Religious Orders of Women in New France

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Question

What services did women of religious orders provide in New France?

Answer

Women of religious orders were active in New France mainly in founding schools and hospitals. Three religious orders were present almost from the time of the earliest French settlements. Jesuit Relations reports, first published in 1611, inspired many founders of these religious communities to travel to New France. Reports narrated the adventures and trials of the earliest Jesuit missionaries who accompanied French explorers and trappers. The religious orders of women that soon followed established the first schools and hospitals in the colony and were among the first women to arrive in New France. The most important of these communities were:

Ursulines

The Ursulines were the first nuns to arrive in New France, in 1639, led by Marie de l'Incarnation. She and the other Ursulines who accompanied her established a convent in Quebec, where they started the first school for girls in North America. The pupils were both Native and French girls. Ursuline communities and schools spread throughout New France, eventually reaching as far south as New Orleans, where a community was established early in the 18th century. As their communities spread west, they founded schools to educate Native American girls.

Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph

These Augustinian religious women also came to Quebec in 1639 and founded a hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec (the first in North America north of Mexico). They staffed another, the Hôtel-Dieu, in Montreal in 1645. The Hospitalières also founded schools for girls, including nursing schools, as well as other institutions to care for the poor and the sick.

Congrégation de Notre-Dame

St. Marguerite Bourgeoys began this noncloistered religious order and, in 1658, established a girls' school in Montreal. This was the first of many boarding schools and day schools run by the order throughout New France. The first bishop of Canada, François de Montmorency Laval, highly encouraged and supported these communities of religious women.

For more information

The Virtual Museum of Canada, Seasons of New France.
Quebec City's Chapelle et Musée de Ursulines.

Ursulines of Canada.

Some from Marie de l'Incarnation to her brother.

Montreal's Musée des Hospitalières de l'Hôtel-Dieu.
Montreal's Marguerite-Bourgeoys Museum, Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secour Chapel.

Canada's First Hospital, Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec City.

The Augustinian Sisters and Quebec City's Hôtel-Dieu.

Also very useful for understanding the role of nuns and sisters in New France:
Robert Choquette, "French Catholicism Comes to the Americas," 131- 242, in Charles H. Lippy et al. Christianity Comes to the Americas 1492-1776. New York: Paragon House, 1992.
W. J. Eccles. "The Role of the Church in New France," 26-37 in Eccles, Essays on New France. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987.
W. J. Eccles. The Canadian Frontier 1534-1760. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983.
Thérèse Germain. Autrefois, les Ursulines de Trois-Rivières: une école, un hôpital, un cloître. Sillery, Quebec: A. Sigier, 1997.
Colleen Gray. The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693-1796. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.
Dom Claude Martin. La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marie de l'Incarnation, première supérieure des Ursulines de la Nouvelle France. Paris: L. Billaine, 1677.
Peter N. Moogk. La Nouvelle France: The Making of French Canada: A Cultural History. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000.
Marcel Trudel. Les Écolières des Ursulines de Québec, 1639-1686: Amérindiennes et Canadiennes. Montreal: Hurtubise-HMH, 1999.

Bibliography

Library of Congress, France in America, collection of textual sources.
This includes links to the full text of the following:
Pierre Francois Xavier de Charlevoix. History and General Description of New France, 6 vols. New York: Francis P. Harper, 1900.
Chrestien Le Clercq. First Establishment of the Faith in New France, 2 vols. New York: John G. Shea, 1881.
John Gilmary Shea. Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley. Clinton Hall, NY: Redfield, 1852. Vol. 4 of Benjamin Franklin French, ed., Historical Collections of Louisiana.

The Library and Archives of Canada, full text of the 40 volumes of the Jesuit Relations.

An anthology of selections from the Relations:
Allan Greer. The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000. Bedford Series in History and Culture.

Images:
Detail of illustration of Marie de l'Incarnation, from Claude Martin, Marie de l'Incarnation, Ursuline de Tours: Fondatrice des Ursulines de la Nouvelle-France.

Marguerite Bourgeoys, Musée Virtuel Canada, "Des saisons en Nouvelle-France."

