Description

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"Altogether superb: an accessible, fluent account that advances scholarship while building a worthy memorial to the victims of two and a half centuries past." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In 1755, New England troops embarked on a "great and noble scheme" to expel 18,000 French-speaking Acadians ("the neutral French") from Nova Scotia, killing thousands, separating innumerable families, and driving many into forests where they waged a desperate guerrilla resistance. The right of neutrality; to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England; had been one of the founding values of Acadia; its settlers traded and intermarried freely with native Mìkmaq Indians and English Protestants alike. But the Acadians' refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to the British Crown in the mid-eighteenth century gave New Englanders, who had long coveted Nova Scotia's fertile farmland, pretense enough to launch a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it.

About the Author

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John Mack Faragher is the Howard R. Lamar Professor Emeritus of History and American Studies at Yale. He is the author of many books on American history, including a biography of Daniel Boone that received a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Praise For…

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Painstakingly researched, at once poignant and hard-hitting, this tragic history of mass expulsion and dispersion of a people from their homeland demands the attention of every American citizen.
— Skye K. Moody - Seattle Times

Faragher’s meticulous scholarship recovers the history of a people deliberately targeted for extinction in the British-American conquest of North America. He gives us in vivid detail both the calculated cruelty of the conquerors and the enduring humanity of the people who survived this American exercise in ethnic cleansing. This is a major work.
— Edmund Morgan, author of Benjamin Franklin

The Acadians’ doomed struggle for survival, recounted by the author in painstaking, even exhaustive detail, takes on the aura of inevitability as though the outcome had been inscribed by the gods on Olympus.
— William Grimes - New York Times

[A] fascinating account…recommended for anyone with a general interest in Colonial American history.
— James D. Fairbanks - Houston Chronicle