In 2025, the Lemon Project celebrates fifteen years of our spring symposium. As we navigate today's world, the reparative and healing work of the Lemon Project is as vital as it has ever been. Remembering the past fifteen years of symposium gatherings, we celebrate Black resilience through the theme, "Undefeated: Black Resilience through Resistance, Creativity, and Cooperation." "Undefeated" beckons us to embrace communal strength in a world where obstacles seem insurmountable, and challenges are relentless. The symposium celebrates the indomitable spirit of resilience, the power of cooperation, and the transformative force of creativity within Black communities. This gathering aims to explore how these interconnected themes shape the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of Black individuals and communities worldwide.

The 2025 Spring Symposium will explore the following questions: How have historical experiences of adversity and resilience shaped the current strengths and challenges within Black communities? In what ways do Black communities demonstrate resilience through cultural practices, collective action, and grassroots initiatives? What are examples of successful intra community cooperation initiatives that have strengthened solidarity and mutual support within Black communities? What are examples of innovative solutions and entrepreneurship within Black communities that address local challenges and foster economic resilience. These questions will stimulate meaningful discussions and explore innovative ideas at the symposium focusing on resistance, resilience, cooperation, and creativity within Black communities. We encourage participants to reflect on historical contexts, celebrate cultural strengths, and envision collaborative pathways towards sustainable empowerment and social justice. We also invite you to review past symposium themes and submit a proposal related to a past theme. https://www.wm.edu/sites/lemonproject/annual_symposium/.

Archaeology in the Community (AITC) has launched a new series of virtual continuing education opportunities, called Brush Up Workshops. The focus is on topics in public archaeology such as working with schools and communities, inclusivity, communication, etc. The intended audiences for the trainings are professional archaeologists, educators, and interested community members. The next workshop in the series, “Curb Cut Effect: Addressing Disability and Ableism” on October 16, helps participants think about accessibility in the workplace and how addressing these issues benefits everyone. These and future trainings are designed for anyone who engages in the discovery and stewardship of archaeology and heritage. The Brush Up Workshops are sponsored by the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA). Registration is half-off for SBA members and free for students in the SBA mentoring program. Revenue from registration fees supports AITC's year-round educational programming for all ages. Brush up on your archaeological skills!

Learn more and register online at https://www.archaeologyincommunity.com/workshops.html.

In celebration of the 15 year anniversary of the Society of Black Archaeologists in 2026, we are organizing writing groups to celebrate our collective power in knowledge production, while at the same time gathering across different regions to curate the next era of SBA scholarship.

We hope to engage with members from across the writing spectrum reaching students, emerging scholars, advanced career writers, and those new to the writing process in the world of archaeology. This is about building regional hubs to write together and generate something new to mark this milestone in SBA history!

Launching in Fall 2024. Deadline to submit interest form October 15th: https://forms.gle/PNAm81hrx4cL167T6.

Any questions about submitting? Please send a message to presidentelect@societyofblackarchaeologists.com.

In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2008), historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman describes her personal quest to "reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities." She continues, "If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago." This, Harman explains, "is the afterlife of slavery -- skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment."

Since the publication of Hartman's groundbreaking memoir, the phrase "afterlife of slavery" has been deployed across humanities fields to underscore the significant connection between periods before and after slavery. For its tenth anniversary annual conference, the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) invites individual and panel proposals that grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlives in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. Ongoing social, political, and cultural developments demand continued preservation, dissemination, and engagement with the experiences and ideas of African Americans and others across the African diaspora.

By grappling with the theme of "Slavery and Its Afterlives," AAIHS encourages conference participants to reflect on how histories of African and African-descended peoples from slavery to the present continue to shape and haunt our present and futures in familiar and new ways. We hope this invitation prompts scholars, activists, artists, and other intellectuals to interrogate notions of change, continuity, and progress, all key elements of historical inquiry.

AAIHS welcomes individual and panel proposals for short presentations (12-15 minutes) that consider the conference theme as linked to a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to, gender, sexuality, public policy, indigeneity, politics, and class. We welcome submissions that explore the conference theme in art and popular culture and in literature. Papers that explore the global historical context and international dimensions of the theme are encouraged. We also invite panels with capacious temporal engagement.

