French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815 by Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, eds.The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis by Cleary, Patricia (review)

118 The Michigan Historical Review government efforts to help blacks by building public housing projects, and they feared government-mandated attempts at granting blacks access to better jobs—at the presumed expense of whites. As Doody notes, similar concerns aided George Wallace’s presidential candidacy among Detroit’s white UAW locals in 1968. Because anti-communism loomed so large in postwar America, it served as a lubricant for accelerating challenges to the New Deal order. The Cold War was a catalyst rather than an instigator of the postwar conservative ascendancy; when it ended, conservatism did not decline. Detroit’s Cold War is a concise, clearly written, and sensibly organized book. It highlights important trends in the United States that have yet to run their course. Drew Maciag Rochester, New York Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, eds. French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815. East Lansing and Winnipeg: Michigan State University Press & University of Manitoba Press, 2013. Pp. 219. Illustrations. Endnotes. Paper, $25.95. Cleary, Patricia. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011. Pp 357. Illustrations. Index. Bibliography. Cloth $40. It’s been nearly two decades since Richard White published his seminal work, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press) in 1991. According to the editors of French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815 (p. xvi), “White’s The Middle Ground was paradigm altering, bringing together the political and commercial focus that had been so prevalent in French colonial history, with the ethnohistorical emphasis on culture that had become a salient feature of the new Indian history. It highlighted the fact that French and Indians would not be studied in isolation in the heart of North America and gave a language to the process and outcome of encounters.” Englebert and Teasdale’s edited collection of papers consists mainly of papers concerning the history of those French-Indian relations in the colonial Great Lakes region and Mississippi River Valley. Several of those papers had been presented at the annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Book Reviews 119 Society in 2008. The eight edited articles within this significant volume carry on the major contributions made by White, and dive even deeper into the ethnographic data of the Midwest, Great Lakes, and Mississippi River valley. The thematic-based, chronologically arranged chapters are tied together through concepts of Indian-French economics and a two-way cultural transformation and assimilation, as each chapter topic is related to both local and international history and importance. The ‘balkanization’ or ‘shatter-zone’ concept applied by geographers decades ago, applies to the French-Indian geography of the Midwest, and crosses the boundary of no longer presenting a biased, boundary-based interpretation of French-Indian history or historiography that ‘stops at a modern political boundary’ as has been so frequent in past literature. One of the most difficult tasks when pulling together a volume of edited papers is to edit those papers so they read as one voice and one tense and, as importantly, flow in sequence, topic, and contribution. In my opinion, Englebert and Teasdale do just that and they both should be commended for pulling together a volume that is every bit as significant in contribution to our historical and ethnohistorical understanding of French-Native culture as was the volume presented by White decades ago. Indeed, I am proud to say that from the auspices beginnings of the French Colonial Historical Society, the research, papers, and books produced by this Midwest-based, but internationally participated in Society, have consistently turned heads in a very positive manner throughout the professional world of history. This book is a book that should grace the library of anyone interested in early FrenchNative ethnohistory. The title of Professor Patricia Cleary’s book The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis comes from a quote made by Fernando de Leyba, one of a succession of colonial Spanish governors to sit in civil authority over the French founders and habitants of colonial St. Louis. Cleary, a professor of...