This is an exceptional study of the fluidity of the 19th century Atlantic world, through the life of a man fascinating in his own right, Edmond Dédé. Through his, McKee can discuss the New Orleans of his birth in the 1830s, transitioning from Spanish and then French cultural and legal dominance to the flood of Yankees and their ever-tightening black codes, the Caribbean islands whose rumbles of revolution sent waves of emigrants like Dédé's grandmother from Cuba to America and the survivors of Toussaint L'Overture from Haiti to France, Mexico in the wake of its loss to the US in 1849 and its welcome of Dédé as a black man rather than an America (Americans were not really welcome in Mexico after the war), the European Revolutions of 1848 that produced the swelling music Dédé excelled at composing and performing, a Paris of scrambling students where Dédé and his friends used their skills as cigar rollers to survive as musicians in training, and the port city of Bordeaux--where, although the French were racists in their own imperial way, Dédé found a wife, a prestigious career as conductor of their opera orchestra for nearly 30 years.