All panel sessions will run for 75 minutes with at least 15 minutes devoted to audience participation. All paper proposals should include a title and an abstract of approximately 300 words. The proposal should clearly explain the paper's argument; methods and methodologies; interventions; and engagement with the conference theme. Submissions should also include a short CV (1-2 pages in length), highlighting previous publications and presentations, if applicable. Full panel proposals should include all the above information for each individual panelist as well as an overall abstract (less than 300 words) articulating the key questions and themes of the papers collectively and how the totality of the papers relate to the conference theme. We strongly encourage experimental formats, workshops, art displays, film screenings, roundtables, musical performances, and any other presentations beyond traditional academic papers and panels.

Proposals will be considered for inclusion in one of the featured conference sessions, which will be held in-person from March 14 to March 15, 2025 at the historic Graduate Hotel near Brown University in Providence, RI. A select number of travel grants are available by application only for graduate students, contingent faculty, independent scholars, and junior scholars. AAIHS invites scholars at various ranks and affiliations (from graduate students to senior faculty and independent scholars) to submit proposals for consideration. The best papers selected from conference proceedings will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of Global Black Thought, the official journal of AAIHS.

Submit your proposal online at https://www.aaihs.org/conference-2025/call-for-papers-aaihs-2025/.

The 2025 Conference on Public Archaeology is taking place on August 8-9, 2025 in Washington, DC! Abstract submissions are now open and advanced registration will open in March.

This meeting will be hosted by Archaeology in the Community and is intended to provide a dedicated space for public-minded archaeologists and cultural heritage practitioners to share their experiences and expertise. Over two days, we plan to host a series of workshops, panels, round-tables, and special events geared toward addressing some of the most pressing issues in the discipline, including:

• Diversifying professional and avocational representation
  
• Public archaeology and the Section 106 process
  
• Community science and heritage site stewardship
  
• Climate impacts to tangible and intangible heritage resources
  
• Harnessing digital advances for outreach and education
  
• Working in schools and engaging with educators

While the Conference on Public Archaeology will forego the traditional paper format, our hope is that discussion, hands-on participation, flexible formats, and professional networking will foster advances and new directions in the discipline. This is the second Conference on Public Archaeology, with the first held in Pensacola, Florida through the Florida Public Archaeology Network in 2023.

Abstract Submissions: We invite you to submit your abstract for the Conference on Public Archaeology. Abstracts should be concise, with a maximum length of 1,000 characters (approximately 150-200 words). Before submitting, please review the detailed Submission Guidelines (PDF). The deadline for abstract submissions is February 10, 2025. Please note that all participants whose abstracts are accepted will be required to register for the conference between March and July 2025. https://www.fpan.us/projects/2025-conference-on-public-archaeology/.

New Book

Routledge Handbook of Critical African Heritage Studies
Edited by Ashton Sinamai, John D. Giblin, Shadreck Chirikure, and Ishanlosen Odiaua
Routledge Press
528 pp., ISBN-13 978-0367434021, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History
By Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp., ISBN-13 978-0809024377, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
By Tiya Miles
Penguin Press
336 pp., ISBN-13 978-0593491164, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

Reframing the Black Atlantic: African, Diasporic, Queer and Feminist Perspectives
By Aretha Phiri
Routledge Press
160 pp., ISBN-13 978-1032752440, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

New Book

A Southern Underground Railroad:
Black Georgians and the Promise of Spanish Florida and Indian Country
By Paul M. Pressly
University of Georgia Press
324 pp., ISBN-13 978-0820366852, 2024.

Description from the Publisher:

Lascelles "Peabody" Small traveled the world from the deck of a cargo ship. Born in Jamaica, he first arrived in the United States as a crew member on a freighter transporting bauxite and iron ore to Mobile, Alabama, where, upon disembarkation, he was immediately confronted by the stark realities of Jim Crow. The same ship then left the Gulf of Mexico, traveling up the Eastern Seaboard and docking in Baltimore, Maryland, before heading to Montreal, Canada. Between 1958 and 1960, Small was based in Brooklyn, New York, as a resident of Norwegian Seaman's House, where he experienced life in the "Jim Crow North" while also working on ships that traversed the Atlantic. In the 1960s, he decided to move North again and applied for permanent residency in Canada.

