American Indians in Early New Orleans

American Indians in Early New Orleans PDF Author: Daniel H. Usner, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From a peace ceremony conducted by Chitimacha diplomats before Governor Bienville’s makeshift cabin in 1718 to a stickball match played by Choctaw teams in 1897 in Athletic Park, American Indians greatly influenced the history and culture of the Crescent City during its first two hundred years. In American Indians in Early New Orleans, Daniel H. Usner lays to rest assumptions that American Indian communities vanished long ago from urban south Louisiana and recovers the experiences of Native Americans in Old New Orleans from their perspective. Centuries before the arrival of Europeans, American Indians controlled the narrow strip of land between the Mississippi River and present-day Lake Pontchartrain to transport goods, harvest resources, and perform rituals. The birth and growth of colonial New Orleans depended upon the materials and services provided by Native inhabitants as liaisons, traders, soldiers, and even slaves. Despite losing much of their homeland and political power after the Louisiana Purchase, Lower Mississippi Valley Indians refused to retreat from New Orleans’s streets and markets; throughout the 1800s, Choctaw and other nearby communities improvised ways of expressing their cultural autonomy and economic interests—as peddlers, laborers, and performers—in the face of prejudice and hostility from non-Indian residents. Numerous other American Indian tribes, forcibly removed from the southeastern United States, underwent a painful passage through the city before being transported farther up the Mississippi River. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a few Indian communities on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain continued to maintain their creative relationship with New Orleans by regularly vending crafts and plants in the French Market. In this groundbreaking narrative, Usner explores the array of ways that Native people used this river port city, from its founding to the World War I era, and demonstrates their crucial role in New Orleans’s history.

American Indians in Early New Orleans

American Indians in Early New Orleans PDF Author: Daniel H. Usner, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807170097
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From a peace ceremony conducted by Chitimacha diplomats before Governor Bienville’s makeshift cabin in 1718 to a stickball match played by Choctaw teams in 1897 in Athletic Park, American Indians greatly influenced the history and culture of the Crescent City during its first two hundred years. In American Indians in Early New Orleans, Daniel H. Usner lays to rest assumptions that American Indian communities vanished long ago from urban south Louisiana and recovers the experiences of Native Americans in Old New Orleans from their perspective. Centuries before the arrival of Europeans, American Indians controlled the narrow strip of land between the Mississippi River and present-day Lake Pontchartrain to transport goods, harvest resources, and perform rituals. The birth and growth of colonial New Orleans depended upon the materials and services provided by Native inhabitants as liaisons, traders, soldiers, and even slaves. Despite losing much of their homeland and political power after the Louisiana Purchase, Lower Mississippi Valley Indians refused to retreat from New Orleans’s streets and markets; throughout the 1800s, Choctaw and other nearby communities improvised ways of expressing their cultural autonomy and economic interests—as peddlers, laborers, and performers—in the face of prejudice and hostility from non-Indian residents. Numerous other American Indian tribes, forcibly removed from the southeastern United States, underwent a painful passage through the city before being transported farther up the Mississippi River. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a few Indian communities on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain continued to maintain their creative relationship with New Orleans by regularly vending crafts and plants in the French Market. In this groundbreaking narrative, Usner explores the array of ways that Native people used this river port city, from its founding to the World War I era, and demonstrates their crucial role in New Orleans’s history.

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians PDF Author: Sophie White
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207173
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
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.

French Americans--Native Americans in Eighteenth-century French Colonial Louisiana

French Americans--Native Americans in Eighteenth-century French Colonial Louisiana PDF Author: Joseph Zitomersky
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description


Africans In Colonial Louisiana

Africans In Colonial Louisiana PDF Author: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807119997
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
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.

Voices of the Enslaved

Voices of the Enslaved PDF Author: Sophie White
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469654059
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana's courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

A Description of Louisiana

A Description of Louisiana PDF Author: Louis Hennepin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Indians of North America
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description


Voices from an Early American Convent

Voices from an Early American Convent PDF Author: Emily Clark
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807142492
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
In 1727, twelve nuns left France to establish a community of Ursuline nuns in New Orleans, the capital of the French colony of Louisiana. Notable for founding a school that educated all free girls, regardless of social rank, the Ursulines also ran an orphanage, administered the colony's military hospital, and sustained an aggressive program of catechesis among the enslaved population of colonial Louisiana. In Voices from an Early American Convent, Emily Clark extends the boundaries of early American women's history through the firsthand accounts of these remarkable French missionaries, in particular Marie Madeleine Hachard. These fascinating documents reveal women of determination, courage, and conviction, who chose to forgo the traditional European roles of wife and mother, embrace lives of public service, and forge a community among the diverse inhabitants -- enslaved and free -- who occupied early New Orleans.

Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy

Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy PDF Author: Daniel H. Usner Jr.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
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.

French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815

French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815 PDF Author: Robert Englebert
Publisher: MSU Press
ISBN: 1609173600
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
In the past thirty years, the study of French-Indian relations in the center of North America has emerged as an important field for examining the complex relationships that defined a vast geographical area, including the Great Lakes region, the Illinois Country, the Missouri River Valley, and Upper and Lower Louisiana. For years, no one better represented this emerging area of study than Jacqueline Peterson and Richard White, scholars who identified a world defined by miscegenation between French colonists and the native population, or métissage, and the unique process of cultural accommodation that led to a “middle ground” between French and Algonquians. Building on the research of Peterson, White, and Jay Gitlin, this collection of essays brings together new and established scholars from the United States, Canada, and France, to move beyond the paradigms of the middle ground and métissage. At the same time it seeks to demonstrate the rich variety of encounters that defined French and Indians in the heart of North America from 1630 to 1815. Capturing the complexity and nuance of these relations, the authors examine a number of thematic areas that provide a broader assessment of the historical bridge-building process, including ritual interactions, transatlantic connections, diplomatic relations, and post-New France French-Indian relations.

French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World

French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World PDF Author: Bradley G. Bond
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807130353
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
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.