Gentilly
Regular price
€44.99
1800s
Category=NHD
Category=NHK
Category=WQH
correspondence
enslaved
enslaver
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
farm
France
historians
history
letters
Louisiana
management
Mississippi River
nineteenth century
plantation
primary source
slavery
South
urban
Product details
- ISBN 9780807183663
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 15 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Between 1818 and 1851, Auvignac Dorville, a Louisiana Creole, managed the day-to-day operations of the Gentilly plantation, located a few miles from New Orleans along Bayou St. John. The plantation belonged to Henri and Marguerite de Sainte-Gême, who entrusted their property to Dorville's careful supervision when they left Louisiana for the Sainte-Gême ancestral home in France. Dorville wrote to the Sainte-Gêmes for more than thirty years, offering detailed glimpses of the plantation's crops, financial situation, environmental challenges, and events surrounding the two dozen enslaved men, women, and children working there. Expertly translated and annotated by Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould, Dorville's letters illuminate nineteenth-century life on an urban plantation that connected the rural world of Louisiana to the urban sphere of New Orleans and reached far into the Atlantic world.
Nathalie Dessens is professor of history at the University of Toulouse and the author of Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans.
Virginia Meacham Gould is a lecturer in history at Tulane University and the editor of Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South.
Virginia Meacham Gould is a lecturer in history at Tulane University and the editor of Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South.
