[10] Settlers and political refugees from the Kingdom of France, including Huguenots, also settled alongside French-speaking Flemish Walloons in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, which later became New York City.

Louisiana Creoles of any race have common European heritage and share cultural ties, such as the traditional use of the French language and the continuing practice of Catholicism; in most cases, the people are related to each other.

[14] As a group, the mixed-race Creoles rapidly began to acquire education, skills (many in New Orleans worked as craftsmen and artisans), businesses and property.

Their ancestors settled Acadia, in what is now the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and part of Maine in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

[16] Another significant source of immigrants to Louisiana was Saint-Domingue (today Haiti); many Saint Dominicans fled during this time, and half of the diaspora eventually settled in New Orleans.

In the 17th and early 18th centuries, there was an influx of a few thousand Huguenots, who were Calvinist refugees fleeing religious persecution following the issuance of the 1685 Edict of Fontainebleau by Louis XIV of the Kingdom of France.

From early colonizing efforts in the 1780s to the era of Quebec's "great hemorrhage," the French-Canadian presence in Clinton County in northeastern New York was inescapable.

[26] In the nineteenth century, many people of French heritage arrived from Quebec and New Brunswick to work in manufacturing cities, especially textile centers, in New England and New York State.

In the same period, Francophones from Quebec became a majority of workers in other regions and sectors, for instance the saw mill and logging camps in the Adirondack Mountains and their foothills.

Some French-Canadian women saw New England as a place of opportunity and possibility where they could create economic alternatives for themselves distinct from the expectations of their farm families in Canada.

Some women never married and oral accounts suggest that self-reliance and economic independence were important reasons for choosing work over marriage and motherhood.

These women conformed to traditional gender ideals in order to retain their 'Canadienne' cultural identity, but they also redefined these roles in ways that provided them increased independence as wives and mothers.

According to Raymond Potvin, the predominantly Irish hierarchy was slow to recognize the need for French-language parishes; several bishops even called for assimilation and English language-only parochial schools.

[32] Like Church institutions, such Franco-American newspapers as Le Messager and La Justice served as pillars of the ideology of survivance—the effort to preserve the traditional culture through faith and language.

[33] A product of the commercial and industrial economy of these areas, by 1913, the French and French-Canadian populations of New York City, Fall River (Massachusetts), and Manchester (New Hampshire) were the largest in the country.

[34] Because of this, a number of French institutions were established in New England, including the Société Historique Franco-américaine in Boston and the Union Saint-Jean-Baptiste d’Amérique of Woonsocket, the largest French-Catholic cultural and mutual benefit society in the United States in the early twentieth century.

Through a collaboration with the Quebec Government Office and local institutions, the podcast’s team established a GeoTour dedicated to Franco-American life in major New England cities.

Senator Kelly Ayotte (R, New Hampshire), Governor Paul LePage of Maine, and Presidential adviser Jon Favreau, who was born and raised in Massachusetts.

[51] As a result of historic connections and cultural exchanges between France and the region, the majority of French multinational businesses have established their U.S. headquarters or subsidiaries in the San Francisco Bay Area since the rise of Silicon Valley and the Dot-com bubble.

According to Walker, from 1896 to 1924, Franco-Americans typically supported the Republican Party because of its conservatism, emphasis on order, and advocacy of the tariff to protect the textile workers from foreign competition.

Ronald Petrin has explored the rise of the Republican ascendency among Massachusetts Franco-Americans in the 1890s; the lengthy economic depression that coincided with President Grover Cleveland's administration and Franco-Irish religious controversies were likely factors in growing support for the GOP.

[59] In the most in-depth study of Franco-American political choices, Patrick Lacroix finds different patterns of partisan engagement across New England and New York State.

Due to the nativist and anti-labor policies of Republican state governments, an increasingly unionized Franco-American working class lent its support to the Democrats across the region.

[72][73][74][75] A breaking point was reached during the Sentinelle affair of the 1920s, in which Franco-American Catholics of Woonsocket,[76] Rhode Island, challenged their bishop over control of parish funds in an unsuccessful bid to wrest power from the Irish American episcopate.

[85] By 1976, nine in ten Franco Americans usually spoke English and scholars generally agreed that "the younger generation of Franco-American youth had rejected their heritage.

Such teleological stances have impeded the progress of research by funneling scholarly energies in limited directions while many other avenues, for example, Franco-American politics, arts, and ties to Quebec, remain insufficiently explored.

[96] While a considerable number of pioneers of Franco-American history left the field or came to the end of their careers in the late 1990s, other scholars have moved the lines of debate in new directions in the last fifteen years.

The "Franco" communities of New England have received less sustained scholarly attention in this period, but important work has no less appeared as historians have sought to assert the relevance of the French-Canadian diaspora to the larger narratives of American immigration, labor and religious history.

Recent studies have introduced a comparative perspective, considered the surprisingly understudied 1920s and 1930s, and reconsidered old debates on assimilation and religious conflict in light of new sources.

[101][102][103] At the same time, there has been rapidly expanding research on the French presence in the middle and western part of the continent (the American Midwest, the Pacific coast, and the Great Lakes region) in the century following the collapse of New France.