Today in Maine’s Franco History is a look back at important dates in the history of Maine’s Franco-American communities. It will run throughout 2020, the bicentennial year of Maine’s statehood. Your suggestions for additional events, people, and institutions to celebrate are most welcome. January 16, 1925: First edition of La Justice de Sanford published. It was one of […]
You can’t always believe everything you read. That adage is equally applicable in our modern internet age and when reading 19th century newspapers. So the following story, which appeared in the Ellsworth American, January 18, 1899, is offered with the caution that it hasn’t been corroborated with any other sources. Whether or not it’s inspired […]
In 2019, I’ll be working on a new, additional, project. Every day, I’ll be sharing a story that appeared in the pages of Le Messager (the French paper published in Lewiston) 125 years ago. Day by day, the Tweets in the original French, with English translations, will build a picture of Franco-American life in the […]
Maine Governor Paul LePage once again made national headlines for his defense of President Trump – and by extension, of confederate monuments – when he claimed that 7,600 Mainers fought for the Confederacy. That unsubstantiated claim appears to be off by a magnitude of several hundred, since the known number of Maine Copperheads is around […]
With the release of the wildly-popular mobile game, Pokémon Go, journalists around the world rushed to file copy about the new phenomenon. The Associated Press, the world’s largest consortium of reporters, accordingly issued its style guidelines for reporting on the new game. In addition to advice to “avoid made up words”, the AP directed the […]
When French Ambassador Paul Claudel visited Lewiston, Maine, in 1930, he was given a warm reception by Franco-American leaders in the city. A delegation of civic leaders greeted him at the railroad station, and he was taken on a tour of the Franco institutions of the city, including St. Mary’s Hospital, and the French […]
“There are 8,000 French Canadians in Biddeford, and they are reputed to be excellent people, peaceable, industrious, frugal, and the only allegation that can be made against them is that the French Canadian men are almost unanimously Democrats. For being Democrats they are suffering persecution…Every French Canadian who has been naturalized by the Biddeford court […]
A bitterly cold February evening in Maine – the snow is swirling around the lacrosse players as I walk into the brick-clad Benjamin Mays Arts Center at Bates College in Lewiston. It doesn’t sound like the likeliest setting for a discussion of Maine’s vibrant and multicultural Francophone community. But the showcase of student films by […]
