Three historians and a literary scholar reflect on the French in the Midwest in light of their own work on the history of immigration, migration, and Native American encounters with Europeans in the Midwest. Kathleen Neils Conzen is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor in American History at the University of Chicago, whose work focuses on the history of nineteenth-century immigration, ethnicity, and urban development in the United States. Daniel Greene is Interim Director of Research and Academic Programs and Director of the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture at the Newberry Library and a historian of ethnicity in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Susan Sleeper-Smith is Professor of History at Michigan State University and author of Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes. Carla Zecher is Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library and a literary scholar of the French Renaissance and the literature of contact and conquest.

Recorded Saturday, January 22, 2011 at the Newberry Library.