This book marks the 400th anniversary of the founding of Quebec. It consists of six essays by a team of contributors drawn from Quebec, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. The book explores the concept of Franco-American heritage not as a modern remnant of a lost French North American empire but a thriving entity that grew in both vitality and geographical spread in the centuries after the British Conquest of 1759.
Two points are fundamental to the essays in the book:
• Franco-America's heritage was neither French nor American but something different and unique from both.
• Its geographical extent spread far beyond its birthplace in Quebec province and penetrated into large parts of so-called Anglo-America —in other words, it was continental rather than provincial in nature.