Kathleen M. Byrd’s Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1803–1840 is an examination of one French Creole community as it transitioned from a fur-trading and agricultura

Out of colonial Natchitoches, in northwestern Louisiana, emerged a sophisticated and affluent community founded by a family of freed slaves. Their plantations e

A National Historic Landmark with a complex and remarkable two-hundred-year history, Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, was home to many notable w

The legal crusade of Myra Clark Gaines (1804?--1885) has all the trappings of classic melodrama -- a lost heir, a missing will, an illicit relationship, a quest