Leservot takes up Auguste Lussan's La Famille créole to trace how refugees from Saint-Domingue turned into Louisiana Creoles. The backdrop is the upheaval that began with the slave uprising of 1791 and closed with Haitian independence in 1804, which left a deep mark on Louisiana.

Arrivals came in waves. A thin stream reached New Orleans soon after the uprising began, thousands followed around 1803, and then, across a few months in 1809 and 1810, roughly ten thousand more landed at once after being pushed out of Cuba, where they had settled first. The city took in enough people to double in size, reaching 25,000 residents by 1810 and standing seventh-largest in the country.

Why did French colonial builders in different corners of the New World arrive at different kinds of houses? Edwards puts that question to three settlement zones: Saint Domingue in the Caribbean, the Illinois Country of upper Louisiana, and Louisiana's lower reaches.

The method is to treat propositions drawn from culture theory as claims to be tested rather than assumed. Founder's effect, syncretism between cultures, and preadaptation are each weighed against what is documented about how vernacular traditions formed and how the ordinary settler's house changed shape over time.

At issue throughout is how far such broad cultural processes account for the variation.

Lundy tracks the arrival of Saint Domingue refugees in Philadelphia, from the fifteen who stepped off the Charming Sally in May 1791 to the roughly three thousand who followed over the next thirty months, asking why this city in particular drew them.

The city was free, the state around it was free, and it held both the young republic's capital and a centre of antislavery organizing, with gradual abolition acts promising freedom after six months to anyone a settling owner brought in. That made the landing of enslaved refugees awkward. Awkwardness turned to alarm: a run of arsons, a growing black population and the news from the island produced open talk of imported insurrection, and in 1798 the governor barred further such landings.

Among black Philadelphians the meaning ran the other way. Independence in 1804 became a source of pride, an argument against colonization schemes, and eventually the basis of an emigration society.

Lachance takes the ten thousand Saint-Domingue refugees expelled from Cuba who reached New Orleans in 1809, a number close to the city's whole population, as a case for testing what receiving societies predict about newcomers against what actually follows.

The arrivals divided roughly evenly among whites, free people of color and the enslaved, and drew the mixed response refugees usually draw: humanitarian argument on one side, fear of alien ideas and of insurrection on the other. Anglo-Americans warned above all that the influx would fasten a French character on the territory for good.

That prediction proved half right. French speakers did remain a majority of the white population for about two decades, and the refugees reinforced the community in numbers and institutions, but the ratio was already so lopsided that preponderance would have lasted anyway. Little further migration followed, so attrition set in; by the 1830s spouses of refugee origin had dwindled while arrivals from France rose sharply.