America's forgotten atrocity

Right. You're using the modern concept of "ethnic cleansing" to describe what happened to the Acadians.

Yes. The comparative study of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century has revealed some broad outlines about how such operations are conducted. They're planned in detail, planned with a great deal of foresight. Before, in the history of the Acadian expulsion, it was really a kind of antiquarian question: Whether or not the operational plan was written the year of the event or five years before. In comparison with other ethnic cleansing operations, the fact that it was written, I believe, four to five years before the operation was set in motion puts it in the same category. It was highly planned, top-down, hierarchically controlled. So that puts it in the context of something that is depressingly familiar to us.

One of the fundamental questions that American historians have pondered for the last hundred years at least -- and by implication, since the Revolution -- is whether the history of the United States is an exception to patterns that are much larger: patterns of the conduct of nations, international law, patterns that are inherent in the expansion of Europe in world history. What this suggests to me is that in many ways American history is part of a much larger global pattern. American history is not exceptional; it needs to be considered along with the history of all other countries.

That might seem like a benign statement. But the notion that the history of this nation is exceptional, and stands outside the normal behavior of nations and colonies, remains a very powerful idea.

One could argue that idea is still driving our national conduct.

Absolutely. So the question of the exceptional or unexceptional nature of American history -- that's really how this project began.

I don't know that the people at Fox News are really keeping up with the debates within American history. If they were, they'd put you in the pillory and scream at you for what you just said, which is essentially that America isn't special and carries no mission from God. But isn't this one way of understanding the contemporary political divisions in this country: Some people believe that America truly stands outside history in some way?

Well, I encounter this in my classes a lot, the notion that American history is outside of time, essentially. We're talking more about myth -- and I don't mean myth in the sense of untruth -- about the enactment of large, universal principles outside of time. You know, the Struggle for Freedom. I'm not trying to put these concepts down! I'm just suggesting that they need to be examined in the context of real historical experience, and examined in a comparative frame. In my experience, that idea itself is extremely radical to my students.

It's not like you teach at some small-town, local college, either.

That's right. Yale recruits nationally, and gets many of the very best students. Yet many of them, in a kind of unthoughtful way, have imbibed the notion that Americans stand outside of history. We have a history in this country, and the very act of trying to compare it with other societies, other places and other times is shocking to many of my students.

I was trained as a Western historian, a frontier historian. And from the earliest part of my career, the idea was to try to place Western and frontier history in the context of the expansion of Europe over the last 500 years. That essentially is putting America into time and into place, and making comparative frameworks into the final standard for judging a historical event. So yes, it is a real divide in this country.

When you describe, very powerfully and painfully, how the expulsion of the Acadians was actually carried out, you write that this was one of the most horrific episodes in American history. That's a startling statement, isn't it? We're talking about a continent that had slavery for more than 200 years, and a continent where the native peoples were more or less wiped out. I mean, there's a high bar to get over here, in terms of horrific episodes.

There is, and I don't want to be placed in the business of comparative horrors. One of the reasons why I think this stands as a notable horror is the extent to which the history of the Acadians, and their particular variety of settler society, represented a way of planting communities in the homeland of another people that was more about accommodation than about conflict. And that fact itself became one of the principal factors in their destruction. So it's not simply the way in which they were forcibly removed, which was terribly destructive, but the fact that it crushed and put out of memory an experiment in colonization that seems to have offered a very different way to go. God knows, in our history we need as many of those examples as we can find.

One thing I don't want to do is simply to be in the business of telling one depressing story after another. One of the things that was so attractive and so compelling about doing this history was that the Acadian experience as settlers, with the Natives, and their attempt to find a way to work within the competition of empires, suggested a different way of moving forward in the world. It's terribly pathetic that it was for that reason -- and that was indeed one of the main reasons -- they were crushed. In this way I'm no different from historians who investigate the American Revolution in order to provide inspiring stories -- I'm a big believer in the inspirational aspect of historical inquiry. We need good examples. That for me is what made this story particularly brutal and sad. Here was an example we can certainly learn from today, and yet that was one of the main reasons the Acadians were destroyed.

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