Africans In Colonial Louisiana

Author : Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 1995-07-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0807119997

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Africans In Colonial Louisiana by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Pdf

Although a number of important studies of American slavery have explored the formation of slave cultures in the English colonies, no book until now has undertaken a comprehensive assessment of the development of the distinctive Afro-Creole culture of colonial Louisiana. This culture, based upon a separate language community with its own folkloric, musical, religious, and historical traditions, was created by slaves brought directly from Africa to Louisiana before 1731. It still survives as the acknowledged cultural heritage of tens of thousands of people of all races in the southern part of the state. In this pathbreaking work, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall studies Louisiana's creole slave community during the eighteenth century, focusing on the slaves' African origins, the evolution of their own language and culture, and the role they played in the formation of the broader society, economy, and culture of the region. Hall bases her study on research in a wide range of archival sources in Louisiana, France, and Spain and employs several disciplines--history, anthropology, linguistics, and folklore--in her analysis. Among the topics she considers are the French slave trade from Africa to Louisiana, the ethnic origins of the slaves, and relations between African slaves and native Indians. She gives special consideration to race mixture between Africans, Indians, and whites; to the role of slaves in the Natchez Uprising of 1729; to slave unrest and conspiracies, including the Pointe Coupee conspiracies of 1791 and 1795; and to the development of communities of runaway slaves in the cypress swamps around New Orleans.

Author : Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2009-11-05
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0807876860

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Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall Pdf

Enslaved peoples were brought to the Americas from many places in Africa, but a large majority came from relatively few ethnic groups. Drawing on a wide range of materials in four languages as well as on her lifetime study of slave groups in the New World, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall explores the persistence of African ethnic identities among the enslaved over four hundred years of the Atlantic slave trade. Hall traces the linguistic, economic, and cultural ties shared by large numbers of enslaved Africans, showing that despite the fragmentation of the diaspora many ethnic groups retained enough cohesion to communicate and to transmit elements of their shared culture. Hall concludes that recognition of the survival and persistence of African ethnic identities can fundamentally reshape how people think about the emergence of identities among enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, about the ways shared identity gave rise to resistance movements, and about the elements of common African ethnic traditions that influenced regional creole cultures throughout the Americas.

Author : Bradley G. Bond
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 41,7 Mb
Release : 2005-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807130354

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French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World by Bradley G. Bond Pdf

French colonial Louisiana has failed to occupy a place in the historic consciousness of the United States, perhaps owing to its short duration (1699--1762) and its standing outside the dominant narrative of the British colonies in North America. This anthology seeks to locate early Louisiana in its proper place, bringing together a broad range of scholarship that depicts a complex and vibrant sphere. Colonial Louisiana comprised the vast center of what would become the United States. It lay between Spanish, British, and French colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and between woodland and eastern plains Indians. As such, it provided a meeting place for Europeans, Africans, and native Americans, functioning as a crossroads between the New World and other worlds. While acknowledging colonial Louisiana's peripheral position in U.S. and Atlantic World history, this volume demonstrates that the colony stands at the thematic center of the shared narratives and historiographies of diverse places. Through its twelve essays, French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World tells a whole story, the story of a place that belongs to the historic narrative of the Atlantic World.

Author : Charles Vincent
Publisher : University of Louisiana
Page : 766 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : WISC:89073077265

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The African American Experience in Louisiana: From Africa to the Civil War by Charles Vincent Pdf

Author : Herman L. Bennett
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2005-02-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9780253217752

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Africans in Colonial Mexico by Herman L. Bennett Pdf

From secular and ecclesiastical court records, Bennett reconstructs the lives of slave and free blacks, their regulation by the government and by the Church, the impact of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

Author : Sophie White
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 357 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2013-01-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812207170

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Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians by Sophie White Pdf