Truth in Transit: Crafting Meaningful Field Trips

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Dawn. The Blue Ridge Mountains, of Pennsylvania, in the western distance, down Chambersburg Pike have an ethereal purple hue as the sun captures their crest. Closer to the ground where we are standing the mist is beginning to lift this mid-October morning. Students and chaperones huddle close together to ward off the autumn chill. All is quiet for this moment I have planned. Reaching into my satchel I pull out my set of Tibetan bells. Asking for perfect stillness from my students and chaperones I bring the bells together. As their ring echoes and trails off, I invoke the Spirit of History to be with us this day as we explore the site of the largest battle of the Civil War. Seven hours later we will head back to West Springfield High School, and my students will never look at a historic site in the same way again.

. . . my students will never look at a historic site in the same way again.

This article will help you to craft deeply rich learning experiences for your students. The lens through which we will use to explore this topic is my annual pilgrimage to Gettysburg National Military Park. Any of the strategies modeled here can be easily adapted by you to use at any historic site you choose.

Prep Work

For any field trip, preparation is a necessity and that includes planning

  • the logistics of getting there,
  • making sure your students are fed, and
  • figuring out how, what, and where you want your students to learn.

Planning is essential, and yes it will take hours, but in the end everyone is rewarded for your hard work. Before you take students, visit the site yourself, several times if necessary. Speak with site staff about your visit and keep a sharp eye and ear attuned to the narrative told at the site. Pick up tidbits along the way that you can use to transform the total experience. If the site has audio-visual programs look at them and determine if you want your students to see them. Doing so will help you to determine your time frame for visiting the site. Your use of time is crucial, particularly if you are visiting a large site such as a battlefield.

Using Student Historians

Early on I learned that what makes a field trip more meaningful for students is getting them involved. I don’t want to simply be a tour guide. For our trip to Gettysburg I ask for student volunteers to teach all of us about what happened to certain individuals at site specific locations, what I term "battlefield vignettes." Working with the National Park Service staff at Gettysburg I assembled file folders of information about seven or eight people who were part of the Gettysburg story. Student historians are then given these folders about a week before the trip to help them to prepare for their presentations. At different stops along the way, we disembark from our motor coach, and the student historians share what they have learned about these characters and what happened to that person at the specific site from which they are speaking. This provides an optimum experience on a variety of levels; it sharpens students speaking skills, it allows peers to see others in action, and it forces the student historians to "get into" the story of their character and be a historian.

. . . student historians share what they have learned about these characters and what happened to that person at the specific site from which they are speaking.

 

The Teacher's Role on Site

My role on the trip is to provide necessary background information about the battle as we drive along in our bus. At different places we stop I will read dramatic primary source accounts of key moments in the battle. Before I read I ask everyone to take their minds' eye back to that time and place and settle in with the moment of the past. On the crest of Cemetery Ridge, at the Angle, where Pickett's Charge was repulsed, I read several eyewitness accounts of the actual combat that took place where we are standing as well as reflections on the site that were written the day after the battle was over. These prove to be powerful and moving as history becomes transcended.

Assessment

It is important to have students reflect on their experience and the best way to do that is to have them write reflective journal entries about their visit. (See here for example of prompt.) Entries are crafted to plumb not only the intellectual components of their visit but also their feelings, affirming what Ralph Waldo Emerson famously wrote, "There is no truth but in transit." Field trips can be the ultimate learning and teaching experience and provide you and your students not only a slice of history but a lifetime of memories as well.

 

 

 

Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services

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The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services is a subsection of the U.S. Department of Education. OSERS' rather broad mission is to address the difficulties which individuals with disabilities—children and adults— must overcome.

While the page largely lists OSERS' various programs, the section likely to be of the most use to you is the office's publications and products. Several offerings intended for parents may be worth a read for special education teachers and educators in inclusive classrooms. Take a look at "Opening Doors: Technology and Communication Options for Children with Hearing Loss" and "Learning Opportunities for Your Child Through Alternate Assessments".

The piece de resistance of the webpage is the Tool Kit on Teaching and Assessing Students with Disabilities. The tool kit offers research and suggestions for assessment, instruction, behavior, and accommodations related to students with disabilities.

Voice of America

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The Voice of America, the United States' first official international radio service, began airing in 1942, during WWII. Since then, the service has provided a global audience with "a consistently reliable and authoritative source of the news," according to the VOA website. Besides news features, VOA also covers cultural, informative, and educational broadcasts; and the service is provided in 45 languages.

If you are interested in U.S. media history, the first place you may want to look is at the VOA organizational history, which is broken down by period, or at the historical highlights timelines.

Maybe you'd like to listen in on some of the archived broadcasts? In actuality, this may be difficult, if your broadcast of interest isn't brand new or at least 12 years old. However, the VOA does provide information on where certain broadcasts can be accessed (the National Archives being key).

