Educating the Sons of Sugar

This book is a history of a campus that was the site of several colleges. Jefferson College, the first school to occupy the St. James Parish site, educated the Creole sons of sugar planters from 1834 to 1848. R. Eric Platt finds that the school's purpose was to keep these planters' sons close to home, providing them an education that reinforced their ethnic identity and status as economic and political elites increasingly challenged by Anglo-Americans and non-Creole French immigrants. This particular planter class defined Creole as descendants of eighteenth-century French colonists who ventured to Louisiana prior to those they called Français étrangers (foreign French) who arrived after fleeing later revolutions in France and Haiti. These Creoles viewed the new French, while secular and sophisticated like themselves, nevertheless as “seconds in their tiered class system” (p. 20). The more religious and uncultured French exiles and descendants of Le Grand Dérangement (the expulsion of French Acadians from Nova Scotia by the British) however, Creoles “relegated to the lower ranks of the social order” (ibid

Archaeology · Art · Creole language · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Genealogy · Humanities · Identity (music · Immigration · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · History · Law · Philosophy

• Learning Slavery at Home

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