The seemingly accidental discovery of a 1968 Mustang in a swamp reopened a fifty-year-old case that had never been solved involving the disappearance of three high school girls. It tore the scab off some old wounds that most people thought were healed and pretty much forgotten. Sheriff Mack Becker thought that he knew just the man to figure out what happened those many years ago. He contacted recently retired FBI agent Mark Bellingham, who specialized in cold cases and had amassed an impressive record of closures. Nobody had a clue as to what was about to unfold in the small Mid-American town of Pleasant Valley. The outcome of the investigation would shock the entire town and send ripples across the country.
The seemingly accidental discovery of a 1968 Mustang in a swamp reopened a fifty-year-old case that had never been solved involving the disappearance of three high school girls. It tore the scab off some old wounds that most people thought were healed and pretty much forgotten. Sheriff Mack Becker thought that he knew just the man to figure out what happened those many years ago. He contacted recently retired FBI agent Mark Bellingham, who specialized in cold cases and had amassed an impressive record of closures. Nobody had a clue as to what was about to unfold in the small Mid-American town of Pleasant Valley. The outcome of the investigation would shock the entire town and send ripples across the country.
This intellectual history explores how the idea of manhood shaped French Canadian culture and Quebec’s nationalist movement. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Quebec was an agrarian society, and masculinity was rooted in the land and the family and informed by Catholic principles of piety and self-restraint. As the industrial era took hold, a new model was forged, built on the values of secularism and individualism. Jeffery Vacante’s perceptive analysis reveals how French Canadian intellectuals defined masculinity in response to imperialist English Canadian ideals. This “national manhood” would be disentangled from the workplace, the family, and the land and tied instead to one’s cultural identity. The new formulation was crucial in the larger struggle to modernize Quebec’s institutions while preserving French Canadian community, faith, and culture. It offered French Canadian men a way to remodel themselves, participate in industrial modernity, and still assert cultural authority.
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