History Of New Orleans Research Articles

Pontchartrain Park Pioneers: An oral history of New Orleans’ civil rights era segregated black ‘suburb in the city’

The article was inspired by the Pontchartrain Park Pioneers Oral History Project which began in 2019. Ten Pontchartrain Park pioneers who purchased their homes in this middle class, African American community between 1955 and 1965 were interviewed. This innovative oral history project allowed the interviewees to share their unique stories of pursuing the ‘American Dream’ of home ownership, while living in a racially segregated country and city.

New Orleans Coffee in The Awakening: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

New Orleans Coffee in <i>The Awakening</i>: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz

Reviewed by: Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz Cornelis Disco (bio) Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 By Andy Horowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 296. Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 By Andy Horowitz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 296. A history of Katrina from 1915 to 2015? A century of history? But wasn't Katrina a natural event, a hurricane that wreaked havoc and destruction along the Gulf Coast, flooded New Orleans, and then went away again? Not if you ask Andy Horowitz. He sees Katrina as not just a passing storm, but as the inevitable culmination of a century of disaster-in-the-making. For a storm like Katrina to become a disaster, he argues, nature's momentary fury is not enough; disasters do not just impinge on society, they "come from within." And so Katrina is an extended exploration of hurricane Katrina's specific "within." Horowitz relentlessly pursues how the history of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the United States produced Katrina over the course of a century. The main ingredients are greed, corruption, the 1927 Mississippi River flood, the gulf oil industry, the Army Corps of Engineers, sub-standard levees, the pre-1994 Democratic Party, and racism by the bushel. Horowitz's argument, drawing on a version of the sociology of disaster articulated by Kai Erikson, has the potential to make a radical contribution to the history of technology. To be sure, we have our own proper tradition of disaster studies. And in this tradition, disasters (like Three Mile Island, Challenger, or Tacoma Narrows) are also generally framed as the perverse interaction of long-embedded socio-technical traditions, routines, and systems with proximate breakdowns and human error. We have Erikson's Yale colleague Charles Perrow to thank for this concept of "normal accidents." Horowitz has taken this to another level by showing that the logic of perverse deep structures not only clarifies breakdowns in large and complex socio-technical systems, but can also explain what are commonly called "natural" disasters. These too are embedded in "deep" history, though a far more inclusive and heterogeneous one than the socio-technical normalities underlying Perrow's approach. [End Page 584] The five chapters of the book are framed by an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction lays out the idea of disasters as long-term social constructions and previews some of the main issues involved in the Katrina disaster. With the body of the book divided into two parts, the first describes the political, cultural, economic, and technological germination of Katrina over the course of the twentieth century (chs. 1, 2, and 3). Getting its own chapter, Hurricane Betsy (1965), a disaster in itself, clearly revealed the fault lines making an even more destructive successor like Katrina nothing short of inevitable (ch. 3). The book's second part deals with the devastation of Katrina itself and the reconstruction efforts that followed. The epilogue is a somewhat wistful reflection on how Katrina has made space for chilling visions of a new New Orleans: a safe and antiseptic modern city estranged from its historical cultural roots. The writing is masterful, at times transcendent. Despite the book's conceptual quest, Horowitz manages to stay close to the skin. The text abounds with first-person accounts, newspaper clippings, official documents, and personal histories. Though Horowitz's guided tour along the long muddy road of Katrina's making and aftermath inevitably has its tedious moments, there are villains and angels aplenty to keep the plot moving along. The downside of Horowitz's deep delving is that the tragic etiology of Katrina fills the whole screen. This lends credence to the pessimistic conviction that societies—specifically (southern?) American society, or perhaps all liberal democratic (especially federalist?) societies—congenitally and inevitably produce disasters. Though there may be a grain of truth here, surely this is not the whole story. May not our better angels sometimes work at mitigating disasters? In the Dutch polity, for example, despite egregious historical lapses, it is not enabling floods, but predicting and preventing floods, that rules—at least for the time being. Here, not only disasters, but effective protocols for disaster management, have emerged "from within." While...

Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803 by John Eugene Rodriguez

Reviewed by: Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803 by John Eugene Rodriguez Dean Sinclair Spanish New Orleans: An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766–1803. John Eugene Rodriguez. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiii+247, map, tables, charts, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8071-7489-0. A common perception of the Bourbon Spanish Empire in the Americas is that it was characterized by neglect, as well as economic and cultural drift, and that the incompetently managed Louisiana Territory was much better off under French rule, rife with corruption and dramatic contrasts between rich and poor. Spanish New Orleans explores the Spanish period in the long history of New Orleans and serves as a corrective to this perception, challenging narratives like DeConde's This Affair of Louisiana (1976) or Pitot's Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802 (1980), which portray Louisiana as a corrupt and neglected part of the Spanish Empire, longing for return to France or even attachment to the United States. France founded New Orleans in 1718 and it became the capital of Louisiana in 1723. The French held Louisiana for only forty-nine years before it was ceded to Spain in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. Spain occupied Louisiana for almost as long as the French, forty years, until the retrocession of Louisiana to France in the Treaty of Ildefonso, signed in 1800 but not in effect until 1803. Rodriguez employs a wide range of archival sources to argue that Bourbon Spain was not neglectful of its American possessions but rather employed a variety of means to encourage demographic, [End Page 124] economic, and political development of its empire. That success was mixed is obvious, yet in Spanish Louisiana throughout the years of Bourbon rule, there was little unrest in the cities or the countryside, and no active movement toward independence. In fact, it can be inferred that without Napoleon's retrocession, Bourbon Spanish rule might have lasted several years past 1803. Rodriguez's Spanish New Orleans is an innovative and engaging addition to the literature on Bourbon Spanish America. The author's purpose "is not to merely reinsert New Orleans into Spanish imperial history . . . [but] to consider what Spanish New Orleans reveals about the challenges and opportunities for the large Bourbon empire" (5). To accomplish this, Rodriguez examines demography, trade, and political discourse, framing these issues in a historic context, taking an evolutionary approach to New Orleans as an integral part of the late eighteenth-century Bourbon Spanish Empire. The evolutionary approach suggests that as Spain took control, demographic changes led to economic changes, including the creation of a multiethnic elite, which led to a vibrant political discourse, little of which generally correlate with later-stage Bourbon Spanish America. Rodriguez begins with population. There is a perception of demographic stagnation in the late 1700s Spanish Empire, but the author firmly establishes New Orleans as a place of population growth, using a variety of census data to establish this, as well as a unique use of economic records. As it was important for the Spanish rulers to understand the people in the empire and the expected tax revenues, several censuses were taken during the Spanish period. Census counts, including a 1795 "chimney census," are analyzed, yielding not only counts of people but also data on age and sex, ethnicity, and status as free or slave. Rodriguez also examines the voluminous notarial records for demographic changes. The twenty thousand pages of handwritten documents from the Spanish period track the routine business practices in the city, providing a data set that can be used to follow business transactions. Using this data, Rodriguez confirms that as the Spanish period continued, the city became less French and more Spanish, while revealing a growing population with northern European surnames as well as free people of color. He establishes that during the Spanish period New Orleans grew in population, and though the French presence remained significant, the population became more cosmopolitan with the arrival of immigrants [End Page 125] from Spain and other European countries and an increasing presence of Anglo-Americans. Rodriguez spends chapters...

The Catastrophe to Come: Prefiguring Hurricane Katrina’s Public Memory through the Anxious Melancholic Rhetoric of “the Big One”

AbstractThe city of New Orleans has long narrated its own demise through reference to “the Big One,” a singular hurricane that would destroy the city for good. The “catastrophe to come” is a more or less permanent spectral presence for many of its residents, evidence of which can be traced as far back as the city’s founding in 1718. When it comes to memorialization of Katrina, the central question of this essay is: how does one analyze public memory of an event so thoroughly anticipated, indeed, whose historical anticipation is fundamental to the later memory of it? Rather than merely acting as the historical context within which public memory comes to be interpreted, this anticipation and the anxiety that marks its form figures directly into the reading of the later memory object itself. In this essay, I argue that the repeated narrativization of the Big One is an anxious rhetoric that prefigures post-Katrina memory objects through a process of melancholic rhetorical incorporation. I first engage the history of New Orleans and this anxiety, extrapolating my usage of anxiety and melancholy as rhetorical concepts along the way. Then, I tender a critical analysis that first reads two narratives of such destruction to describe memory’s prefiguration and then turns symmetrically to two post-Katrina memory objects to demonstrate the work of incorporation in the production of memory objects.