The life and travails of Small, beautifully recovered and rendered in Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey's Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, provide a glimpse into the interconnected racial histories of the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. This innovative book examines the transnational lives of people of African descent who navigated the interrelated racisms of each of these regions. It asks, "How do we explain a people whose migrations, labor, family ties, social aspirations, politics, and revolutionary struggle transcended the boundaries of empires and states?" In response, Adjetey adopts a hemispheric lens that traces the lives and Pan-African visions of politicians, activists, workers, artists, and state agents throughout North America. He shows how "African North Americans" worked to find home in diaspora "by imagining and forging diasporic and transnational communities that spanned the United States, Canada, the Caribbean basin, and Africa" (p. 2). Emphasizing the fluidity of borders and the mobility of people of African descent, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans details how border crossing "amplified Pan- Africanisms" that facilitated Black claims for citizenship and self-determination. As Adjetey argues, in this context, "Black liberation -- whether moderate or revolutionary -- was intergenerational, international, and intercontinental" (p. 9).

One of the major strengths of this study is how the author takes the reader from the early 1900s to the mid-1980s, expertly detailing the connections between political movements and specific activists. The book opens with the emergence of the New Negro movement and "the messianic moment" of Garveyism, contributing to recent scholarly works on the global contours of Garveyism by documenting the impact the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) had in Canada.[1] In total, there were thirty UNIA branches in the country, while Garveyites also worked with such organizations as the Canadian League for the Advancement of Colored People to challenge white conceptions of nationhood. Adjetey's insistence on the power of cross-border cooperation between people of African descent in North America is most clearly illustrated through his expert analysis of the Canadian newspaper Dawn of Tomorrow, published in London, Ontario, by James Francis Jenkins, a protégé of W. E. B Du Bois, and its editorials on race relations. Dawn of Tomorrow's origins, production, and focus clearly illustrate the hemispheric dimensions of "race first" militancy.

Chapter 2 then moves to the development of Pan-African politics from the 1930s to the 1950s, again emphasizing the importance of Black mobility and migration across state borders. Adjetey notes how the process of "self-exile" sometimes "mitigated ... the potency of anti-Black racism" by allowing migrants to maintain familial and social ties as well as important political strategies (p. 67). Focusing largely on the Great Lakes cities, the chapter makes clear the close policing of borders, reminding the reader of the need to resist the notion that Canada somehow represents a racially enlightened counterpoint to the United States. Adjetey's concept of "citizenship passing" is especially intriguing in this chapter. Speaking to how "migrants exchanged one identity for an alternative one, sometimes discarding a former identity but always melding aspects of belonging to personal advantage," he provides scholars and activists with another way of thinking about the malleable and multilayered meaning of citizenship, as well as the political agency of Black people on the move (p. 70).

The book then moves to the early Cold War and the age of decolonization, documenting how concepts of civil and human rights were constructed across borders. This fascinating chapter is based around the life and career of Daniel Grafton Hill. Born and raised in the US, Hill graduated from Howard University and served in the army during World War II. In the aftermath of the war, he moved to Canada and in 1950 began his graduate studies at the University of Toronto, later earning a PhD in sociology. Hill's role as the director of Ontario's Human Rights Commission, where he launched an ambitious new race relations program, is covered in detail. As a liberal figure, Hill is somewhat of an outlier in terms of the cast of radical leftists who are more often at the heart of the book. However, his inclusion as a cross-border cosmopolitan "who could advance Black solidarity discretely" clearly illustrates the political diversity and complexity of Black international thought, especially as Black activists and politics navigated the repressive politics of anticommunism (p. 146).

In chapter 4 we are introduced to two central characters who feature regularly in the second half of the book: Anne Cools and Rosie Douglas, young Black radicals who would both later assume elected office. Their activism demonstrates how the global politics of Black Power fused with the anti-war movement to transform debates about race and rights in Canada.[2] To emphasize this point, Adjetey calls our attention to lesserknown activists, such as African Nova Scotian Burnley "Rocky" Jones of the Black United Front. Widely referred to as "Canada's Own Stokely Carmichael," Jones told a crowd at the University of Toronto in 1968, "If you don't get up off me I am going to throw you off and I'm going to stomp you. Whatever you do to us, we will do to you" (pp. 171, 175). The transnational politics of Black radicalism are also the focus of the book's next chapter, which moves to the issues of state repression and specifically collaboration between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The scale and audaciousness of the counterinsurgency efforts of FBI operative Warren Hart are staggering and once again make clear the lengths to which the state went to curtail Black organizing in the 1960s and 1970s. The final chapter of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans expertly weaves together how US-Canadian businesses circumvented the arms embargo against apartheid South Africa, while also highlighting the role played by US and Canadian white power paramilitaries in orchestrating attempted coups in Grenada and Dominica. As Adjetey notes, when considering the evidence outlined in his last two chapters, "It becomes difficult to disentangle nonstate actors, such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi mercenaries, from the US government and its intelligence agencies" (p. 259).

