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Title
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My Friend Nicolas Mongoula: Africans, Indians, and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Mobile
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Date
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2007
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Bibliographic Citation
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Wheat, David. 2007. My Friend Nicolas Mongoula: Africans, Indians, and Cultural Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Mobile. In Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century edited by Richard F. Brown, pp. 59-90. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
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annotates
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Wheat’s chapter in Coastal Encounters is a piece of microhistory centered on Nicolas Mongoula, a free black man living in Mobile from 1720 to 1798 and whose surname was derived from the Mobilian trade language. Using census records, along with baptismal and sacramental records, Wheat broadly argues that the shared experience of slavery and the regional exchange economy brought Africans and Native Americans, including the Choctaw, into close contact in Mobile fostering linguistic exchange and familial relationships. Wheat refers to a pair of Choctaw villages north of Mobile named “Mongoulacha” and cites specific examples of Black enslaved persons living among the Choctaw and African American-Choctaw intermarriage in Mobile. Although Wheat forgoes discussion of material cultural exchange due to the limited nature of his sources, he still provides useful historical insight into African-Native relations which are often overlooked.