The VOA list of programs offers links to many of the organization's programs and radio frequencies, which could be an excellent way to simultaneously teach English as a Second Language and current events, if you yourself are bilingual.

Similarly, you can check out streaming and on demand radio and film webcasts. On the other hand, if you are teaching English as a Second Language, select Learn English, which provides English-language broadcasts specifically designed for English learners.

One of the most unique, and potentially useful, features of the site is a pronunciation guide. Not only does the site write out location, organization, and historical and recent politician's names phonetically, it also provides audio files. So, for example, if you're teaching anything involving China, you can be much more confident discussing Jiangxi, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, or Zhou Enlai in front of your class.

Tramping Through History: Crafting Individual Field Trips

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"Teachers," the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, "are those who use themselves as bridges, over which they invite their students to cross; then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own." With Kazantzakis’s maxim under my wing, I have nurtured his approach to teaching history for 30 years. Washington, DC, and its environs is the great laboratory of democracy. Given the chance to teach in the Washington, DC, area, I can empower my students with a special kind of learning—one infused by time, place, and space.

Rationale

The Individualized Field Trip (IFT) permits students to encounter the past at historic sites and museums, all within the context of learning history based on state and national standards. They make outstanding summative assessment tools, while at the same time permitting students to have an enjoyable and fun experience while they learn.

Description

The IFTs I have constructed over the last two decades have included student visits to battlefields, cemeteries, public monuments, history and art museums, and other historic sites. These activities are designed to have students, on their own time, visit these places, not simply for extra credit but for required enrichment of my classes. In each case students carry worksheets, a camera, and sometimes readings that they are to complete while visiting their particular site. These trips become a record of their experience, be they studying George Washington, while visiting Mount Vernon; Theodore Roosevelt while viewing an artistic exhibition interpreting his life at the National Museum of American Art; walking the National Mall and looking at the 20th-century war memorials to World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars; or traipsing through Congressional Cemetery in search of the final resting places of Mathew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer, or feminist sculptor Adelaide Johnson, whose National Memorial to the Women’s Rights Movement sits in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

These activities are designed to have students, on their own time, visit these places, not simply for extra credit but for required enrichment of my classes.

In the days before PowerPoint I used to have students create photo essays, placing images on poster board and adding captions underneath each image for identification. Today with more sophisticated technology and access to digital archives via the web, students can now craft engaging PowerPoint presentations that incorporate not only the pictures that they take at these sites, but archival images as well.

Tailoring IFT to Teaching Unit

In my regular U.S. History classes I generally require IFTs for three of our four quarters. The IFT for the first quarter is connected to the Colonial Era, Revolutionary Era, and Early American Republic by visiting Mount Vernon. In the second quarter, students visit the National Gallery of Art and study the 1900 plaster cast of sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Memorial. They also visit the National Memorial to African American Soldiers and Sailor’s Memorial by Ed Hamilton dedicated in 1997 which sits a short distance from Howard University, the first institution of higher learning for blacks created during Reconstruction. These visits are related to our study of the American Civil War. During the last quarter students are assigned an IFT I call “Echoes from the Mall,” which requires that they study the three memorials on the National Mall, all erected since 1982, that honor American sacrifice during those conflicts.

Historic Sites as Classrooms

In all of these instances students complete worksheets (Mount Vernon, National Portrait Gallery, Civil War sculpture, and monuments along the Mall) I designed during the groundwork stage of the activity, where I pre-visit the site. The worksheets are specific and can only be answered by visiting the site. Students also must take at least two photographs of the sites during their visit. These photographs eventually illustrate journal entries that students complete, and are placed in their bound composition books. They are also used to decorate a section of my classroom called Clio’s Corner, where images of these student-historians at work are placed on display. To explore the worksheets for each of these trips, see the “download” part of this entry.

Does This Only Work in DC?

While it is true that I may live near Washington, DC, and have access to all these incredible places, I remind you that history and memory have taken place all across the nation. Working with local historical societies, small house museums, and even public libraries can go far in offering you and your students a singularly unique view of the past. Local history can work as a prism for larger issues in American history, connecting your town or community to the bigger picture.

My biggest suggestion is to encourage you to do your homework before you send the students on their mission—you need to visit these places yourself.