A particularly impressive feature of Cross-Border Cosmopolitans is the author's mining of a range of archival sources, coupled with nuanced close readings of this material. State archives, declassified intelligence reports, organizational and personal papers, oral interviews, and newspaper records are considered together to map these Black international histories from the "top down" and the "bottom up," with the book nicely emphasizing the mobility and cosmopolitanism of working-class African North Americans, as well as more prominent political leaders and officials. Adjetey's use of "Pan-Africanisms" (in the plural) does justice to the multifaceted and diverse webs of solidarity that shaped Black responses to empire, colonialism, and white supremacy. Again, his insistence that Pan-Africanisms are "dynamic and contested endeavours that evolved generationally" maps the complexity of the global engagements of people of African descent while illustrating how Black activists were constantly in dialogue with their forbears as they worked to "retake power from their subjugators, and create selfsufficient, independent homes and communities, small and large, local and global" (p. 7).

Yet Adjetey's initial framing does carry the slight danger of reifying and elevating the experiences and actions of African North Americans in terms of the broader history of Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism. While Cross-Border Cosmopolitans does important work when it comes to "de-exceptionalizing U.S. history" and questioning dominant narratives in relation to Black protest by tracing how African Americans engaged in anti-racist politics at a hemispheric level, this emphasis occasionally slips into elevating the contributions of North Americans to Pan- African politics over others (p. 17). As Adjetey states, "The impetus of twentieth-century global Black liberation ... emerged out of African North America" (p. 18). It is important to fully recognize the scale and militancy of Black organizing in this region throughout the twentieth century; however, this claim might give the impression that ideas and actions emanating from Africa and other parts of the Black diaspora were ultimately less important. As such scholars as Laura Chrisman, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Minkah Makalani, and Patricia de Santana Pinho have pointed out, there is still work to do to correct the imbalance that has seen North American voices privileged in historical accounts of Black internationalism.[3] Indeed, Kira Thurman puts this nicely in a recent roundtable in the American Historical Review by asking, "How much is Black internationalism indebted to a particularly (African) American sensibility, even while it works to disavow nationalist hegemonies?"[4]

There are also tantalizing moments throughout Cross-Border Cosmopolitans where the struggles of Indigenous peoples intersect with Black activism. For example, Daniel G. Hill's work on Native rights in the northern Ontarian town of Kenora and the connections between Black Power and Red Power in the late 1960s represent important moments in the book. While it is perhaps beyond the scope of this study -- which already packs a huge amount historically and conceptually -- I was left wanting more about the moments of confluence, or indeed tensions, that animated the transnational histories of Black and Indigenous peoples in North America.[5]

These points should not detract from what is a remarkable scholarly achievement. Adjetey has made an important contribution to the field of diaspora studies, one that will force scholars to rethink the geography of Black internationalism in North America for years to come. Furthermore, the political geographies and relationships recounted in this impressively crafted book make clear how activists practically challenged racism and imperialism on different scales—locally, nationally, and globally. There is a lot that Cross-Border Cosmopolitans can teach contemporary activists in this regard. As Adjetey notes, "Language has the power to forecast revolution" (p. 59).

New Orleans has long presented an awkward problem for American historians. Sited to control the gateways between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi basin, it has been a strategic fulcrum of war, commerce, and politics in southeastern North America since the eighteenth century. In the antebellum age, it was the largest city south of Baltimore, a rising industrial port, the great nerve center of the cotton traffic, and the hub of the internal slave trade; in the Confederacy, it dwarfed the next largest city by more than four to one. Yet far from typifying the region as customarily understood, New Orleans stands out in the southern landscape as a predominantly Catholic city, in which languages, laws, and customs deriving from the city's French founding allowed for the emergence of a large and sometimes prosperous free population of color and for a degree of social intermingling across what was, in most of Anglo- America, a rigid color line.

