| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter J. Kastor. The Nation's Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America. (Western Americana Series.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 311. $35.00.
Like most good works of history, Peter J. Kastor's sophisticated investigation of the Louisiana Purchase and its aftermath addresses a topic we thought we already knew well enough; takes us through a more complicated, sometimes even quite confusing exploration of its details; and finally concludes with the kind of insight that not only offers a fresh perspective on a familiar-seeming issue but opens up larger questions that reach far beyond the focus of the book itself. This book is a work of impressive intellectual maturity that brings Louisiana—and therefore Kastor himself—into the center of an important and very timely discussion about the contested meanings of citizenship, state-making, and nation-building.	1
In most accounts, the standard story of the Louisiana Purchase starts and generally ends with Thomas Jefferson's remarkable real estate deal in 1803. Seen from the perspective of the nation's capital, this quick diplomatic coup gave Jefferson and his Republican allies a sense of immediate achievement in shaping national destiny, while leaving their Federalist opponents to grumble in feckless frustration. But seen from the perspective of the people of Louisiana—or, as Kastor wisely reminds us, the various peoples of Louisiana, the Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans who inhabited the region—the Purchase brought into sharper focus the significance of a longer-standing and much more complex social and political history. Different people had different stakes in the process of incorporation, and they all played a role in defining how that process would play out. When they considered the implications of incorporation into the United States, then, their response could not easily be taken for granted, Kastor continues, either by policy makers at the time or historians now: "Instead, Louisianians could pick and choose their attachments" (p. 29).	. . .

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