Based on a sweeping range of archival, visual, and material evidence, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians examines perceptions of Indians in French colonial Louisiana and demonstrates that material culture—especially dress—was central to the elaboration of discourses about race. At the heart of France's seventeenth-century plans for colonizing New France was a formal policy—Frenchification. Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with it the belief that Indians could become French through religion, language, and culture. This fluid and mutable conception of identity carried a risk: while Indians had the potential to become French, the French could themselves be transformed into Indians. French officials had effectively admitted defeat of their policy by the time Louisiana became a province of New France in 1682. But it was here, in Upper Louisiana, that proponents of French-Indian intermarriage finally claimed some success with Frenchification. For supporters, proof of the policy's success lay in the appearance and material possessions of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen. Through a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to the material sources, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians offers a distinctive and original reading of the contours and chronology of racialization in early America. While focused on Louisiana, the methodological model offered in this innovative book shows that dress can take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies—for the process of colonization was built on encounters mediated by appearance.

Author : Daniel H. Usner Jr.
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807839966

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Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy by Daniel H. Usner Jr. Pdf

In this pioneering book Daniel Usner examines the economic and cultural interactions among the Indians, Europeans, and African slaves of colonial Louisiana, including the province of West Florida. Rather than focusing on a single cultural group or on a particular economic activity, this study traces the complex social linkages among Indian villages, colonial plantations, hunting camps, military outposts, and port towns across a large region of pre-cotton South. Usner begins by providing a chronological overview of events from French settlement of the area in 1699 to Spanish acquisition of West Florida after the Revolution. He then shows how early confrontations and transactions shaped the formation of Louisiana into a distinct colonial region with a social system based on mutual needs of subsistence. Usner's focus on commerce allows him to illuminate the motives in the contest for empire among the French, English, and Spanish, as well as to trace the personal networks of communication and exchange that existed among the territory's inhabitants. By revealing the economic and social world of early Louisianians, he lays the groundwork for a better understanding of later Southern society.

Author : Cecile Vidal
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780812245516

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Louisiana by Cecile Vidal Pdf

Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World offers an exceptional collaboration between American, Canadian, and European historians who explore the many ways and means of colonial Louisiana's relations with the rest of the Atlantic world.

Author : Arnold R. Hirsch,Joseph Logsdon
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 356 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 1992-09-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807117749

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Creole New Orleans by Arnold R. Hirsch,Joseph Logsdon Pdf

This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community. Essays in the book's first section focus not only on the formation of the curiously blended Franco-African culture but also on how that culture, once established, resisted change and allowed New Orleans to develop along French and African creole lines until the early nineteenth century. Jerah Johnson explores the motives and objectives of Louisiana's French founders, giving that issue the most searching analysis it has yet received. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, in her account of the origins of New Orleans' free black population, offers a new approach to the early history of Africans in colonial Louisiana. The second part of the book focuses on the challenge of incorporating New Orleans into the United States. As Paul F. LaChance points out, the French immigrants who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase slowed the Americanization process by preserving the city's creole culture. Joesph Tregle then presents a clear, concise account of the clash that occurred between white creoles and the many white Americans who during the 1800s migrated to the city. His analysis demonstrates how race finally brought an accommodation between the white creole and American leaders. The third section centers on the evolution of the city's race relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell begin by tracing the ethno-cultural fault line that divided black Americans and creole through Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Arnold R. Hirsch pursues the themes discerned by Logsdon and Bell from the turn of the century to the 1980s, examining the transformation of the city's racial politics. Collectively, these essays fill a major void in Louisiana history while making a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, ethnicity, and race relations. The book will serve as a cornerstone for future study of the history of New Orleans.

Author : Ira Berlin
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 516 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2009-07-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0674020820

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Many Thousands Gone by Ira Berlin Pdf

Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin, a leading historian of southern and African-American life, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities, or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of creole slaves--who worked alongside their owners, free blacks, and indentured whites--gave way to the plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had inspired its birth.

