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“One of the most exciting frontiers in the writing of history in the present day has centered on the effort to recapture and document the actions and sayings of people who built the modern world but were hitherto excluded from historical accounts. To this adventure Gwendolyn Midlo Hall has contributed a masterful study of the ways in which Africans introduced from Senegambia shaped the culture and society of colonial Louisiana. An indefatigable investigator, Hall reveals for us in richly textured detail the lives of slaves, free people, and maroons in town and in the cypress swamps. The result is a truly extraordinary book about an extraordinary people.”—Eric R. Wolf, City University of New York “[Africans in Colonial Louisiana] opens to view a new transnational conception of the American culture that grew from slavery and from slave resistance, and describes a process of creolization whose full effects have perhaps become only apparent, at least to scholars, in the present day. . . . [It] promises to shape the course of future research in American studies for many years to come.”—From the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize citation “The author’s uncovering and handling of [the book’s] documentary underpinnings is a tour de force.”—Winthrop D. Jordan, Journal of American History “An important and provocative book; one that every student of American, Latin American, and African history should read.”—Clarence E. Walker, Southern Cultures
Distinguished Research Fellow in the Southern University System and professor emerita of history at Rutgers University, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall is also the author of Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links; Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba; and editor of Love, War and the 96th Engineers (colored): The World War II New Guinea Diaries of Captain Hyman Samuelson; and the CD-ROM Databases for the Study of Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more information, visit
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