From French Canadian to Franco-American : Cultural Survival and Reinvention of Nationality in a Connecticut Yankee Town, 1855-1895

Fluet, Gregoire J.

From Fluet: "This dissertation...focuses on the immigrant French Canadians who maintained their cultural identity and embraced American nationality in the Connecticut Yankee town of Putnam in the period of 1855-1895. Few community studies exist for Connecticut in this period of rapid change and industrialization. Northeastern Connecticut, which witnessed the disappearance of Yankee homogeneity, remains unexamined. Putnam, with its large immigrant population, is representative of the area, and of many other smaller mill towns in the northeastern United States, and permits a glimpse of the process whereby French Canadians became Franco-Americans....Three questions drive the inquiry. The first question involves overarching issues of change and inherent community tensions and problems: how did Putnam move from a Connecticut Yankee town to a diverse city? Second, how did the immigrant French Canadians maintain their mentality of la survivance while participating in debates critical to the development of the Putnam community? Third, how did the French Canadian presence in Putnam help to broaden the very meaning of what it meant to be American in the mind of the community?"

Worcester, Massachusetts

2002

en

Thesis/Dissertation

1855-1895; Putnam, Connecticut