Huguenot Refugees in Colonial New York

Overview

Drawing comparisons with the broader Huguenot diaspora, this book reassesses the prevailing view that Huguenots in North America quickly conformed to Anglicanism and abandoned the French language and other distinctive characteristics in order to assimilate into Anglo-American culture. Although the standard interpretation may still be true for Huguenots in heterogeneous urban communities, it should be modified for Huguenots in ethnically and religiously homogeneous rural settlements like New Paltz and New Rochelle, where the process was more akin to a gradual acculturation.

Reviews

"Paula Wheeler Carlo has produced a concise, richly detailed, and thoroughly researched account of rural New York Huguenots that gives us a more nuanced understanding of this group’s role in colonial America… Essential reading for anyone studying the Huguenot experience in colonial America, and an important reminder that much of rural colonial America consisted of ethnic and religious communities that resisted, with varying degrees of success, the forces of homogenization." —Journal of American History