“Bounded Lives, Bounded Places is an original contribution to the study of colonial Louisiana—an important, but neglected field of study. Hanger focuses upon both ethnic and women’s history, and makes a contribution to comparative history.”—Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Professor of History, Emerita, Rutgers University “Kimberly Hanger traces the origins of antebellum Louisiana’s large and influential free black society to the late ... Read moreeighteenth-century era of Spanish colonial rule, when the entire region, but particularly New Orleans, saw a steady growth in the number of people classified as neither slave nor white. An extraordinarily rich archival trove, especially of government, church and military records, has enabled Hanger to chronicle in remarkable detail the development of this community of libres and their negotiation of the precarious and ambiguous place they occupied in colonial Louisiana society. . . . Hanger fills an important lacuna in the history of free blacks in North America.”—Roderick A. McDonald, Slavery and Abolition “No one has done more to explain the origins of Lousiana’s free people of color than Kimberly Hanger. Hanger’s mastery of both the literature of free blacks in the New World and her deep understanding of the development of colonial Louisiana enables her to place Louisiana’s free people of color in hemisphere perspective, while exposing the fine-grained texture of their daily lives. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places is the best study of free people of color in Spanish Louisiana.”—Ira Berlin, University of Maryland Show Less