Book Review

Not so long ago historians widely doubted that much could be known about the African background of the enslaved population that labored within the territory that became the United States. Among those who thought there was even a past worth recalling, at best one could recover a generalized background, the discovery of "least common denominator[s]," as the anthropologist Melville Herskovits expressed it in The Myth of the Negro Past (1941), that preserved enough of a culture to keep African Americans from being people completely without a history. In a few cases, mostly outside the United States, one could be more specific (as in the case of Dahomey and Haitian voodoo), and, in a very few cases in Louisiana and on the sea islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, there were hints of an earlier history. Some allege that vestiges of this argument, with significant reinterpretation, can still be seen in the influential work of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1992). Since the 1970s, however, an argument running counter to that generalized version of African American culture has received increasing support, suggesting that more specific connections can be made. These new discs provide the wherewithal for extending the work in this direction and many others.	1
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's is in some ways the more intriguing because it provides several avenues for studying a local slave society. It is, as the title suggests, a tool for studying genealogy in the particular as well as features of social history with wider applicability. It contains information from diverse sources, ranging from censuses to civil documents and other manuscripts, drawn from archives in Europe and the United States. It treats white people, "the owners and freers," as an internal document puts it, and also Africans enslaved and freed. There is a database with 100,000 records on slaves that identifies people by, among other things, name, owner, parish, gender, birthplace, and, in over 9,000 cases, African ethnicity. As I have already suggested, the latter topic has gained increasing interest among scholars, and this information, along with such things as family relationships, is particularly useful. There are also records of runaways and other forms of resistance. The database with more than 4,000 records on freedpeople is equally useful. Paul Lachance contributes a dataset of twenty-six aggregate censuses of Louisiana from settlement to the Civil War. "An aggregate census," he explains in an introduction, "counts the number of persons in a population, sharing specified characteristics or combinations of characteristics such as place of residence, gender, race, and age group." It is not an individual count and so would not be of use to genealogists but is excellent for showing change over time and other social concerns. Virginia Gould and Jeffrey Gould's household censuses of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, derived from selected Spanish, French, and American records between 1787 and 1850, does provide individual information. These records, the Goulds explain, "demonstrate the family networks between blacks and whites, slaves and free, which stretched out between these ports."	2
A great advantage of these databases is that they make accessible information from scattered sources in various languages that researchers otherwise would find difficult to find and use. Moreover, the disc includes copies of original documents that can give students an idea of what the original looked like and the difficulties of using originals; they can spark discussions of problems of interpretation even when information has been extracted and somewhat sanitized. There are useful maps, graphs, and charts. Hall's prize-winning Africans in Colonial Louisiana (1992) and other works illustrate what can be done with this kind of information and demonstrate the significance, among other things, of African ethnicity. They show that the African past can be traced to its sources and can be seen to evolve over time. But that is only one topic these documents support. Their utility is limited only by the imagination of researchers using them.	. . .