New France

During the first week of the course, we will examine the history of French encounters with the New World and it inhabitants, and explore the ambivalent relations of the settlers with their home country, once they forged an independent life in the stunning but harsh environment of the St. Lawrence region. Along the way, we will visit museums and exhibits chronicling the lives of the industrious settlers, as they learned to survive Quebec's harsh winters, hunt and trap in its rich forests and mountains, and negotiate with its native inhabitants.

Very quickly, in addition, we will engage with the "problem" of Quebec: its sense of abandonment, arising after the French surrender of Canada to the British, and its determinedly distinct existence as a culturally French and linguistically Francophone land embedded in Anglophone North America, now documented in the Museum of the Civilization of French America.

Photo: The Basilique of Quebec City.