Colonial Mississippi

Christian Pinnen is professor of history and codirector of African American studies at Mississippi College and is a 2022-2024 Bright Institute Fellow at Knox College. His research and teaching focus on the history of race, slavery, and the law in the American colonial borderlands. Charles Weeks (1937-2022) earned degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and Indiana University. He helped develop and teach a program of humanities at St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Jackson, Mississippi. He is author of Paths to a Middle Ground: The Diplomacy of Natchez, Boukfouka, Nogales, and San Fernando de las Barrancas, 1791-1795 and The Juarez Myth in Mexico.

This volume in the Heritage of Mississippi Series on the peoples of Mississippi in the colonial era before American control fills a significant gap in our understandings of Mississippi's past. Using detailed analysis of a wide range of individual historical actors and centering them within the local and international events that shaped their world, this book provides an excellent introduction to the personalities and events of this era of Mississippi's history. Readers will find the writing fast paced, detailed, and well-constructed, while the rich sources used by the authors offer a map into additional research and information. Overall, this is an excellent resource for learning about colonial Mississippi.--Greg O'Brien, coeditor of The Native South: New Histories and Enduring Legacies, editor of Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths, and author of Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750-1830 In Colonial Mississippi, Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks create a thoughtful, well researched, and clear narrative of more than two hundred years of Mississippi history. . . . [It] is a welcome and worthy addition to the history of the American South.--Jeff Washburh "Louisiana History" Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land is a gem of a book. Christian Pinnen and Charles Weeks present a fulsome, deep, broad, yet nuanced synthesis of the colonial history of the state of Mississippi. Pinnen and Weeks follow a full cast of players--Natives, Spaniards, English, French, and Africans--through 250 years of shifting power dynamics, environmental contingencies, and political fortunes and misfortunes, as well as the changing social and cultural worlds that constituted the long Mississippi, and American, colonial experience.--Robbie Ethridge, coeditor of The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760, among many other works