Irish for a Day: Saint Patrick’s Day Celebrations in Quebec City, 1765-1990

Saint Patrick’s Day in Quebec City from 1765 to 1990. The earliest newspaper accounts and interviews show how the city celebrates what has become a spring festival in North America’s French capital and oldest city. Packed with group photographs and proper names, newspaper ads, menus and song sheets, at first glance this looks like the kind of book that will tell the reader dishearteningly more than she wants to know. With her meticulous attention to detail, however, Schmitz has produced a work that is at once a rich local history, an absorbing study of popular culture and a valuable document for our understanding of voluntary ethnicity.