Author : Ibrahima Seck
Publisher : University of New Orleans Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2014-05-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1608010953

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Bouki Fait Gombo by Ibrahima Seck Pdf

Through an in-depth study of one of Louisiana's most important sugar plantations, Bouki Fait Gombo traces the impact of slavery on southern culture. This is a thorough examination of the Whitney's evolution from the precise routes slaves crossed to arrive at the plantation's doors to records of the men, women, and children who were bound to the Whitney over the years. Although Bouki Fait does not shy away from depicting the daily brutalities slaves faced, at the book's heart are the robust culinary and musical cultures that arose from their shared sense of community and homesickness. The release of this book coincides with the opening of the Whitney Plantation Museum, a "site of memory dedicated to a fuller understanding of the facts of slavery, our national tragedy."

Author : Gilbert C. Din
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
Page : 388 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 1999
Category : History
ISBN : 0890969043

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Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves by Gilbert C. Din Pdf

Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves is a provocative look at the institution of slavery and how it functioned as a part of Louisiana's culture during the years of Spanish rule. Gilbert C. Din challenges the idea that conditions under the Spaniards differed little from the years of French rule and examines how local culture merged with colonial government and residual laws to create a slave system unlike any other in the Deep South. Din presents many aspects of the slavery issue, including a look at the French system, conflicts between planters who favored the established system and governors who promoted the less stringent Spanish laws, and the political favoritism that sought to benefit the wealthy New Orleans district. Din also discusses the role of the Catholic Church and debates the commonly held idea that the church's influence made Spanish slavery less brutal, asserting instead that its role in most areas was insignificant and largely observational. Using government documents from archives in Spain and Louisiana, Din paints a historically accurate portrait of a time when the blended culture of the eighteenth-century colony resulted in conflict and turmoil. Most important are the Papeles Procedentes de la Isla de Cuba, a collection of colonial documents that illustrate not only the actions but also the personalities of the governors and how they implemented changes and handled problems within the slave system. Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves is the first in its field to capture the years of Spanish rule as a specific and unique point in Louisiana's history of slavery. Din's research uncovers both the complexities of the slavery issue and the Spanish heritage that ultimatelyhelped to shape the slave system of the future state. It is an ideal study for anyone interested in the history of both colonial Louisiana and slavery itself.

Author : Carl A. Brasseaux,Claude F. Oubre
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2010-01-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781604736083

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Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country by Carl A. Brasseaux,Claude F. Oubre Pdf

The first serious historical examination of a distinctive multiracial society of Louisiana

Author : Clarence Earl Walker
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 198 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 1991
Category : History
ISBN : 0870497227

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Deromanticizing Black History by Clarence Earl Walker Pdf

Walker (history, U. of California, Davis) challenges the revisionist views of black people put forth in the 1960's and 1970's, claiming that they were revolutionary and necessary at the time, but have now petrified into dogma that impedes further study. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Sybil Kein
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2000-08
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807142059

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Creole by Sybil Kein Pdf

The word Creole evokes a richness rivaled only by the term's widespread misunderstanding. Now both aspects of this unique people and culture are given thorough, illuminating scrutiny in Creole, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary history of Louisiana's Creole population. Written by scholars, many of Creole descent, the volume wrangles with the stuff of legend and conjecture while fostering an appreciation for the Creole contribution to the American mosaic. The collection opens with a historically relevant perspective found in Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson's 1916 piece "People of Color of Louisiana" and continues with contemporary writings: Joan M. Martin on the history of quadroon balls; Michel Fabre and Creole expatriates in France; Barbara Rosendale Duggal with a debiased view of Marie Laveau; Fehintola Mosadomi and the downtrodden roots of Creole grammar; Anthony G. Barthelemy on skin color and racism as an American legacy; Caroline Senter on Reconstruction poets of political vision; and much more. Violet Harrington Bryan, Lester Sullivan, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sybil Kein, Mary Gehman, Arthi A. Anthony, and Mary L. Morton offer excellent commentary on topics that range from the lifestyles of free women of color in the nineteenth century to the Afro-Caribbean links to Creole cooking. By exploring the vibrant yet marginalized culture of the Creole people across time, Creole goes far in diminishing past and present stereotypes of this exuberant segment of our society. A study that necessarily embraces issues of gender, race and color, class, and nationalism, it speaks to the tensions of an increasingly ethnically mixed mainstream America.