The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont, 1715–1747 PDF Download

Author: Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469608650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 478

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Book Description
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.

Author: Dumont de Montigny
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781469608662
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
In 1719, Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny set sail for Louisiana with a commission as a lieutenant after a year in Quebec. His adventures over the next 18 years, as recorded in his 1747 memoir, 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. Dumont emerges here as an important colonial voice and brings the French vividly to life.

Author: George Edward Milne
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820347515
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom. This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them. Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse. The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchez's hierarchy. These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple. This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent import—racial categories—to reestablish social order. They began to call themselves “red men” to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the “blacks” and “whites” into which their neighbors divided themselves. After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements. Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people. In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date. From La Salle's first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyzes the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.

Author: Caroline Wigginton
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469670380
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
For hundreds of years, American artisanship and American authorship were entangled practices rather than distinct disciplines. Books, like other objects, were multisensory items all North American communities and cultures, including Native and settler colonial ones, regularly made and used. All cultures and communities narrated and documented their histories and imaginations through a variety of media. All created objects for domestic, sacred, curative, and collective purposes. In this innovative work at the intersection of Indigenous studies, literary studies, book history, and material culture studies, Caroline Wigginton tells a story of the interweavings of Native craftwork and American literatures from their ancient roots to the present. Focused primarily on North America, especially the colonized lands and waters now claimed by the United States, this book argues for the foundational but often-hidden aesthetic orientation of American literary history toward Native craftwork. Wigginton knits this narrative to another of Indigenous aesthetic repatriation through the making and using of books and works of material expression. Ultimately, she reveals that Native craftwork is by turns the warp and weft of American literature, interwoven throughout its long history.

Author: Kirstin L. Squint
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Swamp Souths: Literary and Cultural Ecologies expands the geographical scope of scholarship about southern swamps. Although the physical environments that form its central subjects are scattered throughout the southeastern United States—the Atchafalaya, the Okefenokee, the Mississippi River delta, the Everglades, and the Great Dismal Swamp—this evocative collection challenges fixed notions of place and foregrounds the ways in which ecosystems shape cultures and creations on both local and global scales. Across seventeen scholarly essays, along with a critical introduction and afterword, Swamp Souths introduces new frameworks for thinking about swamps in the South and beyond, with an emphasis on subjects including Indigenous studies, ecocriticism, intersectional feminism, and the tropical sublime. The volume analyzes canonical writers such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, but it also investigates contemporary literary works by Randall Kenan and Karen Russell, the films Beasts of the Southern Wild and My Louisiana Love, and music ranging from swamp rock and zydeco to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Navigating a complex assemblage of places and ecosystems, the contributors argue with passion and critical rigor for considering anew the literary and cultural work that swamps do. This dynamic collection of scholarship proves that swampy approaches to southern spaces possess increased relevance in an era of climate change and political crisis.

Author: David J. Silverman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674974743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
David Silverman argues against the notion that Indians prized flintlock muskets more for their pyrotechnics than for their efficiency as tools of war. Native peoples fully recognized the potential of firearms to assist them in their struggles against colonial forces, and mostly against one another, as arms races erupted across North America.

Author: David MacDonald
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809334615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Winner, ISHS Annual Award for a Scholarly Publication, 2017 Fort de Chartres, built in 1719-1720 in the heart of what would become the American Midwest, embodied French colonial power for half a century. Lives of Fort de Chartres, by David MacDonald, details the French colonial experience in Illinois from 1720 to 1770 through vivid depictions of the places, people, and events around the fort and its neighboring villages. In the first section, MacDonald explores the fascinating history of French Illinois and the role of Fort de Chartres in this history, focusing on native peoples, settlers, slaves, soldiers, villages, trade routes, military administration, and the decline of French rule in Illinois. The second section profiles the fort’s twelve distinctive and often colorful commandants, who also served as administrative heads of French Illinois. These men’s strong personalities served them well when dealing simultaneously with troops, civilians, and Indians and their multifaceted cultures. In the third section, MacDonald presents ten thought-provoking biographies of people whose lives intersected with Fort de Chartres in various ways, from a Kaskaskia Indian woman known as “the Mother of French Illinois” to an ill-fated chicken thief and a European aristocrat. Subjects treated in the book include French–Native American relations, the fur trade, early Illinois agriculture, and tensions among different religious orders. Together, the biographies and historical narrative in the volume illuminate the challenges that shaped the French colonies in America. The site of Fort de Chartres, recognized as a National Historic Landmark in 1966, still exists today as a testament to the ways in which French, British, Spanish, and American histories have intertwined. Both informative and entertaining, Lives of Fort de Chartres contributes to a more complete understanding of the French colonial experience in the Midwest and portrays a vital and vigorous community well worth our appreciation.

