Book Notes

Book Notes Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Richmond F. Brown. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. xiii, 313 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0-8032-6267-6. Written by leading historians, this compilation of eleven essays explores the social, political, cultural, and economic characteristics of the Gulf South during the eighteenth century. Stretching from Florida to Texas, the region experienced remarkable changes as a result of European, African, and Native American influences. The ensuing complicated and often violent interactions between these groups transformed it from a colonial frontier to a slave-based agricultural region. Alabama features prominently in Karl Davis’s discussion of the Creek Indian settlement at Tensaw and David Wheat’s multicultural look at eighteenth-century Mobile. Essays about Spanish West Florida, Choctaw and Chickasaw trade relations with Britain, Black Seminoles, French colonial Louisiana, and Afro-Creole women in New Orleans are also included in this study. Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. By Anthony E. Kaye. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. x, 365 pp. $34.95. ISBN 978-0-8078-3103-8. In this well-written and carefully documented monograph, author Anthony Kaye explains the development of slave neighborhoods in the antebellum South. Slaves routinely traveled to and from adjoining plantations to work, court, socialize, trade, and worship with other slaves. Slaves established bonds of friendship, kinship, and community. Nevertheless, these neighborhoods often functioned in a constant state of flux as owners migrated to new places and the slave trade forced friends and family apart. Although the author focuses primarily on the Natchez District of Mississippi, he touches on slave neighborhood patterns throughout the South, noting that development patterns in the more recently settled areas of the frontier South differed from the older, well-established settlements along the eastern seaboard and the Mississippi River. ...