Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century - Paperback

by Richmond F. Brown (Editor), Richmond F. Brown (Introduction by)

Coastal Encounters opens a window onto the fascinating world of the eighteenth-century Gulf South. Stretching from Florida to Texas, the region witnessed the complex collision of European, African, and Native American peoples. The Gulf South offered an extraordinary stage for European rivalries to play out, allowed a Native-based frontier exchange system to develop alongside an emerging slave-based plantation economy, and enabled the construction of an urban network of unusual opportunity for free people of color. After being long-neglected in favor of the English colonies of the Atlantic coast, the colonial Gulf South has now become the focus of new and exciting scholarship. Coastal Encounters brings together leading experts and emerging scholars to provide a portrait of the Gulf South in the eighteenth century. The contributors depict the remarkable transformations that took place--demographic, cultural, social, political, and economic--and examine the changes from multiple perspectives, including those of Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; colonizers and colonized; men and women. The outstanding essays in this book argue for the central place of this dynamic region in colonial history.

Author Biography

Richmond F. Brown is an associate professor and associate director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. He taught at the University of South Alabama for sixteen years, where he organized the Howard Mahan Symposium. He is the author of Juan Fermin de Aycinena: Central American Colonial Entrepreneur, 1729-1796.

Contributors include:

Armando C. Alonzo

Ida Altman

Richmond F. Brown

H. Sophie Burton

Amy Turner Bushnell

Karl Davis

Shannon Lee Dawdy

Virginia Gould

Jane Landers

Andrew McMichael

Greg O'Brien

Daniel H. Usner Jr.

David Wheat