APG-L Archives

From: <>
Subject: [APG] Announcing New Databases: Documenting Louisiana Sugar
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2008 05:26:13 -0500

Forwarded from the H-South list.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Baker Bruce" <>
To: <>
Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2008 1:08 PM
Subject: Announcing New Databases: Documenting Louisiana Sugar


From: Richard Follett [mailto:]
Sent: Thu 7/3/2008 6:09 PM
Subject: Re: Announcing New Databases: Documenting Louisiana Sugar

Documenting Louisiana Sugar 1845-1917 <www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar>

Documenting Louisiana Sugar provides historians and social scientists with
an innovative tool for examining plantation economy and agrarian society in
the American South. Utilizing exceptionally detailed annual crop returns
and additional census records, Documenting Louisiana Sugar makes available
two fully searchable databases that allow users to examine in micro and
macro detail the evolution of one of America's definitive plantation crops,
namely cane sugar. These can be freely accessed at
www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar

For over seventy years, agrarian economists in Louisiana diligently
recorded economic and production data on each sugar producing estate. These
remarkable records provide an unbroken time series of data; indeed, no
other plantation crop in the American South was so meticulously recorded
for such a long period of time as was Louisiana sugar. This project makes
these sources available for rigorous analysis and provides users with the
query functions capable of tracing people and plantations through time. It
enables users to study the economic performance of an entire industry, to
consider business consolidation, capital acquisition, technology transfer,
and the shifting dynamics of plantation land use. The built in search
functions enable researchers to limit or expand their enquiries by year,
parish, crop output, technology, and even gender. Users can track
persistence and change among the plantation elite, trace landholding and
economic performance among both large and small cane farmers, examine the
effect of the American Civil War, and assess the transition from slave to
free labor on Louisiana's plantation economy. And for those interested in
the late nineteenth century, the databases track the rise and fall of
American sugar during U.S. imperial expansion. No other public database
detailing plantation life in such detail exists and we hope that scholars
find this resource to be a valuable research tool.

Former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass described Louisiana's
sugar country as a "life of living death." These databases do not tell the
story of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who labored in the cane
fields through the nineteenth century, but they tell the story of an
industry where the exploitation of land, capital, and labor was central to
business success.

Funding for this project was made available by research project grants
awarded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom,
The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and by the
University of Sussex and the University of Toronto.

Dr. Richard Follett
Department of American Studies
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN
United Kingdom

Tel: 44-1273-877365
www.sussex.ac.uk/americanstudies
www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar
---------------------------------------------------
Bruce E. Baker
Senior Lecturer in United States History
Royal Holloway, University of London
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/unra/373
List Editor, H-SOUTH

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