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The Rumble of a Distant Drum opens in 1673 when Marquette and Jolliet sailed down the Mississippi River and found the Quapaw already in residence in the Arkansas Post, where the Arkansas River flowed into the Mississippi. Here, they established the first European settlement in this part of the country, thirty years before New Orleans and eighty years before St. Louis. Morris S. Arnold draws on his many years of archival research and writing on colonial Arkansas to produce this elegant account of the cultural intersections of the French and Spanish with the native American peoples. He demonstrates that the Quapaws and Frenchmen created a highly symbiotic society in which the two disparate peoples became connected in complex and subtle ways - through intermarriage, trade, religious practice, and political/military alliances.
This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world. Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city’s history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescen...
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 coul...
Ever since a native American prepared a paper "charte" of the lower Colorado River for the Spaniard Hernando de Alarcon in 1540, native Americans have been making maps in the course of encounters with whites (the most recent maps often support land claims). This book charts the history of these cartographic encounters, examining native maps and mapmaking from the earliest contacts onward.
In 1719, Jean-Francois-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny, son of a Paris lawyer, set sail for Louisiana with a commission as a lieutenant after a year in Quebec. During his peregrinations over the next eighteen years, Dumont came to challenge corrupt officials, found himself in jail, eked out a living as a colonial subsistence farmer, survived life-threatening storms and epidemics, encountered pirates, witnessed the 1719 battle for Pensacola, described the 1729 Natchez Uprising, and gave account of the 1739-1740 French expedition against the Chickasaws. Dumont's adventures, as recorded in his 1747 memoir conserved at the Newberry Library, underscore the complexity of the expanding French Atlantic world, offering a singular perspective on early colonialism in Louisiana. His life story also provides detailed descriptions and illustrations of the peoples and environment of the lower Mississippi valley. This English translation of the unabridged memoir features a new introduction, maps, and a biographical dictionary to enhance the text. Dumont emerges here as an important colonial voice and brings to vivid life the French Atlantic.
An archaeological guide to the earliest French settlement on the northern Gulf Coast. Archaeological excavations since 1989 have uncovered exciting evidence of the original townsite of Mobile, first capital of the Louisiana colony, and remnants of the colony's port on Dauphin Island.
A study of historic architectural styles of New Orleans homes. This presentation of nineteenth-century gouache and watercolor archival paintings from the New Orleans Notarial Archives offers a glimpse at what old, renovated, restored, and new buildings in New Orleans neighborhoods not only might look like, but how they should look. Including examples of each New Orleans house type, ranging from the French colonial plantation home to the Creole cottage, this volume offers historic plans for each house along with contemporary adaptive-use alternatives to suit modern needs. An architectural pattern book, educational tool, city planner’s handbook, and stunning visual presentation, this gorgeou...
Louisiana, the Bayou State, is famous for many things, including savory cuisine, great music, and a resident population whose mantra is laissez les bons temps roulerlet the good times roll! The place is also noted for its historic architecture, which ranges from simple forms such as the shotgun house or the Creole cottage to the celebrated plantation homes along the River Road. Bayou Built: The Legacy of Louisianas Historic Architecture examines the so-called built environment from the perspectives of cultural geography and historic preservation. It explores the various folk types and architectural styles that became part of the Louisiana landscape from the first French settlement in 1699 through the railroad and lumber boom of the 1890s.
Incorporating more than 3,000 illustrations, Kornwolf's work conveys the full range of the colonial encounter with the continent's geography, from the high forms of architecture through formal landscape design and town planning. From these pages emerge the fine arts of environmental design, an understanding of the political and economic events that helped to determine settlement in North America, an appreciation of the various architectural and landscape forms that the settlers created, and an awareness of the diversity of the continent's geography and its peoples. Considering the humblest buildings along with the mansions of the wealthy and powerful, public buildings, forts, and churches, Kornwolf captures the true dynamism and diversity of colonial communities - their rivalries and frictions, their outlooks and attitudes - as they extended their hold on the land.
"Since Louisiana fell under the administration of France and Spain before becoming a U.S. territory in 1803, the case of New Orleans offers an opportunity to test the long-standing thesis that slave regimes under the French, Spanish, and Anglo-Americans were significantly different. Ingersoll finds that, by contrast, the city's development was remarkably continuous, affected mainly by the changing volume of its slave trade between 1719 and 1808 and thereafter primarily by urban conditions."--Couv.