David M. Shribman: Trump's planned 'Great Upheaval' has a dismal precedent

CHETICAMP, Nova Scotia — In the middle of the 18th century, Great Britain undertook a deportation program in the New World with many of the elements of President-elect Donald Trump's plan to expel hundreds of thousands of immigrants, perhaps even more than a million, from the United States. It did not go well.

This episode is lost in the memory of most North Americans, but is vivid today, some 270 years later, in the lives and cultures of descendants of the French colonists who lived, generally peaceably, among Indigenous peoples for a century and a quarter. It was a mass deportation known variously as the Acadian Expulsion or the Great Upheaval, and it remains a blot on British history — and, perhaps, an object lesson for the new administration as it is contemplating an even more massive expulsion.