My biggest suggestion is to encourage you to do your homework before you send the students on their mission—you need to visit these places yourself. That is crucial in crafting these activities. You need to know what you want your students to see, feel, and experience.

Peace Corps

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The Peace Corps has a three-fold mission. First and foremost, the organization sends volunteers to communities around the world which have requested assistance in creating sustainable solutions to real world problems. Second (and third, really), is an interest in increasing international understanding and friendship—of non-Americans for Americans and vice versa.

One of the most exciting options the Peace Corps offers educators is the World Wise Schools Correspondence Match program. The program permits educators to request a pen pal relationship with a Peace Corps volunteer in a region of the world and area of interest (agriculture, business, education, health, or environment) of their choosing. Maybe your students could discuss the lasting impact of the Vietnam War with a volunteer in Southeast Asia or how U.S. business history has altered life in China or Central America. This could also be an excellent way to introduce social studies students to the connection between history and geography and fields more often taught at the collegiate level, such as anthropology and international relations.

Another feature offered is a collection of more than 120 lesson plans. These are not focused on history per se, but you may be able to find a lesson which will strengthen themes you are pursuing in the classroom. One such lesson involves planning a service learning project. Oral histories are a classic way to combine service learning and history.

Civil Rights Oral History Interviews: Spokane, Washington

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Produced as a part of a series of articles on black history titled "Through Spokane's Eyes: Moments in Black History," this site is a civil rights oral history project organized around the memories of men and women from Spokane, WA. Visitors can listen to of eight oral history interviews. They include an account by Jerrelene Williamson who compares the civil rights movement in Spokane to events in Alabama. Like most of the interviews, Williamson's dialogue is approximately 10 minutes in length. Emelda and Manuel Brown discuss their experiences with racial prejudice within the context of raising a family in Spokane in the 1960s. Their interview (32 minutes) is the second longest within the collection. Like many others within the project, Clarence Freeman shares his remembrances of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Sam Minnix and Verda Lofton describe the local civil rights demonstrations, and Flip Schulke recounts his experiences as a photographer in the south during the 1960s. His interview includes a discussion of James Meredith's admission into the University of Mississippi and at 45 minutes, is the longest. Alvin Pitmon talks about the desegregation of Arkansas schools and Nancy Nelson sings two civil rights spirituals, "My Lord, What a Morning" and "Let Us Break Bread Together."

A search engine allows users to search interviews by keyword and across database topics. This site will be of great interest to those interested in the history of civil rights in the United States.

Life Interrupted: The Japanese American Experience in WW II Arkansas

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This compelling, well-designed site offers a rare glimpse into the World War II experiences of Japanese Americans in two Arkansas internment camps. A series of 30 photographs illuminates the daily lives of inmates at school, in a clinic, working at a sawmill. Physical conditions in the camp are captured effectively by several aerial views. Three QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) images that allow for 360-degree ground-level views are equally impressive. These photographs are supported by an in-depth timeline of events, an interactive map, and an extensive education section providing links to resources hosted by other sites.

Selected Historical Decennial Census Population and Housing Counts

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More than 40 historical census reports, including decennial reports dating back to 1790, are available for download on this website as PDFs. Historical statistics address topics such as population totals by race, urban or rural status, educational attainment, and means of transportation to work, among others.

There are also histories of the 21 U.S. census questionnaires produced from 1790 to 2000, including instructions to census marshals dating back to 1820. Comparative tables show which censuses included specific questions on subjects, such as ancestry and mental disabilities, and whether respondents were deaf, blind, insane, feeble-minded, paupers, literate, or convicts. Additional information includes state and territorial censuses, mortality schedules produced for a number of 19th-century censuses, population at the time of each census, and supplemental censuses taken at various times on free and slave inhabitants, Indian populations, unemployment, and housing.

Because of the PDF format, the reports take a number of minutes to download. These materials are useful for those needing demographic information or researching the history of census taking and the development of census categories.

Worthington Memory, Online Scrapbook

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Currently provides more than 122 images of objects, documents, and photographs pertaining to the history of the town of Worthington, OH, founded in 1803 by a group of families migrating from western Connecticut and Massachusetts. The site creators plan to add more materials in the future, including digitized versions of 19th- and 20th-century newspapers and oral histories. Users may search by subject, title, or keyword in bibliographic records—which include abstracts of up to 100 words for each item—or browse the collection by decade or 27 categories covering aspects of the social, economic, cultural, civic, and environmental history of the town. Includes links to 22 related sites. Useful for those studying local history.