Spanish Louisiana in the American Revolution: Contest for Borderlands

The Spanish era in the Lower Mississippi Valley, a borderland contested by empires and the region’s diverse inhabitants following the Seven Years’ War, was characterized by tremendous transition as the colony emerged from the neglect of the French period and became slowly but increasingly centered on plantation agriculture. The transformations of this critical period grew out of the struggles between Spain and Louisiana’s colonists, enslaved people, and Indians over issues related to space and mobility. Many borderland peoples, networks and alliances sought to preserve Louisiana as a flexible and fluid zone as the colonial government attempted to control and contain the region’s inhabitants for its own purposes through policy and efforts to secure loyalty and its own advantageous alliances.

Drawing from her new book, Spanish Louisiana: Contest for Borderlands, 1763-1803, Frances Kolb Turnbell, Ph.D., visiting lecturer at the University of North Alabama, examines the period from 1763 through the American Revolution, when the Mississippi River was a boundary between empires, and how the activity of borderland peoples evolved after the Revolutionary War—when the Lower Mississippi was no longer an imperial boundary—to demonstrate the instability and fluidity of postwar years in Louisiana, American trade and migration, Louisiana’s experience of the Age of Revolutions, and Spain’s ultimate political demise in the Mississippi River Valley.

About the Speaker
Frances Kolb Turnbell is a historian of colonial America and the Atlantic World with a specialty in the eighteenth-century Lower Mississippi Valley. She received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and currently teaches courses on U.S. history at the University of North Alabama. She is the editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly and has participated in the American Revolutionary War in the West museum exhibition, book, and conferences developed and hosted by the St. Charles Historical Society in Missouri.

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