French Colonial Louisiana And The Atlantic World
Bradley G. Bond
Louisiana State University Press
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. <P>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, African, 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. <P>Contents <P>"Between Creoles and Yankees: The Discursive Representation of Colonial Louisiana in American History," by Daniel Usner <P>"How to Prepare Buffalo, and Other Things the French Taught Indians about Nature," by Christopher Morris <P>"Gift Exchange between the French and Native Americans in Louisiana," by Khalil Saadani <P>"Sacred Circles and Dangerous People: Native American Cosmology and the French Settlement of Louisiana," by James Taylor Carson <P>"A ‘Dominion of True Believers Not a Republic for Heretics’: French Colonial Religious Policy and the Settlement of Early Louisiana, 1699–1730," by Bertrand van Ruymbeke <P>"Patrimony without Pater: The New Orleans Ursuline Community and the Creation of a Material Culture," by Emily Clark <P>"Antoine Bienvenu, Illinois Planter and Mississippi Trader: The Structure of Exchange between Lower and Upper Louisiana," by Cécile Vidal <P>"French Geographic Conceptions of the Unexplored American West and the Louisiana Cession of 1762," by Paul Mapp <P>"Population in French America, 1670 to 1730: The Demographic Context of Colonial Louisiana," by James Pritchard <P>"The Growth of the Free and Slave Populations of French Colonial Louisiana," by Paul LaChance <P>"From Saint Domingue to Louisiana: West Indian Refugees in the Lower Mississippi Region," by Nathalie Dessens <P>"The Relationships between St. Louis of Senegal, Its Hinterlands and Colonial Louisiana," by Ibrahima Seck  <P>"Historical Memory, Consciousness, and Conscience in the New Millennium," by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall