After Le grand dérangement

Call me concussed, but I enjoy PhD theses, especially when they are nicely rewritten and turned into real books. And Christopher Hodson’s The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History is a very good book indeed. Hodson began to study history at Utah State University, then at Northwestern University. He now teaches at Brigham Young University, and his book has that lovely sense of geographic space as being both plastic and manageable that one gets from someone with a historical sensibility formed by the American West. Even though the Acadians were moved about from the north-eastern shores of North America, they were an ethno-religious group that was kicked about in big spaces and yet kept their identity intact, albeit modified by the impact of tough experiences. The several maps in this book are not merely decorative, but are an absolute necessity and a very helpful part of Hodson’s exposition.

Christopher Hodson takes it as read that the Acadians were a...