Mississippi's American Indians
Mississippi's American Indians

Author: James F. Barnett Jr.

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2012-04-04

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 162846982X

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At the beginning of the eighteenth century, over twenty different American Indian tribal groups inhabited present-day Mississippi. Today, Mississippi is home to only one tribe, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. In Mississippi's American Indians, author James F. Barnett Jr. explores the historical forces and processes that led to this sweeping change in the diversity of the state's native peoples. The book begins with a chapter on Mississippi's approximately 12,000-year prehistory, from early hunter-gatherer societies through the powerful mound building civilizations encountered by the first European expeditions. With the coming of the Spanish, French, and English to the New World, native societies in the Mississippi region connected with the Atlantic market economy, a source for guns, blankets, and many other trade items. Europeans offered these trade materials in exchange for Indian slaves and deerskins, currencies that radically altered the relationships between tribal groups. Smallpox and other diseases followed along the trading paths. Colonial competition between the French and English helped to spark the Natchez rebellion, the Chickasaw-French wars, the Choctaw civil war, and a half-century of client warfare between the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 forced Mississippi's pro-French tribes to move west of the Mississippi River. The Diaspora included the Tunicas, Houmas, Pascagoulas, Biloxis, and a portion of the Choctaw confederacy. In the early nineteenth century, Mississippi's remaining Choctaws and Chickasaws faced a series of treaties with the United States government that ended in destitution and removal. Despite the intense pressures of European invasion, the Mississippi tribes survived by adapting and contributing to their rapidly evolving world.

Draining New Orleans
Draining New Orleans

Author: Richard Campanella

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2023-05-03

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0807179426

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In Draining New Orleans, the first full-length book devoted to “the world’s toughest drainage problem,” renowned geographer Richard Campanella recounts the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater the Crescent City. With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster response, he chronicles the herculean attempts to “reclaim” the city’s swamps and marshes and install subsurface drainage for massive urban expansion. The study begins with a vivid description of a festive event on Mardi Gras weekend 1915, which attracted an entourage of elite New Orleanians to the edge of Bayou Barataria to witness the christening of giant water pumps. President Woodrow Wilson, connected via phoneline from the White House, planned to activate the station with the push of a button, effectively draining the West Bank of New Orleans. What transpired in the years and decades that followed can only be understood by examining the large swath of history dating back two centuries earlier—to the geological formation and indigenous occupation of this delta—and extending through the colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and Progressive eras to modern times. The consequences of dewatering New Orleans proved both triumphant and tragic. The city’s engineering prowess transformed it into a world leader in drainage technology, yet the municipality also fell victim to its own success. Rather than a story about mud and machinery, this is a history of people, power, and the making of place. Campanella emphasizes the role of determined and sometimes unsavory individuals who spearheaded projects to separate water from dirt, creating lucrative opportunities in the process not only for the community but also for themselves.

Complexion of Empire in Natchez
Complexion of Empire in Natchez

Author: Christian Pinnen

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2021-02-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0820358517

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In Complexion of Empire in Natchez, Christian Pinnen examines slavery in the colonial South, using a variety of legal records and archival documents to investigate how bound labor contributed to the establishment and subsequent control of imperial outposts in colonial North America. He examines the dynamic and multifaceted development of slavery in the colonial South and reconstructs the relationships among aspiring enslavers, natives, struggling colonial administrators, and African laborers, as well as the links between slavery and the westward expansion of the American Republic. By placing Natchez at the focal point, this book reveals the unexplored tensions among the enslaved, enslavers, and empires across the plantation complex. Most important, Complexion of Empire in Natchez highlights the effect that different conceptions of racial complexions had on the establishment of plantations and how competing ideas about race strongly influenced the governance of plantation colonies. The location of the Natchez District enables a unique study of British, Spanish, and American legal systems, how enslaved people and natives navigated them, and the consequences of imperial shifts in a small liminal space. The differing—and competing—conceptions of racial complexion in the lower Mississippi Valley would strongly influence the governance of plantation colonies and the hierarchies of race in colonial Natchez. Complexion of Empire in Natchez thus broadens the historical discourse on slavery’s development by including the lower Mississippi Valley as a site of inquiry.

Practicing Ethnohistory
Practicing Ethnohistory

Author: Patricia Kay Galloway

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2006-11-01

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 0803271158

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An essential reader on the practice and methodology of ethnohistory.

Searching for Red Eagle
Searching for Red Eagle

Author:

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published:

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781617033445

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Portrays William Weatherford, who rejected his Scots and French ancestry and embraced his Creek heritage, describes his fight against white encroachment in Georgia, and reflects on his spiritual influence.

French and Spanish Records of Louisiana
French and Spanish Records of Louisiana

Author: Henry Putney Beers

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-03-01

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780807127933

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Representing years of extensive research, this authoritative and comprehensive guide to the records generated in the Louisiana Territory during the French and Spanish colonial periods is a major reference work. Henry Putney Beers has painstakingly traced all types of documents, including land, military, and ecclesiastical records; registers of births, marriages, and burials; and private papers. Far more than a mere bibliographical listing, the book provides a complete history and description of these records and their past as well as current locations. When microfilms or other copies of particular bodies of documents exist, Beers describes the circumstances of reproduction and lists the locations of the copies.In the first part of the book, Beers presents a concise account of history and government in Louisiana, concentrating on the formation of a record-keeping bureaucracy. His detailed discussion includes information on available archival reproductions, documentary publications, and the nature and size of holdings in pertinent manuscript collections. Beers's examination of parish, land, and ecclesiastical records will serve as a vital resource. In the remainder of the book, he provides a similarly comprehensive treatment of the records of what are now Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri, and Arkansas.Beers traces repositories for these documents far beyond regional confines, locating some in Europe, Canada, and Cuba. For the early migrants to the region -- the Acadians, for example -- he describes source materials at the migrants' points of origin. He also provides information on documents that have been lost or destroyed, an important service that will save researchers much time.French and Spanish Records of Louisiana will prove to be of enormous value to a wide range of people: professional historians, local history buffs, genealogists, lawyers, archivists, and librarians.