American popular history usually resolves the New Orleanian paradox by trivializing the city's Francophone and Creole heritage as the romantic (or even morbid) vestiges of a declining Old World culture, fated to be swept away by the Civil War and the march of modernity. The tragic view of the Creole city had its roots partly in the 1880s writings of George Washington Cable, which combined a degree of realism with Anglo-Protestant condescension. It was captured most fully in the 1930s play and film Jezebel, which cast the catastrophic yellow fever epidemic of 1853 as a harbinger of doom for a decadent and corrupt society. Meanwhile, scholarly histories of the American South tend to gloss over or ignore the New Orleanian paradox. For instance, studies of the Civil War and Reconstruction usually treat Louisiana as typical of the Deep South, set apart only by the unusual length of Reconstruction in the state (from occupation in 1862 until the withdrawal of federal troops following the compromise of 1877) and by its degree of violence and tumult, instantiated in the 1866 New Orleans massacre.

The central question facing recent scholars of colonial and nineteenth-century New Orleans, then, has tended to be whether the city's French Catholic background should be understood to set it apart in a politically significant and impactful way from the rest of the American South or merely to provide quaint local color to what was otherwise a typical North American slave society. The debate has been haunted by the notorious "Tannenbaum thesis" -- named for sociologist Frank Tannenbaum, who argued that French and Iberian colonial societies established looser laws and norms around race than their northern European counterparts. Support for such an interpretation of New Orleans seemed to emerge from studies of the French and Spanish colonial records, most significantly, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's 1992 Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century, which argues that the weakness of the French regime and its comparatively loose laws and customs defining slavery allowed for autonomy and strong social bonds among Africans and Afro-Creoles, giving rise, in turn, to political resistance, such as the attempted Bambara uprising of 1731. Hall's argument offers to cast a new light on subsequent events in Louisiana, including such upheavals as the 1811 German Coast slave rebellion, the largest in American history.

Later works sought to counter the emergence of what one might call the new Louisiana exceptionalism— and more fundamentally, the romantic image of New Orleans as a free-wheeling French outpost. Thomas N. Ingersoll, in Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (1999), argues that irrespective of events in the outer parishes, colonial New Orleans was a rigid society based on slavery and racial repression, fundamentally similar to such Anglo-American slave societies as South Carolina—hence its easy and swift integration into the United States. Ingersoll's book has been followed in more recent years by studies emphasizing the centrality of slavery and racism to early New Orleans, such as Rashuana Johnson's Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (2016) and Cécile Vidal's Caribbean New Orleans: Empire, Race, and the Making of a Slave Society (2019).

Caryn Cossé Bell's latest book may constitute the most important intervention in this debate since the 1990s. Bell presents a novel and powerful case for New Orleans's distinctiveness in the American landscape while largely ignoring Louisiana's French and Spanish colonial history. Bell's book stresses instead the large migration into New Orleans of refugees from Saint Domingue that followed the Haitian Revolution and culminated in the 1809-10 wave that doubled the size of the city. Bell argues that the multiracial influx from the Caribbean brought with it dense interracial networks of kinship and politics, bolstered the city's Francophone Catholic population, and fortified its French-style social and legal systems, just in time to withstand the onslaught of hostile Anglophone migrants. She points out, for instance, that Louis Moreau-Lislet, the jurist who wrote Louisiana's civil law code of 1808 and delivered the court ruling that enshrined mixed-race citizens' right to a presumption of freedom, was an 1804 migrant from Haiti.

More importantly, Bell's argument largely avoids reliance on French essentialism, sidestepping the quagmire of the Tannenbaum debate in favor of an effort to link New Orleans politics to the legacy of the Age of Revolutions. "Nowhere else in the United States," Bell concludes, "did the French and Haitian Revolutions exert as enduring an influence as in New Orleans and south Louisiana" (p. 231). In support, the book presents a cavalcade of statements and actions by New Orleanians of all colors who trumpeted the ideals "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" and doggedly carried the banner of the revolutionary era all the way through the nineteenth century.

Drawing on sources from the New Orleans press, as well as memoirs, correspondence, and biographical dictionaries, the book strings together an astonishing array of incidents that shocked Anglo-American observers at the time, just as they may modern-day readers who imagine New Orleans to be an ordinary antebellum city: large companies of Black men bearing arms in the state militia and serving under Andrew Jackson's command, before volunteering to fight in support of the revolutionary republican government of Mexico and securing for it a crucial foothold in Texas; Creole ladies of various colors worshiping together, circulating radical French Romantic tracts, opening interracial schools for girls, and attempting to found an interracial convent; Spiritualists holding séances to communicate with the dead and taking the spirit world as a template for the free and equal republic that ought to exist on earth; fraternal societies embracing republican ideals and calling for "the acquisition of rights which assure the liberty of man in every country" (p. 162); large gatherings celebrating the 1848 revolution in France, marching through the city singing the "Marseillaise," and holding memorials for fallen revolutionaries in the Cathedral of St. Louis; legislators electing to the US Senate a French republican dissident who had fled to New Orleans to escape arrest by Charles X's regime; a missionary priest openly preaching against slavery in the city's cathedral as late as 1850.

