Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries, 1700-1860

" Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries  is an innovative, exciting collection of essays by the next generation of southern historian. Boasting a wide range of European, American, enslaved, and Indigenous actors, the chapters capture the demographic complexity of the Gulf region, break new ground, and defy conventional historical boundaries."

—Jeff Forret, Professor of History at Lamar University, USA

"This impressive collection deftly demonstrates the unique nature of the 18th- and 19th-century Gulf South. Each chapter highlights previously overlooked characters, from the famous Georges Biassou to the lesser-known Charles Deslondes, who led the German Coast slave insurrection in 1811. The varied set of stories succeed in showing how the diverse region was nonetheless connected, principally by rebellion. Yet the volume most importantly reveals the connections between the Gulf South and the larger Atlantic World. By centering the Gulf South in the Revolutionary Atlantic,  Gulf South Rebels  repositions the region's history and by extension forces historians to reimagine early American history." 

—Erin Stone, Associate Professor of History, University of West Florida, USA

Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries is a collection of essays on the tangled yet variegated histories of rebellious actors in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gulf South and its linked environs. These essays bring into relief the preponderance of rebellion in the Gulf South—broadly conceived of as the region encompassing the modern states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas and their peripheries—as a driving force of social, political, and cultural change. Following diverse rebels, revolutionaries, militants, insurgents, opportunists, and subversives from the early eighteenth-century alluvial floodplains of Louisiana to the mid-nineteenth-century coastal prairies of southeast Texas, this volume recasts the Gulf South as a centripetal region in the history of early America, a place where worlds collided, overlapped, combined, and renewed themselves, where revolutionary fervor could thrive and percolate, mix, and coagulate. Bound together by violence, exploitation, greed, honor, family, community, and ideological commitment, Gulf South rebels drew from longer traditions of insurgency, even as they forged new ones. Their legacies would resonate well beyond their seemingly localized disturbances, from the Caribbean to western Europe, illuminating how Indigenous, Black, and Euro-American Gulf South rebels operated in a rapidly shrinking, colonial world.

Paul Barba  is an Associate Professor of History and Affiliate Faculty of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University, USA. He is the author of the prize-winning book Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).