French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World

An Elegy

Bradley G. Bond

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780807130353
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807151402
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Between Creoles and Yankees: The Discursive Representation of Colonial Louisiana in American History
• 2 How to Prepare Buffalo, and Other Things the French Taught Indians about Nature
• 3 Gift Exchange between the French and Native Americans in Louisiana
• 4 Sacred Circles and Dangerous People: Native American Cosmology and the French Settlement of Louisiana
• 5 “A Dominion of True Believers Not a Republic for Heretics”: French Colonial Religious Policy and the Settlement of Early Louisiana, 1699–1730
• 6 Patrimony without Pater: The New Orleans Ursuline Community and the Creation of a Material Culture
• 7 Antoine Bienvenu, Illinois Planter and Mississippi Trader: The Structure of Exchange between Lower and Upper Louisiana
• 8 French Geographic Conceptions of the Unexplored American West and the Louisiana Cession of 1762
• 9 Population in French America, 1670–1730: The Demographic Context of Colonial Louisiana
• 10 The Growth of the Free and Slave Populations of French Colonial Louisiana
• 11 From Saint Domingue to Louisiana: West Indian Refugees in the Lower Mississippi Region
• 12 The Relationships between St. Louis of Senegal, Its Hinterlands, and Colonial Louisiana
• Epilogue: Historical Memory, Consciousness, and Conscience in the New Millennium
• Contributors
• Index