The first serious historical examination of a distinctive multiracial society of Louisiana

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of southwestern Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have given them only scant attention. This probing book, focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials. During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state's three-tiered society—white, free people of color, and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region's economy, for they were self-compelled in efforts to become an integral part of the community. Though not accepted by white society, they were unwilling to be classified as black. Imitating their white neighbors, many were Catholic, spoke the French language, and owned slaves. After the Civil War, some Creoles of Color, being light-skinned, passed for white. Others relocated to safe agricultural enclaves, becoming even more clannish and isolated from general society.

Eight essays explore the social and historical foundations of mixed-race people in Louisiana and along the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico, specific features of Gulf Creole culture, and ethnic and identity developments during the 20th century. The cultural features include Mardi Gras, zydeco music, and the place of the language in the larger New World French Creole. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Over the course of more than three centuries, the diverse communities of Louisiana have engaged in creative living practices to forge a vibrant, multifaceted, and fully developed Creole culture. Against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Blackness and Indigenous erasure that has sought to undermine this rich culture, Louisiana Creoles have found transformative ways to uphold solidarity, kinship, and continuity, retaking Louisiana Creole agency as a post-contact Afro-Indigenous culture. Engaging themes as varied as foodways, queer identity, health, historical trauma, language revitalization, and diaspora, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood explores vital ways a specific Afro-Indigenous community asserts agency while promoting cultural sustainability, communal dialogue, and community reciprocity. With interviews, essays, and autobiographic contributions from community members and scholars, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood tracks the sacred interweaving of land and identity alongside the legacies and genealogies of Creole resistance to bring into focus the Afro-Indigenous people written out of settler governmental policy. In doing so, this collection intervenes against the erasure of Creole Indigeneity to foreground Black/Indian cultural sustainability, agency, and self-determination.

Winner of the 2018 Louisiana Literary Award given by the Louisiana Library Association For centuries, outlanders have openly denigrated Louisiana's coastal wetlands residents and their stubborn refusal to abandon the region's fragile prairies tremblants despite repeated natural and, more recently, man-made disasters. Yet, the cumulative environmental knowledge these wetlands survivors have gained through painful experiences over the course of two centuries holds invaluable keys to the successful adaptation of modern coastal communities throughout the globe. As Hurricane Sandy recently demonstrated, coastal peoples everywhere face rising sea levels, disastrous coastal erosion, and, inevitably, difficult lifestyle choices. Along the Bayou State's coast the most insidious challenges are man-made. Since channelization of the Mississippi River in the wake of the 1927 flood, which diverted sediments and nutrients from the wetlands, coastal Louisiana has lost to erosion, subsidence, and rising sea levels a land mass roughly twice the size of Connecticut. State and national policymakers were unable to reverse this environmental catastrophe until Hurricane Katrina focused a harsh spotlight on the human consequences of eight decades of neglect. Yet, even today, the welfare of Louisiana's coastal plain residents remains, at best, an afterthought in state and national policy discussions. For coastal families, the Gulf water lapping at the doorstep makes this morass by no means a scholarly debate over abstract problems. Ain't There No More renders an easily read history filled with new insights and possibilities. Rare, previously unpublished images documenting a disappearing way of life accompany the narrative. The authors bring nearly a century of combined experience to distilling research and telling this story in a way invaluable to Louisianans, to policymakers, and to all those concerned with rising sea levels and seeking a long-term solution.

In an extraordinary feat of research and intrepid historical navigation, Carl A. Brasseaux and Keith P. Fontenot serve as guides through the labyrinthian and often harrowing world of Louisiana bayou steamboat journeys of the mid to late nineteenth century. The bayou country's steamboat saga mirrors in microcosm the tale of America's most colorful -- and most highly romanticized -- transportation era. But Brasseaux and Fontenot brace readers with a boldly revisionist picture of the opulent Mississippi River floating palaces: stripped-down, utilitarian freight-haulers belching smoke from twin stacks, churning through shallow swamps and narrow tributary streams, and encountering such hazards as shoals, sawyers, stumps, highwater and dry-bed seasons, and the remains of vessels claimed by those treacheries. For decades, steamboats transported goods, passengers, and mail between New Orleans and south Louisiana's vibrant interior agricultural region, bearing testimony to the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and tenacity of crews in conquering the challenges posed by a forbidding environment. Brasseaux and Fontenot marshaled a monumental array of information, including sources long-buried in courthouses, private collections, and the records of the Army Corps of Engineers. They offer data on some five hundred steamboats, keelboats, and barges known to have operated in the bayou country. This book is the first major study of a fascinating slice of the steamboat industry, showcasing a trade critically important to New Orleans's prosperity but largely forgotten in southern historiography until now. Encompassing economic, social, transportation, and environmental history, it captures the period just before the iron horse emerged as America's undisputed master of inland conveyance.

An outgrowth of the Language Variety in the South III symposium, New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches comprises forty-five original essays on a range of topics regarding the languages and dialects of the American South. Book jacket.