Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Natchez County
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Rochester
STATE: MI
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://oakland.edu/history/top-links/history-faculty-staff/george-milne/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-milne-a8267428 * https://thehistoriansmanifesto.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/review-of-natchez-country-by-george-edward-milne/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2014069078
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Milne, George Edward
Found in: Natchez Country, 2015: ECIP t.p. (George Edward Milne) data
view (assistant professor of history at Oakland
University)
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:New York University, M.A., 2000; University of Oklahoma, Ph.D. , 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Educator and writer. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, associate professor of history.
MEMBER:Phi Alpha Theta.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
George Edward Milne is a writer and educator. He earned a master’s degree from New York University and a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. Milne is an associate professor of history at Oakland University, in Rochester, Michigan.
In 2015, Milne released his first book, Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana. In this volume, he offers information on the history of Louisiana, focusing on its colonization by the French. Milne notes that French settlers began arriving in Louisiana in the late 1600s. The settlers were sent by King Louis XIV, also known as the “Sun King,” to colonize the region. There, they came into contact with the Natchez Native American tribe, also called the Theoloels, which means “People of the Sun.” Milne explains that the French and the Natchez initially coexisted peacefully. The Natchez, who ruled over other tribes in the region, incorrectly believed that the French were yet another group that they would control. Both groups recognized similarities between themselves and the others. Over time, however, conflicts emerged. One of the first was a hostage crisis. One of the more gruesome instances in the conflicts occurred when the Natchez greeted visitors from the Choctaw nation by setting out a display of the heads of French settlers. The French’s most significant action against the Natchez was the torching of the Natchez Grand Village. Ultimately, the French enslaved many of the Natchez, and other members of the tribe were forced to flee their homeland. In the book, Milne includes maps that indicate the ways in which the region changed as the French colonized Natchez country.
Writing in the Journal of Southern History, Carla Gerona suggested: “Although this study employs a unique methodological approach that considers both race and place, Natchez Country does not explore the equally important disease environment.” However, Gerona concluded, “Milne has produced a succinct account of two Sun peoples that raises provocative ideas as it goes beyond traditional imperial perspectives.” G. Gagnon, reviewer in Choice, remarked: “The author’s use of French sources of Natchez history is excellent and the theoretical discussion of sacred place … plausible.” A critic on the Historians Manifesto Web site commented: “Milne’s engaging narrative is well-written and leaves the reader anxious to turn the pages to see what happens next. His thesis did, however, seem almost rushed at the end, almost like an afterthought.” The critic added, “Milne tells us a captivating story that deserves a wider audience.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, July, 2015, G. Gagnon, review of Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana, p. 1910.
Journal of Southern History, August, 2016, Carla Gerona, review of Natchez Country, p. 655.
ONLINE
Historians Manifesto, https://thehistoriansmanifesto.wordpress.com/ (July 7, 2015), review of Natchez Country.
Oakland University Web site, https://oakland.edu/ (March 15, 2017), author profile.
George Milne
Title: Associate Professor
Office: 415 Varner Hall
Phone: (248) 370-3530
Fax: (248) 370-3528
Email: milne@oakland.edu
Education:
Ph.D., University of Oklahoma
M.A., New York University
Major Fields:
Early American History, Native American History
Biography:
My work focuses on the interactions between Native Americans and European colonists during the 17th and 18th centuries. I am particularly interested in the relationships that developed in the Lower Mississippi Valley between the French and the Natchez, Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples. On a larger scale, my research investigates how the communities that grew up in that region fit into the emerging Atlantic World. My work has been supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library and the American Historical Association.
The courses that I teach reflect my research interests. These include a two-semester survey of Native American history, an upper-division course on Colonial America, and one on Piracy in the Atlantic World. I also teach the introductory survey on United States History until 1877.
Publications:
Book
Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
Articles and Book Chapters
"Clerics, Cartographers, and Kings: Mapping Power in the French Atlantic World, 1608-1752," in Religion and Space in the Atlantic World, eds. John Corrigan, David Bodenhamer, and Trevor Harris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
"Plumes, Quadroons, and Company Men: Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World," William and Mary Quarterly 73 (2016): 160-72.
“Picking up the Pieces: Natchez Coalescence in the Shatter Zone,” in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, eds. Robbie Etheridge and Sherri M. Shuck Hall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 388-417.
Encyclopedia Entries
"French Colonial Louisiana, 1699-1763," "Native American Military Practices to 1783," "Native American Military Practices since 1783," "The Jesuits" and "The Natchez Indians" in Peter Mancall, ed., The Encyclopedia of Native American History (New York: Facts on File, 2009).
"American Indians: Old Southwest," "The Battle of Horseshoe Bend" and "Creek War" in Paul Finkelman, ed., Encyclopedia of the New American Nation: The Emergence of the United States, 1754-1829 (Detroit: Scribner's, 2006).
Nineteen individual entries in Paul Gilje, ed., The Encyclopedia of American History, vol. 3 (New York: Facts on File, 2003
Natchez Country
Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana
George E. Milne
The Natchez, the French, and the development of racial consciousness among native peoples
Description
At the dawn of the 1700s the Natchez viewed the first Francophones in the Lower Mississippi Valley as potential inductees to their chiefdom. This mistaken perception lulled them into permitting these outsiders to settle among them. Within two decades conditions in Natchez Country had taken a turn for the worse. The trickle of wayfarers had given way to a torrent of colonists (and their enslaved Africans) who refused to recognize the Natchez’s hierarchy. These newcomers threatened to seize key authority-generating features of Natchez Country: mounds, a plaza, and a temple. This threat inspired these Indians to turn to a recent import—racial categories—to reestablish social order. They began to call themselves “red men” to reunite their polity and to distance themselves from the “blacks” and “whites” into which their neighbors divided themselves. After refashioning their identity, they launched an attack that destroyed the nearby colonial settlements. Their 1729 assault began a two-year war that resulted in the death or enslavement of most of the Natchez people.
In Natchez Country, George Edward Milne provides the most comprehensive history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Natchez to date. From La Salle’s first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate dispersal of the Natchez by the close of the 1730s, Milne also analyzes the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Mississippi River and how Native Americans in turn adopted and resisted colonial ideology.
George Milne
Associate Professor at Oakland University
Greater Detroit Area
Higher Education
Current
Oakland University
Education
University of Oklahoma
27
connections
View George’s full profile. It's free!
Your colleagues, classmates, and 400 million other professionals are on LinkedIn.
View George’s Full Profile
Experience
Oakland University
Assistant Professor
Oakland University
Present
Education
University of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma
Ph.D, Early American History
2000 – 2006
Activities and Societies: Hudson Fellow Alumni Fellow Phi Alpha Theta
New York University
New York University
Master of Arts (M.A.), Social Theory
1998 – 2000
Skills
Higher EducationResearchTeachingPublic SpeakingUniversity TeachingStudent AffairsCurriculum DesignCurriculum DevelopmentMicrosoft OfficeCommunity Outreach
How's this translation?
Great•Has errors
Volunteer Experience & Causes
Causes George cares about:
Children
Education
Human Rights
Politics
Poverty Alleviation
QUOTED: "Although this study employs a unique methodological approach that considers both race and place, Natchez Country does not explore the equally important disease environment."
"Milne has produced a succinct account of two Sun peoples that raises provocative ideas as it goes beyond traditional imperial perspectives."
Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana
Carla Gerona
82.3 (Aug. 2016): p655.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana. By George Edward Milne. Early American Places. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xviii], 293. Paper, $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4750-9; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4749-3.)
In this latest addition to the University of Georgia Press series Early American Places, George Edward Milne provides a lively reinterpretation of Natchez and French relations. The book starts with two Sun peoples. In the late seventeenth century, French subjects of the Sun King (Louis XIV) began migrating to Louisiana, where they encountered the Theoloels, or the People of the Sun, as the Natchez called themselves. Initially, each group "recognize[d] aspects of their own culture in the other's way of life" (p. 16). Villages and families structured politics and society. Paramount leaders built consensus through theatrical spectacles, religious rituals, and symbolic landscapes to rule ranked communities that included elites, workers, slaves, and immigrants. The Natchez Suns who led the powerful Grand Village at first misperceived the French as one of many subordinate groups.
Despite superficial similarities, differences between the French and the Theoloels quickly emerged in a series of conflicts that scholar John R. Swanton once termed the First, Second, and Third Natchez Wars. Although Milne joins those who have questioned this militaristic terminology, events like the "Natchez Hostage Crisis" (similar to Swanton's First War) provide a recurrent theme of violent conflict in Milne's narrative. A sensationalist introduction begins with the Natchez proudly displaying a row of French heads to Choctaw visitors, and the book concludes with the destruction of the Natchez Grand Village (Swanton's Third War). Milne theorizes that the enslavement and dispersal of the Natchez from their homelands after the war led to the construction of a new racial ideology.
Building on Nancy Shoemaker's argument that Indians made themselves "red," Milne pinpoints the origins of a pan-Indian racialist thinking to Natchez leaders who "use[d] the term 'red men' to unite those villagers who had previously been reluctant to fight against the colony" (p. 11). While French transcriptions of Natchez speeches certainly included the phrase "red men," did this usage really equate to the formation of a new "red racial category" at that time (p. 11)? The Natchez used red paint as a marker of difference before French contact. Some Natchez had French fathers, and African slaves fled to indigenous villages to join the Natchez resistance. Moreover, the Natchez continued to use other terms of self-identification such as "Theoloels" and "nacion." All suggest a more complex understanding of race and identity that scholars will want to further explore.
