acadian | Mysite

“Saw Mount Surratt [and] Saint Kitts Is.”: Navigation and Notation in an Acadian Merchant Captain’s Voyages from Nova Scotia to the West Indies

Documents authored by eighteenth-century Acadians are rare. The French settlers known as the Acadians had been deported from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, and Roman Catholic education in the province was soon thereafter reduced to non-existence. The generation of eighteenth-century Acadians born and raised in exile seldom had access to formal education.[1] There were exceptions, however, and some Acadians born in the tumult of the 1750s rose to prominence through lucrat

Colby Gaudet

Aug 13, 202410 min read

'The Testament of Ann Lee' and Eighteenth-Century Enthusiastic Religion

The prospect of the new film, The Testament of Ann Lee (about to be released), is exciting for a historian, such as myself, with a passion for studying eighteenth-century religion.

Colby Gaudet

Primary Source Analysis: Quaker Philanthropy and Indigenous People in the Maritimes

My interest in the history of religion often gravitates to the topic of Christianity and Indigenous people. I’m particularly compelled to study the ways that Christian groups interacted with Indigenous people in the contexts of settler colonialism.

Colby Gaudet

From Rural Roman Catholic to Urbane Freemason and Transcendentalist? Louis A. Surette in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia and Massachusetts

In a previous post, “ Ecclesiastical Kinship at Pointe-de-l’Église ,” I discussed the ‘presbyterial household’ of the Abbé Jean-Mandé Sigogne. Among the children who lived (for a time) as part of this ecclesiastical kin-unit were three Surette brothers from Argyle Township, near Yarmouth. These boys were sons of Athanase Surette and Louise d’Entremont, Acadian parishioners at Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau.[1] Louise and Athanase produced a prodigious family, having twelve children

Colby Gaudet

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