388 pages 2021
One million French Canadians crossed the border between 1840 and 1930 to work in New England’s burgeoning textile industry. Vermette traces individuals and families , from the textile barons whose profits in the Caribbean and China trades financed a new industry, to the rural poor of Quebec who crowded the into fetid tenements after the Civil War. Hos social history exposes the anti-Franco-American agitation of Protestant clergy , the Ku Klux Klan, and the eugenics movement.
