No matter where you hail from, you're apt to have ties to the Finger Lakes Region. That's the well-supported message of a new book, A Spirited Trip Through the Finger Lakes & Upstate New York, in which the author ties the Upstate to places all over the world. A Spirited Trip Through the Finger Lakes & Upstate New York borrows the persona of early pioneers to personalize the rich history of the region and answer the question: How did things got to be the way they are? Why should someone from Massachusetts feel right at home when visiting upstate New York? Why do the ancestors of Winston Churchill reside in the cemeteries of Palmyra and Macedon? How did an English lord wind up owning millions of acres of Upstate property after his country lost it in the Revolutionary War? Why did a Canandaigua family become a major benefactor of the New York Metropolitan Museum?
The United States is accustomed to accepting waves of migrants who are fleeing oppressive conditions and political persecution in their home countries. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the flow of migration reversed as over fifty thousand Americans fled across the border to Canada to resist military service during the Vietnam War or to escape their homeland’s hawkish society. Unguarded Border tells their stories and, in the process, describes a migrant experience that does not fit the usual paradigms. Rather than treating these American refugees as unwelcome foreigners, Canada embraced them, refusing to extradite draft resisters or military deserters and not even requiring passports for the border crossing. And instead of forming close-knit migrant communities, most of these émigrés sought to integrate themselves within Canadian society. Historian Donald W. Maxwell explores how these Americans in exile forged cosmopolitan identities, coming to regard themselves as global citizens, a status complicated by the Canadian government’s attempts to claim them and the U.S. government’s eventual efforts to reclaim them. Unguarded Border offers a new perspective on a movement that permanently changed perceptions of compulsory military service, migration, and national identity.
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