Exile without an end: the first ethnic cleansing in American history.

• Author: Sturgis, Amy H.
• Position: A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians From Their American Homeland - Book Review

A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians From Their American Homeland, by John Mack Faragher,, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 592 pages, $28.95

"WHERE IS THE thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers--/ Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands / Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?" So asked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic 1847 poem Evangeline, a Tale of Acadie. His answer was fittingly grim: "Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed! / Scattered like dust and leaves ..."

In his remarkable book A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians From Their American Homeland, the Yale historian John Mack Faragher provides the first modern, in-depth examination of the Acadian tragedy that left thousands dead and survivors "scattered like dust and leaves" Previously known for his award-winning books Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (1992) and The American West: A New Interpretive History (2000), Faragher now not only offers the definitive study of the Acadian chapter of North American history but also argues convincingly why a story that played out from 1606 to 1785 holds sobering, direct, and immediate implications for the present day.

"The point is not to moralize about the past but to better understand it," Faragher writes. The story of the Acadians, French colonists who in 1606 established communities in present-day Nova Scotia that predated both Jamestown and Plymouth to the south, warrants better understanding for several reasons. One, according to Faragher, is that le grande derangement, or "the great upheaval," the Acadians suffered at the hands of the British government after nearly 10 years in North America qualifies in contemporary terms as the first example of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing on the continent.

In 1992 the United Nations Security Council created a Commission of Experts to explore the violent situation in the Balkans. The resulting report defined a new term: "'Ethnic cleansing' is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas. To a large extent, it is carried out in the name of misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and a powerful driving sense of revenge. This purpose appears to be the occupation of territory to the exclusion of the purged group or groups."

Applied retroactively to the Acadian example, the...