Between 1791 and 1815 at least fifteen thousand refugees from Saint-Domingue landed in the lower Mississippi valley, most of them in and around a New Orleans that held about eight thousand people at the start of the period. Dessens asks what that arrival did to Louisiana and how much of what has been credited to it can actually be demonstrated. She works through occupational and business records, church and educational institutions, newspapers, theatre and language in order to separate the sheer visibility of a large three-tiered migration from genuine influence. Her finding is that the refugees built a community in the first decades, then dissolved into New Orleans Creole society while keeping a symbolic identity resting on common origin and shared uprooting. The influx more than doubled the free population of colour, reinforced Gallic culture against absorption after 1803, and made lower Louisiana a dissenting corner of the American South.