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book cover for Sweet Home Feliciana

Sweet Home Feliciana

Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History

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Pub Date Mar 05 2026 | Archive Date Feb 20 2026


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Description

In this tapestry of intersecting stories, including those of her own family, Rashauna Johnson charts the global transformation of a rural region in Louisiana from European colonialism to Jim Crow. From her ancestor Virgil to her cousin Veronica and her hand-sewn Mardi Gras memorial suit more than a century later, this history is one of triumphs and trauma, illustrating the ways people of African descent have created sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance. Johnson uses her grandmother's birthplace in East Feliciana as a prism to illuminate foundational, if fraught, aspects of US history including colonialism, slavery, war, citizenship, and unfinished freedom. The result is a portrait of the world in a family, a family in a region, and a region in the world that insists on the bristling and complicated relationships of people to place and creates a new understanding of what it means to be American.

In this tapestry of intersecting stories, including those of her own family, Rashauna Johnson charts the global transformation of a rural region in Louisiana from European colonialism to Jim Crow...


Advance Praise

‘A stunning work of social and cultural history and of creative historical thinking. Rashauna Johnson has given us a multi-layered story that not only conjoins the local, regional, and international but also shows how our present lives in the past and our past in the present. Sweet Home Feliciana exemplifies historical scholarship at its finest and most inventive.’ Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History

‘In lyrical prose as moving as song, Sweet Home Feliciana haunts a notorious southern anthem and the troubling nostalgia associated with it. Relying on a wealth of sources and a rare gift of interpretation, historian Rashauna Johnson tells a bold, blues story of Indigenous people, Black enslaved people, their defiant descendants, and the Louisiana lands they still call home. Readers of this book will never see New Orleans or the rural South in the same way again.’ Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake



‘A stunning work of social and cultural history and of creative historical thinking. Rashauna Johnson has given us a multi-layered story that not only conjoins the local, regional, and international...


Available Editions

EDITION Hardcover
ISBN 9781009668323
PRICE $32.95 (USD)
PAGES 368

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