Creates a picture of the Illinois country as a single ethnic, economic, and cultural entity. Focusing on the French Creole communities along the Mississippi River, this book shows how land use practices intersected with several issues between Illinois and New Orleans to the significance of the mentalities of French Creoles and Anglo-Americans.

The Illinois Habitant, writes Natalia Maree Belting, was a gay soul; he seemed shockingly carefree to later, self-righteous puritans from the American colonies. He danced on Sunday after mass, was passionately attached to faro and half a dozen other card games, and played billiards at all hours. He gossiped long over a friendly pipe and congenial mug of brandy in the half-dusk of his porch or in the noisy tavern. First published in 1948, "Kaskaskia under the French Regime" is a social and economic history of French Kaskaskia from 1703 to 1765. Using a readable, journalistic style, Belting...

Based almost entirely on original source documents from the United States, France, and Spain, Carl J. Ekberg's Stealing Indian Women provides an innovative overview of Indian slavery in the Mississippi Valley. His detailed study of a fascinating and convoluted criminal case involving various slave women and a metis (mixed-blood) woodsman named Celadon illuminates race and gender relations, Creole culture, and the lives of Indian slaves--particularly women--in ways never before possible.

In 1790, Pierre-Charles de Lassus de Luzieres gathered his wife and children and fled Revolutionary France. His trek to America was prompted by his "purchase" of two thousand acres situated on the bank of the Ohio River from the Scioto Land Company--the institution that infamously swindled French buyers and sold them worthless titles to property. When de Luzieres arrived and realized he had been defrauded, he chose, in a momentous decision, not to return home to France. Instead, he committed to a life in North America and began planning a move to the Mississippi River valley.

De...

Begun as a royal adventure to enhance the glory of the king, the Dutch War sparked serious debate within the French government over the relationship of the ruler to the state. Ekberg focuses on one significant year of the war and explains how, despite opposition by several counselors, the king escalated the original conflict into a full European war and wrought a dramatic shift in French policy. The study is arranged thematically to bring clarity to a period of complex issues.

Originally published in 1979.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the...

History as They Lived It deserves to be placed within the rich context of Illinois Country historiography going back more than a century. . . . It brings together the fully ripened thoughts of a mature scholar at the very moment that students of the Illinois Country need such a book. from the foreword by Carl J. EkbergSettled in 1722, Prairie du Rocher was at the geographic center of a French colony in the Mississippi Valley, which also included other villages in what is now Illinois and Missouri: Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, St. Philippe, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis. Located in an...

Dr. Ekberg's masterwork on the old French town south of St. Louis brings into sharp focus life in colonial America. Ekberg has rendered a rich portrait of community life on the most fascinating of American frontiers, the composite world of French Creoles and American Indians in the Mississippi Valley. This is an important book and a good read to boot. That's how Yale University's John Mack Faragher praised this book.

The standard story of St. Louis's founding tells of fur traders Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau hacking a city out of wilderness." St. Louis Rising "overturns such gauzy myths with the contrarian thesis that French government officials and institutions shaped and structured early city society. Of the former, none did more than Louis St. Ange de Bellerive. His commitment to the Bourbon monarchy and to civil tranquility made him the prime mover as St. Louis emerged during the tumult following the French and Indian War.
Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the...

The standard story of St. Louis's founding tells of fur traders Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau hacking a city out of wilderness. St. Louis Rising overturns such gauzy myths with the contrarian thesis that French government officials and institutions shaped and structured early city society. Of the former, none did more than Louis St. Ange de Bellerive. His commitment to the Bourbon monarchy and to civil tranquility made him the prime mover as St. Louis emerged during the tumult following the French and Indian War.
Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the...