| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Caryn Cossé Bell. Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1997. Pp. xv, 325. $35.00.

In the broad sweep of history, there is seldom just one cause or a single origin of such major historical events as wars or revolutions. Rather, it is the accretion of numerous ideas over time and the chains of evolving circumstances that bring about major disruptions to normal life. Social revolutions, in that sense, are similar to political upheavals. Caryn Cossé Bell emphasizes these factors as she analyzes a major theater of the socio-racial changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As usual in works on Louisiana, she calls primarily on New Orleans to represent the entire colony and state, and her emphasis is on the background and leadership of that city's mixed Creole elite. 1

The impact of revolutions elsewhere—British America, France, and Haiti—upon Louisiana is by no means a neglected aspect of Louisiana history. Bell, however, carries Louisiana's interpretation of those revolutionary ideas and spirit into the Civil War and Reconstruction that triggered the region's first significant changes. From there, it is easier to see how those ideas culminated in the famous separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. Bell presents the free person of color, who is more commonly portrayed as "the man in the middle" without much influence, as a proactive citizen who took revolutionary ideas seriously and struggled to advance his class in Louisiana's triracial system. . . .

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