A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland [Paperback]

Altogether superb: an accessible, fluent account that advances scholarship while building a worthy memorial to the victims of two and a half centuries past.  Painstakingly researched, at once poignant and hard-hitting, this tragic history of mass expulsion and dispersion of a people from their homeland demands the attention of every American citizen. Faraghers meticulous scholarship recovers the history of a people deliberately targeted for extinction in the British-American conquest of North America. He gives us in vivid detail both the calculated cruelty of the conquerors and the enduring humanity of the people who survived this American exercise in ethnic cleansing. This is a major work. The Acadians doomed struggle for survival, recounted by the author in painstaking, even exhaustive detail, takes on the aura of inevitability as though the outcome had been inscribed by the gods on Olympus. [A] fascinating account&recommended for anyone with a general interest in Colonial American history.