City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry

Abstract

Reviewed by: City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry Michael Shane Powers City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300. By Jason Berry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [x], 412. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4714-2.) The tricentennial in 2018 of the founding of New Orleans has produced a wealth of excitement and interest in the Crescent City’s storied history. Jason Berry, a journalist and writer, contributes admirably to the recent groundswell of popular attention to the city, which dates to Hurricane Katrina and controversies over Confederate monuments. Drawn mostly from academic secondary sources, Berry’s work focuses on individuals from Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville to Mayor Mitch Landrieu as case studies to demonstrate the evolving and contentious development of New Orleans. Yet City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 avoids the pitfalls of great-man history that often mark books written by journalists and geared toward a popular audience. Berry gives apt attention to how marginalized people—enslaved people dancing in Congo Square during the colonial era, for instance—helped mold the city’s unique history. Berry’s work is at its best when chronicling cultural and social history. Readers should look elsewhere for a synthesis of New Orleans politics or economics. The history of voodoo, burial marches, carnival krewes, jazz, and other cultural waypoints are covered well. City of a Million Dreams is also notable as a work of popular history for consistently placing the Crescent City in the wider world and demonstrating the myriad ways fluid borders and transnational exchanges have defined New Orleans. For example, Berry gives sufficient attention to the importance of Spanish control in developing the city from a colonial backwater to a significant Atlantic world hub. In addition, Berry assesses environmental and biological forces when appropriate, such as the trajectory of yellow fever pathogens from mosquitoes to humans. Readers must expect a book that covers three hundred years of history to reflect tough choices of what to include. For instance, Berry merely scratches the surface of New Orleans during Reconstruction. While accurately reminding readers that “[t]he real war in New Orleans began after the war,” he gives short shrift to the postbellum politics that defined the contours of Louisiana’s political arena until the rise of Huey P. Long in the 1930s (p. 161). Moreover, Berry chooses not to address the significance of New Orleans’s world’s fairs in 1884 and 1984. Including an assessment of the fairs would have strengthened Berry’s otherwise accomplished goal of demonstrating the rich and nuanced history of New Orleans as a “crossroads of humanity” (p. 5). On the whole, such faults are minor. The book’s purpose to provide a synthesis of academic scholarship on New Orleans past and present is achieved in a well-written narrative. Berry’s focus on “[t]he tension between spectacle and law” is carried throughout (p. 6). City of a Million Dreams should be a go-to [End Page 136] resource for scholars and the general public alike wishing to find a concise and engaging account of New Orleans’s colorful past. Michael Shane Powers Angelo State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association