Browse Items (563 total)
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The Spice of Popery : Converging Christianities on an Early American Frontier
Exploration of Maine's religious culture and various religious identities in the 17th and early 18th centuries. A study of religious eclecticism in the New England/New France borderland that complicates conventional notions of Christian orthodoxy, or of various Protestant and Catholic peoples and ways of living, in a corner of North America during the Colonial Period. The region's interactions between European Protestant settlers, Wabanaki, and French Catholics; the interplay of their various powers and religious varieties; the birth of hybrid borderland cultures; the solidification of religious identities. Particular emphasis on Catholic/Protestant conflicts in this time period and region. Illustrated with maps, portraits, and black and white photographs. Based on the 2006 dissertation of a similar title. -
Never Back Down
Novel set in Keene, New Hampshire between the 1950s and early 2000s. Young baseball prospect Jack Landry comes of age with the Catholic sensibility and working-class ethos of his upbringing. Landry confronts stereotype, forbidden love's trials, and the perils of his personal success under the looming ethereal presences of an ancient event and his tragically killed Memere. A man's life between New England and New Orleans, configured through the guiding motto of his youth: "Never back down, never instigate."Tags Acadians, Cajuns, Death and Disaster, Family, Fiction and Literature, Florida, Gender and Sexuality, Irish Americans, Keene NH, Literary Works, Literary Works -- Fiction, Mexico ME, Mills and Mill Work, Mississippi, Native Americans, New Hampshire, New Orleans LA, Religion, Rumford ME, Sports and Leisure, White River Junction VT, Youth -
Don Roy, Fiddle Music, and Social Sustenance in Franco New England
Profile of the life, training, and works of expert Maine-based fiddler, Don Roy. The musical traditions in which he seats himself, and the attention he has brought to contemporary fiddle playing through public performance. The author's critique of models of cultural sustainability, cultural preservation industry, and other institutions through the example of Roy's pursuits, his community music project, "Fiddle-icious," and through his "inherited sense of music as a participatory activity" (36). Summary history of Franco American immigration and subsequent communities in southern Maine. Contains segments of interviews with Don Roy and Cindy Roy, among others. -
Community-Building in Uncertain Times : The French-Canadians of Burlington and Colchester
Article characterizing the social and economic conditions surrounding Vermont's fluid French Canadian immigrant populations in Burlington and Colchester at the outset of 1850, and the ensuing decade's historical significance in the process of immigrant community definition. The difficult foundation of French Canadian national cultural institutions - school, church, and social organization - in these towns in the 1850s; and the impact of these advancements on community growth and French Canadian identity (cultural, religious, linguistic) among ethnic groups in the region. Discussion of the relevance of Burlington's early lumber and manufacturing industries - before the American Civil War - to the local immigrant workforce. -
The Catholicism of Jack Kerouac
Observations of Jack Kerouac's ethnoreligious background - Franco American and Roman Catholic - and what the author describes as one of three "panels of the survivance triptych" : Catholicism. Historical descriptions of the role and actions of the Roman Catholic Church in historic New France, French Canada, Québec, and later in Franco American communities like Kerouac's Lowell, Massachusetts. Franco Catholicism's Jansenist and Manichean tendencies as rooted in early French North American history. Kerouac's early devotion and later rebellion from Catholic practice, with an ever persistent reflection of and fascincation with select observably Catholic conditions and attitudes, including the themes of guilt and suffering apparent in his recorded life and works. Shades of Catholicism in "Beat Movement" mystical and anti-material mores, and intersections with Kerouac's attentions to Buddhism. Selected revelations of Kerouac's interior life, sexual life, and moral concerns as found in his literature and in select quotation. -
From Little French Mary to Cuzak's Boys : Aspects of the Immigrant Experience in the Work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather
