Reviewed by Sophie White | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2

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Reviewed by Sophie White | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Sophie White, University of Notre Dame

French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World. Edited by Bradley G. Bond. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. 346 pages. $59.95 (cloth).
One of the more memorable images of the havoc wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi in 2005 was a photograph of the massive Grand Casino hotel complex in Gulfport-Biloxi stranded on the north side of Highway 90, five hundred feet (and across the highway) from where it had been moored on its barge before the storm. The scholars who participated in a symposium in Biloxi commemorating the 300th anniversary of the founding of the first permanent settlement of Louisiana could not have anticipated the scale of the destruction, just six years later, of the space in which they had met. But in some ways their work, now published in French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, seems prescient. Daniel Usner's exposé of the historiographical construction of French colonial Louisiana's irrelevance to the American world it helped shape offers a virtuoso dissection of the deployment of this colony as a foil in the creation of a purely Anglophone national narrative. His analysis begs consideration of the parallels between the otherness of Katrina victims struggling to survive, largely isolated and deserted by their fellow Americans, and the invisibility and marginalization of the history of French colonial Louisiana. Together with Emily Clark's review article on the rewards for Atlantic history of including the non-British, Usner's essay should be required reading for every graduate student in American history.¹	1
Bradley G. Bond has ably edited and organized a coherent volume that offers an optimistic rejoinder to the problems charted by Usner, one that is notable for its inclusion of contributions by African scholars. The studies within expand our knowledge of colonial Louisiana and usefully problematize the colony's relationship to France. They also fulfill Bond's claim that the volume will help to resituate the history of French Louisiana within the "story of the nation" (xii), thereby altering the study of key and emerging themes in the history of the Atlantic world beyond this French colony.	. . .

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