Author: Cameron B. Strang
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469640481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Cameron Strang takes American scientific thought and discoveries away from the learned societies, museums, and teaching halls of the Northeast and puts the production of knowledge about the natural world in the context of competing empires and an expanding republic in the Gulf South. People often dismissed by starched northeasterners as nonintellectuals--Indian sages, African slaves, Spanish officials, Irishmen on the make, clearers of land and drivers of men--were also scientific observers, gatherers, organizers, and reporters. Skulls and stems, birds and bugs, rocks and maps, tall tales and fertile hypotheses came from them. They collected, described, and sent the objects that scientists gazed on and interpreted in polite Philadelphia. They made knowledge. Frontiers of Science offers a new framework for approaching American intellectual history, one that transcends political and cultural boundaries and reveals persistence across the colonial and national eras. The pursuit of knowledge in the United States did not cohere around democratic politics or the influence of liberty. It was, as in other empires, divided by multiple loyalties and identities, organized through contested hierarchies of ethnicity and place, and reliant on violence. By discovering the lost intellectual history of one region, Strang shows us how to recover a continent for science.

Author: Shannon Lee Dawdy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022635122X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the world reacted with shock on seeing residents of this distinctive city left abandoned to the floodwaters. After the last rescue was completed, a new worry arose—that New Orleans’s unique historic fabric sat in ruins, and we had lost one of the most charming old cities of the New World. In Patina, anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy examines what was lost and found through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. Tracking the rich history and unique physicality of New Orleans, she explains how it came to adopt the nickname “the antique city.” With innovative applications of thing theory, Patina studies the influence of specific items—such as souvenirs, heirlooms, and Hurricane Katrina ruins—to explore how the city’s residents use material objects to comprehend time, history, and their connection to one another. A leading figure in archaeology of the contemporary, Dawdy draws on material evidence, archival and literary texts, and dozens of post-Katrina interviews to explore how the patina aesthetic informs a trenchant political critique. An intriguing study of the power of everyday objects, Patina demonstrates how sharing in the care of a historic landscape can unite a city’s population—despite extreme divisions of class and race—and inspire civil camaraderie based on a nostalgia that offers not a return to the past but an alternative future.

Author: Susan Belasco
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119653347
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 4591

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Book Description
A comprehensive, chronological overview of American literature in three scholarly and authoritative volumes A Companion to American Literature traces the history and development of American literature from its early origins in Native American oral tradition to 21st century digital literature. This comprehensive three-volume set brings together contributions from a diverse international team of accomplished young scholars and established figures in the field. Contributors explore a broad range of topics in historical, cultural, political, geographic, and technological contexts, engaging the work of both well-known and non-canonical writers of every period. Volume One is an inclusive and geographically expansive examination of early American literature, applying a range of cultural and historical approaches and theoretical models to a dramatically expanded canon of texts. Volume Two covers American literature between 1820 and 1914, focusing on the development of print culture and the literary marketplace, the emergence of various literary movements, and the impact of social and historical events on writers and writings of the period. Spanning the 20th and early 21st centuries, Volume Three studies traditional areas of American literature as well as the literature from previously marginalized groups and contemporary writers often overlooked by scholars. This inclusive and comprehensive study of American literature: Examines the influences of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and disability on American literature Discusses the role of technology in book production and circulation, the rise of literacy, and changing reading practices and literary forms Explores a wide range of writings in multiple genres, including novels, short stories, dramas, and a variety of poetic forms, as well as autobiographies, essays, lectures, diaries, journals, letters, sermons, histories, and graphic narratives. Provides a thematic index that groups chapters by contexts and illustrates their links across different traditional chronological boundaries A Companion to American Literature is a valuable resource for students coming to the subject for the first time or preparing for field examinations, instructors in American literature courses, and scholars with more specialized interests in specific authors, genres, movements, or periods.