Descriptions of immigrant Americans in the literary works of Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather. What immigrant experiences lend to each author's thematic details. Jewett's characterizations of French Canadian and Irish characters in New England towns in the nineteenth century; Cather's twentieth century depictions of more diverse European and North American immigrant groups. Allusions to the two authors' brief friendship. Suggestions of Jewett's potential influence on Cather's style and content. -
The Ku Klux Klan in the Nashoba Valley, 1840-1933
Article describing nativist, anti-Catholic sentiment in rural Massachusetts's Nashoba Valley in the nineteenth and early twentieth century - including the towns of Shirley, Groton, and Pepperell. Negative local attitudes toward Irish and French Canadian immigrants made explicit in religious and educational contexts in what was an historically, homogeneously Protesant region. Several instances of interreligious tolerance and amicability in the same region. World War I and the regional rise in size and influence of the Ku Klux Klan. Characterizations of the KKK in New England - particularly Massachusetts, and Groton therein - in the first decades of the twentieth century, with select examples of growth, assembly, and violent discrimination.Tags Ethnicity and Collective Identity, Fitchburg MA, Groton MA, Irish Americans, Lithuanian Americans, Littleton MA, Massachusetts, Mills and Mill Work, Nashoba Valley MA, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- History -- Labor and Social, Nonfiction -- Immigration, Pepperell MA, Polish Americans, Religion, Shirley MA, Townsend MA, Violence, West Groton MA -
Inside, Looking Out
Memoir of famed television soap opera writer and playwright, Harding Lemay. From his tumultuous early youth - one of thirteen children - on a New York farm along the Canadian border, to his lonely escape to New York City at the age of 17 and the friends who find him there. His later military training and participation in World War II in Europe. Back to Manhattan to one failed and one successful marriage, and to live and work among books: in libraries, with publishing executives, and finally as a writer. His persistent love of books and struggles with language. -
Under Canadian Skies : A French-Canadian Historical Romance
Novel of historical fiction depicting the Rebellion of 1837 in Canada. Philippe Champagne and Edouard Dumas are two young attorneys whose advocacy on behalf of Lower Canada carries them from Montréal to the Québec countryside, and from the Champagne family and their friends to some of the most notable political figures of the period. The spy, Mireau, who unsettles Lower Canada and threatens its rebellion. Shots fired and swordplay between peasant militia and advancing soldiers. Depictions of animosity between English and French Canadians. Written by a Rhode Island author, and introduced with a brief discussion of New England French speakers. -
The Happy Time
Coming-of-age novel in lighthearted stories set in and around Ottawa, Ontario, amidst the young narrator Robert's extended family of eccentric men and stern women. Robert's small obsession with a much older boarding woman, and other various crushes; the brief appearances of a friendly canary, a mouse, and Robert's French-Canadian uncles; Father Sebastian building a new church for life's finer things; the errands of neighbor Mrs. Merryweather; pipe organs, adult magazines, little green apples, and special characters in other vignettes. Illustrated. Adapted for stage and screen. -
Love, Loss, and the Sacred in Maria Chapdelaine
Article discussing the role of the sacred in Louis Hémon's classic Québec novel, Maria Chapdelaine. Textual evidence of transcedence in Hémon's language and narrative, perhaps "markings" of a traditioned religious sensibility. A reading of the novel that traces sacredness as a sub-theme, and attends to character spirituality in the recurrence and development of religious - namely Roman Catholic - imagery, attachment, and detachment. How a religious narrative compounds the author's novel of loss and tradition in rural Québec. -
Second Sun : New and Selected Poems
Poetry collection composed of new writings and other previously collected works featured in three of the writer's earlier publications: "Crying in the Cheap Seats" (1971), "The Anarchist Heart" (1977), and "Home Front" (1978). -
Oak Island : An Acadian Tale
Historical novel driven by a love story, with a search for treasures extending from the 11th-century Crusades and the Knights of Templar, to the Acadians and Mi'kmaq of 17th-century Atlantic Canada, to colonial Boston. Includes illustrations, maps, ancestry charts of historical characters, depictions of settings in 18th-century Boston and Nova Scotia.