Second Thursday Lecture Series: Remembering the Cajun Past with Marc David

Join us for a virtual evening with Marc David as he discusses his new book Remembering the Cajun Past: Memory, Race, and the Politics of Public History in Louisiana (University of Massachusetts Press, December 2025). This program is sponsored by the Friends of the Cabildo as part of the Second Thursday Lecture Series. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required. The program will take place on Zoom. Please register here and a link will be emailed to you on the day of the lecture.

About the Book
Cajuns arrived in southern Louisiana in the eighteenth century after the British exiled them from eastern Canada. Also known as Acadians, they retained a unique dialect of French, and their distinctive music, food, and other cultural traits characterized them as an ethnic group. Until the 1960s, authorities viewed them as a serious problem, allegedly blocking the state’s progress as they clung to their antiquated ways. Few Cajun residents in the region remembered the remote past of their ancestors, but by the 1970s, organizations ranging from local nonprofits to the National Park Service created sites that commemorated their history, such as the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, allowing Cajuns to connect their lives to their past and claim it as their own.

 In Remembering the Cajun Past, anthropologist Marc David studies the cultural and political dynamics that reconfigured Cajun memory and identity. Focusing on St. Martinville and the Acadian Memorial, he explores how authorities changed their minds about Cajuns and demonstrates how Cajuns’ historical memories took shape. Part ethnography and part history, David examines the racial aspects of the Memorial’s creation in the wake of the civil rights movement and the growth of a new Cajun history, one through which individual Cajuns rejected the label’s connotation of “white trash” and embraced belonging within a storied white ethnic group. Based on decades of fieldwork and deep engagement with public history practices, David explores how historical memory and the historic sites that foster it are intertwined with the politics of civic life.

About the Author
Marc David is associate professor of practice in sociology and anthropology at St. Olaf College. His work has appeared in journals such as Museum Anthropology Review.