing with it a set of ideas about place and purity with a darker origin story than we might have guessed.

Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Celine Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by a multitude of languages, intimate and sensory expressions ensured that French colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. As Carayon demonstrates, nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous responses and resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the imperial French imagination. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency--and, crucially, well afterward.

Volume 163 in the North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures series.

French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding