Sweet Home Feliciana

'This is a book I have been waiting, yearning, for. In this important and beautifully written work, Johnson takes up the sorely neglected topic of Black homemaking/peacemaking in the rural South, rural but not unconnected to regional, national, and global webs of circulation – of economies, revolution, and knowledge. It is a powerful story not of people 'run off' but who stayed and fought and found 'warmth under the same old sun.'' Thavolia Glymph, author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household 'A stunning work of social and cultural history and of creative historical thinking. Rashauna Johnson has given us a multi-layered story that not only conjoins the local, regional, and international but also shows how our present lives in the past and our past in the present. Sweet Home Feliciana exemplifies historical scholarship at its finest and most inventive.' Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History 'In lyrical prose as moving as song, Sweet Home Feliciana haunts a notorious southern anthem and the troubling nostalgia associated with it. Relying on a wealth of sources and a rare gift of interpretation, historian Rashauna Johnson tells a bold, blues story of Indigenous people, Black enslaved people, their defiant descendants, and the Louisiana lands they still call home. Readers of this book will never see New Orleans or the rural South in the same way again.' Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake 'Sweet Home Feliciana cuts through the myths of the Old South. What matters lies beneath the nostalgic facade. Black families bled, built, mourned, and made beauty out of the wreckage.' Kim Vaz-Deville, author of The 'Baby Dolls': Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition