Material & Visual Culture

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana

University of Pennsylvania Press / McNeil Series in Early American Studies, 2012, reprint 2014

• Finalist, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize

• Reviewed in: American Historical Review American Indian Culture and Research Journal; American Literary History; American Studies; Canadian Journal of American History; Dalhousie French Studies; Ethnohistory; French Studies; Journal of American History; Journal of Illinois History; Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society; Journal of Jesuit Studies; Journal of Southern History; The Historian; Le Journal; Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine; Textile History; The William and Mary Quarterly; The Winterthur Portfolio

"Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians is a brilliant book. With intelligence and precision, White examines a trove of fresh material culture evidence from the Upper Mississippi Valley and advances a new mode of analysis that goes deep into the possible meanings of Frenchness and Indianness, ultimately revealing a much slower timeline than scholars have claimed for the progression of racialized categories that foreclosed the possibility of identity transformation." - Kathleen Brown, University of Pennsylvania

"Historians dream of writing a book that will give us a new lens to make sense of the past. Sophie White has done that with Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians. Her insistence on finding a way to look at colonial people allows the rest of us to see them with a new clarity that reveals how much we have missed in the contested process that made race in the Atlantic World." - Emily Clark, Tulane University

"Drawing on French-language archival sources and an impressively interdisciplinary range of secondary literature, White argues that material culture—clothing and the clothed and groomed body—are central to understanding the complexity of the hybrid cultures of Upper and Lower Louisiana in the eighteenth century. Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians is a wonderfully original contribution to the English-language scholarship." - Ann M. Little, Colorado State University

Select Articles and Essays on Material and Visual Culture

2019 “Dressing Enslaved Africans in Colonial Louisiana,” in Dressing Global Bodies: The Politics of Fashion in World History, 1600-2000, ed. by Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello (Routledge, 2019)

2013 “Slaves’ and Poor Whites’ Informal Economies in an Atlantic Context,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. by Cécile Vidal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013): 141-70

2013 “Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 70:3 (July 2013): 497-538

2012 “To ensure that he not give himself over to the Sauvages:” Cleanliness, Frenchification, and Whiteness,” Journal of Early American History 2 (July 2012): 111-149

2011 “Geographies of Slave Consumption: French Colonial Louisiana and a World of Things,” Winterthur Portfolio 44 (Fall 2011): 229-248

2006 “‘A Baser Commerce: Retailing, Class, and Gender in French Colonial New Orleans,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63:3 (July 2006), 517-50 

2005 ““This Gown ... Was Much Admired and Made Many Ladies Jealous:” Fashion and the Forging of Elite Identities in French Colonial Louisiana,” in George Washington’s South, edited by Greg O’Brien and Tamara Harvey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 86-118 (reissued in paperback 2005) 

2003 “‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his neck, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans,” Gender & History 15: 3 (November 2003), 528-49

1997 “Dress in French Colonial Louisiana (1699-1769): The Evidence from Notarial Sources,” Dress 24 (1997), 69-75

Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture

Guest Editor, special issue of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, on “Dress and Gender” Vol. 9, issue 2 (June 2005).

Table of Contents

1. Letter from the Editor by Sophie White

2. “Gendered Space in Renaissance Florence: Theorizing Public and Private in the “Rag Trade”” by Carole Collier Frick

3. “Historicizing Masculine Appearance: John Chute and the Suits at the Vyne, 1740-76” by Daniel Claro

4. “The Art and Science of Walking: Gender, Space, and the Fashionable Body in the Long Eighteenth Century” by Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello

5. “Fashion Discourses in Fashion Magazines and Madame de Girardin’s Lettres parisiennes in July-Monarchy France (1830-48)” by Hazel Hahn

6. “Masque-ulinities: Changing Dress as a Display of Masculinity in the Superhero Genre” by Friedrich Weltzien

7. “Exhibition Review- Ptychoseis = Folds + Pleats: Drapery from Ancient Greek Dress to Twenty-first Century Fashion” by Gen Doy