Although sometimes meandering and disjointed, Bell's book uncovers a continuing thread of experimentation, opposition, and radical hope that crossed boundaries of time and space. The dissident milieu linked New Orleans to the French-speaking world, with many reformist scholars and doctors, including men of color, studying in Paris and imbibing the heady ideas of the Revolution and the Romantic age. Ironically, whereas Jezebel casts the 1853 yellow fever outbreak as a symbol of New Orleans's descent into decadence, in Bell's book it serves as an arena for Parisian-educated physicians of color to debunk the racist myths of so-called states-rights medicine and to demonstrate revolutionary new techniques of diagnosis and public health.

Moreover, Bell's narrative effectively links New Orleans's Creole heritage with the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction. General Benjamin Butler's enlistment of Black New Orleanians into the Union army under the command of Black officers in 1862 (the first such action in the Civil War) is unsurprising in light of the long precedent of Black men in New Orleans -- including most of those who enlisted under Butler -- having served in uniform. Butler's occupation regime and the subsequent Reconstruction governments went far beyond the southern norm by desegregating public transit, schools, and all places of public accommodation; under universal male suffrage, Louisiana voters elected Black officials to more statewide executive offices than in any other state. Even as armed white mobs and paramilitary groups from 1866 to 1877 attacked the state government in a series of riots and insurrections, interracial coalitions attempted to maintain stability: in 1873, the "Unifier" movement proposed to maintain equal civil rights while dividing state offices evenly between whites and Blacks, and whereas the program gained traction in New Orleans, it failed in the rural parishes. Ultimately, as racist violence undid interracial democracy after 1877, Afro-Creoles sought to secure their rights through a long campaign in the courts, culminating in the Plessy decision of 1896, in which the Supreme Court rejected a New Orleans Creole man's suit against transit segregation. Whereas the ruling, which placed the court's imprimatur on segregation, has customarily been seen as the start of the age of Jim Crow, in Bell's story, it appears as a last stand by Afro-Creole New Orleans against the Anglo-American racial order.

Ultimately, Bell's narrative serves to challenge the conventional periodization of American and Atlantic history. Whereas, from the Anglo-American perspective, a long gap intervenes between the revolutionary period and the Civil War, Creole New Orleans, with its continuing links to the Caribbean, Latin America, and France, saw no such interruption; the upheavals of the Civil War and emancipation could be seen by many as the fulfillment of a continuing revolutionary quest. Throughout the war and Reconstruction period, the New Orleans Francophone press championed radical reforms, such as the breakup and redistribution of large estates in language recalling the revolutionary movements of Europe and the Americas. The premiere bilingual newspaper, the Tribune, which served for a time as the official outlet of the Reconstruction regime, was edited by Jean-Charles Houzeau, a Belgian astronomer and dissident who had fled to America after 1848.

Nonetheless, the impact of Creole New Orleans is likely to be blunted somewhat by problems of organization and interpretation. Bell takes some time to circle in toward her main theses, which are stated more clearly in the conclusion than in the introduction. The latter proposes rather broadly to fulfill the need for "an overall study" of "the city's history in the revolutionary age" but gives the reader fairly little guidance as to how to assign significance to the mass of evidence in the book, which becomes overwhelming -- in the negative as well as positive sense of the word (p. 2). The book comprises three sections: on the Haitian Revolution and migration to Louisiana, the Romantic movement, and the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the book's first and third sections, the narrative meanders and leaps among a wide array of characters, who enter the stage with dizzying rapidity only to exit again, too soon in many cases to gain a sense of their distinct personalities or their significance. The experience of reading becomes taxing in the absence of clear explanations as to how this prosopographic phantasmagoria relates to Bell's larger argument.

