The French in Michigan by Russell M. Magnaghi (review)

114 The Michigan Historical Review Through a number of well-crafted essays, each accompanied by relevant historical documents including newspaper articles, historical addresses, and diary entries, this narrative well captures the discipline’s growing pains and searching for direction. The essays range from detailing the organization of the fair’s anthropology exhibits, organized by Putnam and Powell, to summarizing how the collections were gathered and displayed. Other essays put anthropology into its intellectual context at the end of the nineteenth century and demonstrate how the Chicago World’s Fair marked a shift from enthusiast to professional. Anthropology went from being a wealthy patron’s hobby of building personal collections to eventually donate to museums, to the intended creation of scientific departments housed in universities. Relic hunters were replaced by professional archaeologists, and unilineal models of racially-biased, and often discriminatory, cultural evolution were replaced with models based more on cultural relativism. In the end, Boas shaped an entire generation of anthropologists, leaving an enduring mark on how anthropology is practiced in the American academy. Overall, this collection is both an intellectual history of anthropology and a snapshot of a turning point. It describes a moment when old ideas and practices were confronted with new ways of thinking about the nature of being human and what methods were best suited for that study. Rory G. McCarthy University of Pittsburgh Russell M. Magnaghi. The French in Michigan. Series: Discovering the Peoples of Michigan. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016. Pp. 97. Illustrations. Index. Notes. References. Paper: $12.95. The Michigan State University Press series “Discovering the Peoples of Michigan” presents the historian with a difficult kind of project: one needs to take an immigrant group out of its home context and place it at a location, however diverse its members or disparate its new places in our state. If anyone is up to the task, it is Russell Magnaghi, an experienced Michigan historian with two books in the thirty-six volume series already under his belt (the Italians and the Cornish), as well as coauthoring a volume on Danes and Icelanders. The French offer Magnaghi a special challenge. Relatively few French left their homeland, and though groups of French trapped furs, served as Book Reviews 115 missionaries, or ventured as pioneers and entrepreneurs, there is no coherent exodus as a starting event; there is no great single magnet such as the mines of the Upper Peninsula, and no mass instance of the chain migration and community formation that organize many immigrant case studies. The French have been coming to Michigan since the seventeenth century, long before it was a state, yet they came in fits and starts, influenced but not determined by the rise and fall of the fur trade and the automobile industry and by the turmoils of the French Revolution and World War I. There are themes that could tie The French in Michigan to larger migration histories such as Dirk Hoerder’s study of northern fur empires in his global history of migration, Cultures in Contact, the relationships analyzed in Susan Sleeper-Smith’s Indian Women and French Men or François Weil’s important essay on the lack of French emigration in Citizenship and Those Who Leave. Nonetheless, the research here reveals a deep acquaintance with the literature on Michigan and mines six archives as well as the records of three French Institutions in Michigan. Through these sources, Magnaghi is able to develop classic areas of inquiry such as the immigrant press and social organizations, while still maintaining themes and chronological order. In addition, he educates the reader with efficient explanations of the French Revolution and two World Wars that reflect his years in the classroom. Thorough research gathers this fragmented group into a kaleidoscope of trappers, settlers, miners, mine owners, educators, autoworkers, auto entrepreneurs, and restaurateurs–without obscuring its diversity whether Protestant or Catholic, successful or failed, urban or rural. There is an ample presence of good works on the part of educating priests and nuns, although Magnaghi’s description of the House of the Good Shepherd’s work with “fallen women” gives the twenty-first century reader pause (p. 25). We even hear from de...