Editors

James Taylor Carson is a professor of history and associate dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science college at Queen’s University. In addition to various articles on the Native South, he has published two books: Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (1999) and Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories from the Colonial South (2007). In their own way each sought to recover deep continuities in the cultures of the South’s founding peoples and to explicate how the process of colonization enabled the creation of a new kind of Creole culture. His current research will carry such interests forward into an investigation of the origins of the Old South and the consequences that the Trail of Tears, which opened in the 1830s, had on the region.

Greg O’Brien is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to numerous articles and review essays on southeastern Indian history, he is the author of Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (2002), winner of the 2003 McLemore Prize from the Mississippi Historical Society, coeditor of George Washington’s South (2004), and editor of Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths (2008). His article “The Conqueror Meets the Unconquered: Negotiating Cultural Boundaries on the Post-Revolutionary Southern Frontier” (2001) won the 2002 Fletcher M. Green and Charles W. Ramsdell Award for the best article published in the Journal of Southern History during the two preceding years. His current project in southern Indian history is a study of the Seven Years War in the South (1750s–1760s) focusing on Native diplomatic initiatives and Indian-European relations.

Robbie Ethridge is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of Creek Country: The Creek Country and Their World, 1796–1816 (2003), and coeditor of The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760 (2002) and Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians (2006). Her current research examines the collapse of the Mississippian world and the reconfiguration of Native polities and lives in the first two hundred years of European contact. She has two books in progress on this subject. One is a coedited volume, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, which is due out in 2009. She is also finishing a monograph entitled From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of a Southern Indian Society.