The segment of the website introduces the reader to a variety of recommended reading material, all in reference to the French Acadian people.

A GREAT AND NOBLE SCHEME: THE TRAGIC STORY OF THE EXPULSION OF THE FRENCH ACADIANS FROM THEIR AMERICAN HOMELAND

John Mack Faragher relates, in all its complex, searingly sad details, the story of how the hapless French Acadians were run out of their Nova Scotia homes, a story known to most from Longfellow's Evangeline. Caught between French and British empires, these peaceful farming and fishing families, descendants of French settlers, struggled to maintain their neutrality and their birthright ways. But in 1755, British and colonial New England forces rounded them up and dispersed them by sea throughout North America. Families were broken up; hundreds died on their voyages; their towns were torched; and only small, scattered communities, like the Cajuns of Louisiana,survived into the modern era. The removal of the Acadians, concludes Faragher (the Yale biographer of Daniel Boone), was the first episode of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing in American history. More than that, the communities destroyed, some 150 years old, had lived peacably and intermarried with the Mi'kmaq natives of the Canadian shores. A way of life that could have been a harbinger of our own era of diversity was destroyed.

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This is the first in a series of books by William Gerrior which explores the roots and routes, in France, a number of Acadian families, including the Acadian descendants of François Girouard and Jeanne Aucoin, who arrived from France at Port Royal around 1640. The reader will discover that the Girouard/Giroir family traces back to the medieval times in France. This book also explores the history of the French Canadian branch of the Girouard family, who came directly from France to Québec.

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THE CONTEXTS OF ACADIAN HISTORY, 1686 TO 1784

The first study to connect the Acadian experience with the heritage of ideas the migrants brought with them from Europe, Naomi Griffiths explores the creation and endurance of the Acadian community and the ways in which the Acadians differed from the people of New England and New France. One result of the way between England and France for the domination of much of North America was the deportation of the Acadians from their homeland in 1755. Griffiths examines the implication of this deportation for the survival of the Acadian community.

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This volume is a comprehensive narrative history of how the Acadian community came into being. Acadian culture not only survived, despite attempts to extinguish it, but developed into a complex society with a unique identity and traditions that still exist in present day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Naomi Griffiths uses the results of forty-five years of archival research in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy to place Acadian history in the context of contemporary North American and European events. Sheemphasizes relationships with the Mi'kmaq, showing they were of crucial importance in the development of Acadian identity, land-holding practices, settlement patterns, religious beliefs, and family structure.

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