During the French and Indian War, British authorities executed the mass deportation of the French-speaking Acadian population from their ancestral lands in Nova Scotia, Canada. Families were violently separated as thousands were crammed onto disease-ridden transport ships or forced to march long distances over land to various Anglo-American colonies, France, and Louisiana. Facing starvation, bitter winter cold, smallpox epidemics, and intense hostility from English colonists, the Acadians suffered a mortality rate exceeding 50 percent, yet they maintained their cultural cohesion, language, and oral traditions against catastrophic state-sponsored violence.

This immense tragedy and the subsequent decades of wandering inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic 1847 poem 'Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie', which became one of the most popular and influential American poems of the 19th century. Longfellow's poem mythologized the Acadian endurance, created a permanent cultural archetype of the tragic exile, and catalyzed a cultural renaissance among the surviving Acadian and Cajun populations in Canada and Louisiana.