Tangi Villerbu. Les missions du Minnesota

Tangi Villerbu has written an outstanding work that offers new contributions to several fields. Les missions du Minnesota: Catholicisme et colonisation dans l’Ouest américain, 1830–1860 covers much more than its title seems to promise. Villerbu’s Minnesota extends to the entire Upper Mississippi and the regional river system. The author contends that this geographic focus is part of the history of the American West, which is not self-evident in the literature, especially on the American side. The study is a careful observation of three decades that cover the “age of pioneers,” from the unusual vantage point of Catholicism, its ethnic diversity (French, Canadian, German, and Irish), and the stiff competition but also forms of cooperation with Protestant missions. Villerbu traces a profound transition between two colonial models: he based the first on métissage in the 1830s and 1840s (which, the author convincingly insists, should not be idealized); the second, in the 1850s, was a form of nation- and community-building characterized by territorial as well as institutional (both political and ecclesiastical) organization and consolidation, in a context of hitherto unprecedented population growth and demographic pressure on indigenous communities.

Archaeology · Colonialism · Consolidation (business) · Context (archaeology) · Ethnology · Geography · Indigenous · Irish · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies