To attend, go to THIS WEBSITE and click on WATCH
Kerri Arsenault in conversation with David Vermette, Environmental Legacies and Franco-American Legacies in Maine’s mill towns.
Kerri Arsenault is a book critic, book review editor at Orion magazine, contributing editor at Literary Hub, and her writing has been published in Down East, the Boston Globe, AirMail, Freeman’s and other publications. Mill Town: reckoning with what remains, is her first book.
David Vermette is a researcher and writer who studies the history and identity of the descendants of French North America. Vermette is a third generation Franco-American from Massachusetts and the author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans: Industrialization, Immigration, Religious Strife (2018)
About Mill Town: Kerri grew up in the rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for most residents, including three generations of her family. She had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price we all paid. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health. Mill Town is an autoethnographic investigation, that examines the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease. Mill Town is a moral wake-up call that asks, Whose lives are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?
About A Distinct Alien Race: In the later 19th century, French-Canadian Roman Catholic immigrants from Quebec were deemed a threat to the United States, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. Books and newspapers floated the conspiracy theory that the immigrants seeking work in New England's burgeoning textile industry were actually plotting to annex parts of the United States to a newly independent Quebec. Vermette’s groundbreaking study sets this neglected and poignant tale in the broader context of North American history. He traces individuals and families, from the textile barons who created a new industry to the poor farmers and laborers of Quebec who crowded into the mills in the post-Civil War period. Vermette discusses the murky reception these cross-border immigrants met in the USA, including dehumanizing conditions in mill towns and early-20th-century campaigns led by the Ku Klux Klan and the Eugenics movement. Vermette also discusses what occurred when the textile industry moved to the Deep South and brings the story of emigrants up to the present day. Vermette shows how this little-known episode in U.S. history prefigures events as recent as yesterday’s news. His well documented narrative touches on the issues of cross-border immigration; the Nativists fear of the Other; the rise and fall of manufacturing in the U.S.; and the construction of race and ethnicity.
The Bread and Roses Heritage Festival is a celebration of the ethnic diversity and labor history of Lawrence, MA. This annual festival is celebrated on Labor Day in order to honor the most significant event in Lawrence history: the 1912 Bread and Roses Strike. Lawrence, MA