The most interesting and innovative contribution of Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana comes from Milne's cartographic analysis. In addition to interpreting original maps, Milne has created his own spatial representations to illustrate changing landscapes as French and indigenous groups introduced new villages, concessions, forts, homesteads, cabins, and fields that increasingly violated common areas, while outlying villages cultivated competing ties with Chickasaws and British groups. Milne also uses maps to show that the French maintained tight control over slave quarters. Some Natchez people feared that they, too, might come to be ruled by the Code Noir, which contributed to the development of distinctive racial categories in Louisiana. Although this study employs a unique methodological approach that considers both race and place, Natchez Country does not explore the equally important disease environment. My questions aside, Milne has produced a succinct account of two Sun peoples that raises provocative ideas as it goes beyond traditional imperial perspectives.
CARLA GERONA
Georgia Institute of Technology
Gerona, Carla
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gerona, Carla. "Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 655+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447758&it=r&asid=a14de3e474118d28dcae5500564688f7. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447758
QUOTED: "The author's use of French sources of Natchez history is excellent and the theoretical discussion of sacred place ... plausible."
Milne, George Edward. Natchez Country: Indians, colonists, and the landscapes of race in French Louisiana
G. Gagnon
52.11 (July 2015): p1910.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Milne, George Edward. Natchez Country: Indians, colonists, and the landscapes of race in French Louisiana. Georgia, 2015. 293p bibl index afp ISBN 9780820347493 cloth, $84.95; ISBN 9780820347509 pbk, $26.95; ISBN 9780820347516 ebook, $26.95
52-6069
E99
2014-23168 CIP
Milne (Oakland Univ.) analyzes Natchez behavior after French intrusion into their multicultural, pyramidal chiefdom. Precontact chiefdoms drew power from the sacred mounds of the Grand Village. Natchez leaders tried to incorporate the French and their slaves into their multicultural polity. The French pictured the world differently and injected racial distinctions as determinants into this emergent middle ground. French refusal to incorporate led to Natchez reprisals and French retaliations. French behavior rejected Natchez protocols, so the Natchez realized they would have to adjust to racial terms. By 1725, they were calling themselves and other Indians "Red" men in contrast to the "White" and "Black" others. Soon, Red men became the distinguishing term used by the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek. Milne provides a needed description of an evolving chiefdom, the French polity of Louisiana, the emergence of racial designations as a formative concept replacing identity based on sacred mounds, and the destruction of the Natchez as an ethnic group. The author's use of French sources of Natchez history is excellent and rhe theoretical discussion of sacred place reasonably plausible. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--G. Gagnon, Loyola University of New Orleans
Gagnon, G.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gagnon, G. "Milne, George Edward. Natchez Country: Indians, colonists, and the landscapes of race in French Louisiana." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, July 2015, p. 1910. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA419532883&it=r&asid=de7a5bb8ba284f116b639d50b9e21658. Accessed 5 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A419532883
QUOTED: "Milne’s engaging narrative is well-written and leaves the reader anxious to turn the pages to see what happens next. His thesis did, however, seem almost rushed at the end, almost like an afterthought."
"Milne tells us a captivating story that deserves a wider audience."
Review of Natchez Country, by George Edward Milne
7 Jul
One of the most fascinating stories in U.S. history is the interaction between European colonists and Native Americans. During the early 1700s, three cultures were forced together along the Mississippi River with traumatic consequences. George Edward Milne’s Natchez County: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana describes how the indigenous Natchez Indians, the French colonists, and African slaves came together for dozens of years before the famous Natchez Revolt of 1729 created havoc across the region. During this narrative, Milne provides a thesis that the Natchez began seeing themselves as a different race (red men) to unite their society and distinguish it from others.
NC
Milne uses two hundred pages to detail the three cultures and how they came together. Using predominately French accounts, Milne describes the Natchez Indians and their culture, the French arrival and their attempts to create an agricultural economy based on tobacco farming and their use of African slaves. Milne’s narrations of events such as the funeral of the Tattooed Serpent, the smaller conflicts leading up to the 1729 revolt, and the revolt itself and aftermath are the highlights of the book. An incompetent French fort commandant who made a horrible blunder led the Natchez to take decisive action as they had grown tired of French demands for more land as well as growing French attitudes of superiority. In a surprise attack, the Natchez attacked the fort in an effort to eliminate the French once and for all. According to Milne, it was during this time period that the Natchez began a “shift from a spatially grounded identity to one based on racial categories.” (214) In fact, Milne says the Natchez were the first to use the term “red men” in front of Europeans. This reestablishment of an identity was instrumental in building support for launching their attack. In the end, it did not matter as the French retaliated and forced surviving Natchez away from their homeland.
Milne’s engaging narrative is well-written and leaves the reader anxious to turn the pages to see what happens next. His thesis did, however, seem almost rushed at the end, almost like an afterthought. It is also interesting to note that he did not seem to consult much with Jim Barnett, longtime site director of the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians and the tribe’s preeminent historian. I also must state that the true significance of this particular story is that this dissolution of the Natchez nation is the final ending of Mississippian Mound Building societies. By the early 1700s, most other mound building societies were long gone and only the Natchez one survived until their encounters with the French in the early 1700s. Milne only mentions this in the last paragraph of the book. But these points aside, Milne tells us a captivating story that deserves a wider audience and his good work here will see that it happens.
CPW