Andrew McMichael is an assistant professor of history at Western Kentucky University, USA. McMichael is also the author of History on the Web and an assistant editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 30.
One of the most impressive achievements of Atlantic Loyalties is to
establish a road map for studying West Florida in particular and
the southern borderlands in general. McMichael offers an important
counterpart to the standard narrative of the system of British
slavery that began in the upper South before heading South and
West. Instead, we learn about a more complex and dynamic process
through which enslavement and freedom, plantation agriculture and
frontier settlement, regional connections and international
tensions overlapped to shape life in North America.--Peter Kastor
"author of The Nation's Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the
Creation of America "
McMichael's book is a powerful argument for writing borderlands
history from the ground up, concentrating on what actually happened
in a given place and fitting that place into an Atlantic framework.
The story of Anglo-American expansion into the Spanish borderlands
has traditionally been told as the inevitable triumph of English
liberty over Spanish tyranny. In this pathbreaking study, McMichael
shows that government in the Baton Rouge district of West Florida
was enlightened and mild and that Anglo settlers, whose allegiance
was more practical than patriotic, were content to live under
Spanish law as long as Spain was able to grant lands and protect
property.--Amy Turner Bushnell "author of Situado and Sabana:
Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of
Florida "
Atlantic Loyalties is the finest book written on the southern
borderlands. Focusing upon an obscure region the Baton Rouge
district of West Florida, he has carefully chronicled the
political, economic, social, and cultural factors that gave context
to the lives and loyalties of the French, Spanish, British, and
American settlers. This is a revolutionary book that moves easily
between the local and the international, revealing the shifting
loyalties and abiding self-interest of the settlers.--Virginia
Meacham Gould "editor of Chained to the Rock of Adversity "
Offers exceptionally well written, interesting, and innovative
approaches that promise to breathe new interpretive life into what
many may consider an old topic . . . As one of the stronger
anthologies in the field published in recent years, this collection
will be useful to specialists and students alike . . . the range of
interpretations and the nuanced understandings of American slavery
will certainly benefit scholars for years to come.--Journal of
Southern History
[Andrew] McMichael does a good job of describing the operations and
end of twenty-five years of Spanish rule in West Florida. He uses a
rich variety of archival sources to illustrate and establish his
key points. This is bottom-up history that takes into account
theoretical themes but is ever on the search for concrete evidence
on which to base the more abstract claims. Others would do well to
imitate his work.--Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer
Atlantic Loyalties does an excellent job in placing West Florida
into an international context. . . . An interesting book that sheds
historical light on an area all-too-often downplayed or not
mentioned at all.--Journal of American History
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