Why read Bounded Lives, Bounded Places?

Book cover of Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803

Book description

During Louisiana's Spanish colonial period, economic, political, and military conditions combined with local cultural and legal traditions to favor the growth and development of a substantial group of free blacks. In Bounded Lives, Bounded Places, Kimberly S. Hanger explores the origin of antebellum New Orleans' large, influential, and propertied free…

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American history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Bounded Lives, Bounded Places as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Christian Pinnen

Author

Kimberly Hanger’s Bounded Lives, Bounded Places establishes the role of free people of color in Spanish New Orleans. She traces families and individuals of color throughout the Spanish decades and weaves a rich tapestry of their world in the Crescent City. Women play an important role in her work, and she teases out the way that free people of color sought to fit in the colonial society of Louisiana. While never able to become equal to white people, they created a space above enslaved people that enabled them to participate as ‘almost free’ in New Orleans’s society.

From Christian's list on The best books on race and slavery in the colonial lower Mississippi Valley.