The Acadian Diaspora Quotes

“The logic of imperialism pigeonholed them as laborers suited for agriculture and nothing more. In 1755, that image would prove the Acadians’ undoing.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“securing the fruits of Acadian agriculture, and preventing the enemy from doing so, became the highest priority.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“Slowly and tortuously, loved ones found each other again, crossing oceans and continents to gather in villages that resembled, save for a few environmental variations, those they had left behind in Nova Scotia—especially in southwestern Louisiana, where hundreds of Acadians settled beginning in the mid-1760s,”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“As for the Acadians, they endured dérangement of a different sort as well. The word also refers to mental agitation—the “madness” with which the God of the Old Testament cursed those He dispossessed in the first diaspora. Wrenched from home and separated from neighbors, spouses, and children, Acadians experienced psychological suffering to match their physical hardships. Their lot, declared a shattered exile dumped on Boston’s docks late in 1755, “was the hardest … since our Saviour was upon the earth.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“As for the Acadians, they endured dérangement of a different sort as well. The word also refers to mental agitation—the “madness” with which the God of the Old Testament cursed those He dispossessed in the first diaspora. Wrenched from home and separated from neighbors, spouses, and children, Acadians experienced psychological suffering to match their physical hardships.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“Within three years, Anglo-American troops had almost emptied the region of Acadian inhabitants, seemingly annihilating a colonial society whose origins predated those of Plymouth and Jamestown. It was an “upheaval” that struck even some of its perpetrators as “sumthing shocking.”7”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“Dispersed by famine, slavery, war, and racial, ethnic, or religious scapegoating, victims know well the panic endured by the Israelites “removed … into all the kingdoms of the earth.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“As long as I have lived,” exclaimed Shem Tov Ardutiel, a medieval chronicler of Jewish expulsions in western Europe, “I have been in the grasp of unrest, pursued by shame, wandering, isolated, set apart from companions, made strange to brothers.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“the poet Ovid lamented that his dreams had become “tortures,” dark visions of barbarian attacks, enslavement, or, worst of all, “my friends, and my dear wife distorted, disappearing, the wounds of our separation torn open again.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History

“to be torn away from familiar places and people is to know terror.”
― Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History