Moreover, Bell's introduction forecasts that the book will use as its "backbone" the memoir, published in 1883, of the Creole writer Hélène d'Aquin Allain, who grew up mainly in antebellum New Orleans (p. 2). However, Allain's Souvenirs is only alluded to in the entire first section of Creole New Orleans and is discussed extensively only in the book's second section, dealing with the Romantic movement. This section stands out dramatically from the other two, drawing on the essays, books, and diaries that emerged from a vibrant bilingual intellectual scene, composed mainly of women, which promoted the new mystical, egalitarian, and humanitarian strains of French Catholicism in mid-century New Orleans. Only this section brings to life the social and emotional lives of some of its characters, often through remarkably vivid scenes, for example, a maiden aunt's austere attic room in which she spent her days in prayer and reflection before finally joining a convent and a Congolese-born bride's tignon (turban) tied off in knots in the shape of cowrie shells to recall her African birth. This second section might easily be expanded into a book of its own. In this context, it seems slightly cramped in ways that also typify the book as a whole, such as in its curious lack of visuals, even as the text discusses visual evidence like portraiture.

More crucially, the link between this middle section and the other two is tenuous and underdeveloped. Although the ideas and arguments that antebellum Creole women promoted clearly have political import, Bell presents them uncritically as "revolutionary" and "emancipatory." Her interpretation elides distinctions among several different currents of thought -- for example, republicanism, abolitionism, humanitarianism, Romanticism, mysticism, and the traditional French three-tiered system of race -- which did not always align and sometimes came into conflict. Thus, Bell overlooks important nuances and contradictions in her subjects' worldviews. For instance, Bell quotes Allain, in defending the reputation of the New Orleans Creole community against slander, asserting that in her uncle's household, "masters and servants were part of a truly Christian family" and that Creole chroniclers should emphasize "the role played by these good masters" (p. 100). Such a passage might have prompted a commentary on how Christian and Romantic humanitarianism could be folded into an apology for slavery. The lack of such an ideological analysis is driven home a few lines later when Allain is quoted as asserting that many Louisiana planters espoused the rights of man and "were ready to make any sacrifice to reconcile their lawful interests with their humanitarianism" (p. 100). One might reasonably ask whether these planters' commitment to their humanitarian ideals actually extended to sacrificing their right to own slaves. Similarly, when another apologist, Éléonore Ligeret de Chazey, pleads that Louisiana slave mistresses, though "unable to stop slavery ... soften it with all their might," it is left to the reader to consider how Creole humanitarian rhetoric might have fit into the wider stream of ameliorationism (p. 147). In this light, Creole New Orleans might appear less as a radical hotbed than as a place, like Maryland in Barbara J. Fields's study, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (1985), where eighteenth-century muddled thinking about slavery was able to persist into the antebellum age.

Such a superficial and uncritical interpretation presents less of a problem in the book's first and third sections, which draw on political tracts and slogans with far less ambiguous rhetoric. Nonetheless, these sections might have been more powerful with the support of quantitative evidence, such as census numbers and election results, which could have helped to map out the political factions of the city and could have conveyed a more precise sense of how large and prevalent the radical wing actually was. Finally, Bell's argument would have been strengthened by a consideration of class stratification in New Orleans, including within the Afro-Creole community, to show how tangible class interests could reinforce and sustain revolutionary ideals.

In sum, Creole New Orleans in the Revolutionary Atlantic can be seen to contain within itself two different books -- one dealing with the mostly male-dominated world of revolutionary politics and the other with the mainly female world of Romantic philosophical ferment -- which never entirely meld together. Each side of Bell's work has its own strengths and weaknesses, and each one might have been strengthened with more critical interpretation, such as to make a complete and powerful book in its own right.

Nonetheless, the book that exists should hopefully have a deep impact, effectively demolishing any notion of New Orleans as fitting easily or unproblematically into the nineteenth-century South. Bell's research pays tribute to the imagination and the persistence of radicals of various stripes that made New Orleans a laboratory of revolutionary vision in the nineteenth century. As I have noted in my own work, there is a great irony in the fact that when the US Congress, in the 1810s, debated the possibility of Louisiana joining the Union, many Anglo-Americans warned that the Catholic Creoles would be unable to assimilate to a democratic-republican government -- conveniently ignoring the long history of rebellion and republican ferment on the lower Mississippi, even predating the American Revolution. Bell's book, irrespective of its flaws, should help put to bed this form of Anglo-American condescension and promote in its place an appreciation for the revolutionary spirit that has long thrived in New Orleans.