A history of how Cajun culture coped with forces that threatened its uniqueness

The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana. In the 1940s, when America entered World War II, so too did the isolated Cajuns. Cajun soldiers fought alongside troops from Brooklyn and Berkeley and absorbed aspects of new cultures. In the 1950s as rock 'n' roll and television crackled across Louisiana airwaves, Cajun music makers responded with their own distinct versions. In the 1960s, empowerment and liberation movements turned the South upside down. During the 1980s, as things Cajun became an absorbing national fad, "Cajun" became a kind of brand identity used for selling everything from swamp tours to boxed rice dinners. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the advent of a new information age launched "Cyber-Cajuns" onto a worldwide web. All these forces have pushed and pulled at the fabric of Cajun life but have not destroyed it. A Cajun himself, the author of this book has an intense personal fascination in his people. By linking seemingly local events in the Cajuns' once isolated south Louisiana homeland to national and even global events, Bernard demonstrates that by the middle of the twentieth century the Cajuns for the first time in their ethnic story were engulfed in the currents of mainstream American life and yet continued to make outstandingly distinct contributions.

"This work serves as a model for compiling ethnohistories of other nonliterate peoples."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Cajun culture of south Louisiana has got to be one of the most highly publicized, most often distorted subjects in the American media today. The manner in which some of the media have portrayed the Cajuns not only borders on slandering a people with a proud heritage, but also raises serious questions about the conscientiousness of a substantial segment of the American media. To read the articles in some of the travel magazines and metropolitan newspapers, you'd swear that all the Cajun people do is eat, drink and dance. You'd think that the Cajun country is an exotic land made up mostly of swanps and sleepy little towns with docile, unambitious people who don't care about much except the saturday night dance and their next can of beer. But nothing could be further from the truth!"--Page 4 of cover.

The largest and most diverse collection of Louisiana folktales ever published

Long overdue, this volume is a retrospective on the artist most noted for theBlue Dog, covering his 40-year career.

The Cajuns of Louisiana are a people descended from one of the earliest colonies of European North Americans. Their ancestors, the Acadians, established a French-speaking settlement around Canada's Bay of Fundy in 1604 -- several years before Jamestown. In 1755, their community was decimated in one of American history's most brutal and sordid episodes, known to the Cajuns as Le Grand Dérangement. English soldiers seized the inhabitants of entire towns, arbitrarily splitting up Acadian families and shipping them south. The Cajuns traces both the Acadian roots of these staunchly independent people and the exodus of their refugee descendants into the physically and politically challenging bayou country of colonial Louisiana.