Short description:

"Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries is an innovative, exciting collection of essays by the next generation of southern historian. Boasting a wide range of European, American, enslaved, and Indigenous actors, the chapters capture the demographic complexity of the Gulf region, break new ground, and defy conventional historical boundaries."

?Jeff Forret, Professor of History at Lamar University, USA

"This impressive collection deftly demonstrates the unique nature of the 18th- and 19th-century Gulf South. The varied set of stories of famous and lesser-known characters succeed in showing how the diverse region was nonetheless connected, principally by rebellion. Yet the volume most importantly reveals the connections between the Gulf South and the larger Atlantic World. By centering the Gulf South in the Revolutionary Atlantic, Gulf South Rebels repositions the region's history and by extension forces historians to reimagine early American history." 

?Erin Stone, Associate Professor of History, University of West Florida, USA

Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries is a collection of essays on the tangled yet variegated histories of rebellious actors in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gulf South and its linked environs. Following diverse rebels, revolutionaries, militants, insurgents, opportunists, and subversives from the early eighteenth-century alluvial floodplains of Louisiana to the mid-nineteenth-century coastal prairies of southeast Texas, this volume recasts the Gulf South as a centripetal region in the history of early America, a place where worlds collided, overlapped, combined, and renewed themselves, where revolutionary fervor could thrive and percolate, mix, and coagulate. Bound together by violence, exploitation, greed, honor, family, community, and ideological commitment, Gulf South rebels drew from longer traditions of insurgency, even as they forged new ones. Their legacies would resonate well beyond their seemingly localized disturbances, from the Caribbean to western Europe, illuminating how Indigenous, Black, and Euro-American Gulf South rebels operated in a rapidly shrinking, colonial world.

Paul Barba is an Associate Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University, USA. He is the author of the prize-winning book Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

Long description:

Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries is a collection of essays on the tangled yet variegated histories of rebellious actors in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gulf South and its linked environs. Following diverse rebels, revolutionaries, militants, insurgents, opportunists, and subversives from the early eighteenth-century alluvial floodplains of Louisiana to the mid-nineteenth-century coastal prairies of southeast Texas, this volume recasts the Gulf South as a centripetal region in the history of early America, a place where worlds collided, overlapped, combined, and renewed themselves, where revolutionary fervor could thrive and percolate, mix, and coagulate. Bound together by violence, exploitation, greed, honor, family, community, and ideological commitment, Gulf South rebels drew from longer traditions of insurgency, even as they forged new ones. Their legacies would resonate well beyond their seemingly localized disturbances, from the Caribbean to western Europe, illuminating how Indigenous, Black, and Euro-American Gulf South rebels operated in a rapidly shrinking, colonial world.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: The Bonds of Gulf South Rebellion.- 2. Bad Talks: Rebels, Rumors, and the Politics of Fear in the Gulf Borderlands, 1700-1760s.- 3. Enlightened Rebels and Patrimonial Sovereigns: The 1768 French Creole Revolt in Spanish Louisiana.- 4. Repeat Rebels: The Spread of Slave Insurrections in the Atlantic World.- 5. Ready-Made Rebels in the Age of Jeffersonian Expansion: Filibusters and the West Florida Rebellion, 1810.- 6. ?Bankrupts at the Head and Vagabonds at the Foot?: Revolutionary Opportunists and Land Speculation in the James Long Expedition of 1819.- 7. In Response to Indigenous Warfare: Development of U.S. Cavalry, 1832-1842.- 8. Bringing the Florida Fight to Indian Territory: The Expansion of Marronage across the Borderlands.- 9. Unruly and Refusing to Submit: Black Women, Fugitive Assistance Networks, and Freedom Fighting in the Texas Borderlands.- 10. Afterword: Settler Rebels, Maroons, and Gulf South Inheritances.