In The Place with No Edge, Adam Mandelman follows three centuries of human efforts to inhabit and control the lower Mississippi River delta, the vast watery flatlands spreading across much of southern Louisiana. He finds that people’s use of technology to tame unruly nature in the region has produced interdependence with—rather than independence from—the environment. Created over millennia by deposits of silt and sand, the Mississippi River delta is one of the most dynamic landscapes in North America. From the eighteenth-century establishment of the first French fort below New Orleans to the creation of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan in the 2000s, people have attempted to harness and master this landscape through technology. Mandelman examines six specific interventions employed in the delta over time: levees, rice flumes, pullboats, geophysical surveys, dredgers, and petroleum cracking. He demonstrates that even as people seemed to gain control over the environment, they grew more deeply intertwined with—and vulnerable to—it. The greatest folly, Mandelman argues, is to believe that technology affords mastery. Environmental catastrophes of coastal land loss and petrochemical pollution may appear to be disconnected, but both emerged from the same fantasy of harnessing nature to technology. Similarly, the levee system’s failures and the subsequent deluge after Hurricane Katrina owe as much to centuries of human entanglement with the delta as to global warming’s rising seas and strengthening storms. The Place with No Edge advocates for a deeper understanding of humans’ relationship with nature. It provides compelling evidence that altering the environment—whether to make it habitable, profitable, or navigable —inevitably brings a response, sometimes with unanticipated consequences. Mandelman encourages a mindfulness of the ways that our inventions engage with nature and a willingness to intervene in responsible, respectful ways.

This history of two plantations on the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge examines the people and places around the tiny town of Bayou Goula in Iberville Parish from 1699 to 2000. It describes the different governmental policies that shaped the land tenure of the region. In chapter 3 the book describes the Acadian settlement and how two free people of color purchased several farms and consolidated them into the Tally-Ho plantation. Later chapters described the John Hampden Randolphs and the John D. Murrells, both investors from Virginia. Chapter six describes the rise and fall of the community of Bayou Goula. Chapter seven describes the African-Americans along Bayou Goula. Some of the family relationships are identified. Links between workers in the twentieth century and workers in slavery appear. Chapter eight relies on memoirs of life at Tally-Ho and the community of Bayou Goula. It presents happy remembrances of things past. The chapter discusses education in the community, daily life, transportation, and relations between the families. Chapter nine describes the founding of the George M. Murrell Planting & Manufacturing Co., the major sugar grower and heir of the 19th century planters. Finally, the book discusses the 20th century successes and failures in the sugar business.

Black British Migrants in Cuba offers a comprehensive study of migration from the British Caribbean to Cuba in the pre-World War II era, spotlighting an important chapter of the larger trajectory of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora. Grounded in extensive and rigorous multi-sited research, this book examines the different migration experiences of Jamaican, Leeward, and Windward Islanders, along with the transnational processes of labor recruitment and the local control of workers in the plantation. The book also explains the history of racial fear and political and economic forces behind the marking of black migrants as the 'Other' and the resulting discrimination, racism, and violence against them. Through analysis of the oppositional and resistance strategies employed by British Antilleans, the author conveys migrants' determination to work, live, and survive in the Caribbean.