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

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

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

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

The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis

Reviewed by: The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History by Scott S. Ellis Nathalie Dessens The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans: A History. By Scott S. Ellis. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 280. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6935-3.) In his latest book, Scott S. Ellis explores the three-hundred-year history of the Faubourg Marigny, one of New Orleans’s oldest neighborhoods. Although he covers the history of the faubourg from its eighteenth-century origins as the Marigny de Mandeville plantation, his focus is on the period after 1805, when Bernard Marigny subdivided the plantation into lots. Ellis meticulously describes the evolution of the faubourg through the Civil War and subsequent emancipation of the slaves, the Great Depression, desegregation, the hippie movement in the 1970s, the late-twentieth-century gentrification period, and the difficult post–Hurricane Katrina era. While the book is a step-by-step chronological narrative, it also offers readers specifics on the faubourg’s founder, Bernard Marigny, his family, several racial and ethnic groups that made the faubourg home in the nineteenth century (including free people of color and Irish and German immigrants), and its later revival by the gay community. Ellis also includes more focused studies, like that of the twentieth-century evolution of Frenchmen Street, the main artery of the Faubourg Marigny, which is well known today for its many jazz venues. The book provides a very thorough history of the Faubourg Marigny’s population, economic development, and architectural and social reconfigurations. It shows a neighborhood in constant evolution, due to the ebb and flow of the city’s economy, only more godforsaken than the French Quarter and its sibling neighborhoods. Historical events, migrations, wars, economic depressions, epidemics (be they yellow fever, cholera, or AIDS), and natural disasters like hurricanes have kept reconfiguring the faubourg, its main commercial artery Frenchmen Street, its population, and even its idiosyncrasies. This book is meticulously sourced. Ellis not only taps an extensive secondary literature but also mines the sacramental and notarial records, the city directories, and federal censuses and includes information gathered from locals he interviewed. He relies on these sources to denounce an “enduring legend, parroted uncritically,” about Bernard Marigny and other myths about the faubourg (p. 9). Ellis uses city directories (starting with the first 1811 directory) and censuses to track each of the minute changes the faubourg has undergone in the past two centuries. His chapter on the commercial evolution of Frenchmen Street, between the 1930s and 2016, is especially fascinating. The book’s digressions and anecdotes, which may be deemed superfluous by academics, will enchant nonacademics interested in the history of New Orleans. The narrative may sometimes appear too general and insufficiently focused on the neighborhood itself (in the passages on urban slaves, for instance), but they make the book more readable for large audiences. The early parts of the book (on the nineteenth century, in particular) are slightly uneven, with very brief chapters, extremely general presentations, and, [End Page 147] at times, a focus on certain groups without explanation (firemen, for instance), but these shortcomings do not prevent the book from being fascinating and informative. Despite a few small inaccuracies (Jean Boze, for instance, was never the overseer of a Gentilly plantation), and the methodological lack of precision (the academic reader would have needed to know more about the numerous interviews the author conducted, how the interviewees were chosen, what the conditions of the interviews were, and how they were analyzed), the book is a much-needed addition to the historiography of New Orleans, and its novel-like narrative will undoubtedly draw larger audiences. Nathalie Dessens University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Lynnell L. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Lynnell L. Thomas, <i>Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory</i>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History by Peter B. Dedek

Reviewed by: The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History by Peter B. Dedek Joy M. Giguere The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History. By Peter B. Dedek. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 262. $38.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6610-9.) While the scholarship on cemeteries, burial customs, and grave markers in America has grown dramatically over the last four decades, Peter B. Dedek, in The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History, offers a major comprehensive historical analysis of New Orleans's cemetery landscapes, examining "those who designed, built, visited, mourned, and worked in these burial grounds" (p. xi). Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Dedek traces the parallel development of New Orleans society and its landscapes for the dead. Beginning with the development of the city's first known public burial ground in 1724, six years after the initial settlement in the area by the French, Dedek reveals how, contrary to popular understanding, New Orleanians originally buried their dead belowground in soggy, watery graves. Not until the early nineteenth century, as the population and economic development began to dramatically expand, did residents begin to construct aboveground tombs for the dead in the city's first major Catholic burying ground, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 (established in 1789). Dedek examines the subsequent development of places of burial to meet periodic public health crises, such as yellow fever epidemics, and to accommodate the rapidly increasing population, exhibiting the ways in which the evolution of the cities of the dead paralleled that of the city of living. Interwoven throughout this history are the lives of those who were instrumental in the design of the cemeteries and of the tombs contained therein, including French architect Jacques Nicolas Bussière de Pouilly, Italian artist Pietro Gualdi, and black Creole tomb builder Florville Foy. In his examination of the pervasiveness of society tombs—tombs established for members of benevolent, fraternal, or labor societies—and emphasis on impermanent tomb or vault rentals, Dedek reveals the collectivist nature of New Orleans burials, which Anglo-Protestants from elsewhere in the country often found shocking and even disturbing. A particular strength of this text is Dedek's emphasis on how the multiethnic influences of the community—French, Spanish, English, Caribbean, African, and Creole—and Old World (stretching back to Roman antiquity) burial [End Page 706] practices determined the styles found in the sepulchral architecture and grave decorations. By providing side-by-side photographs for comparison—including photographs of tombs in Pompeii and nineteenth-century brick tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, of ancient Roman columbaria next to oven wall vaults from 1830, and of oven vaults in Madrid, Spain, beside oven tombs in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1—Dedek aptly underscores both the geographical and the temporal influences on New Orleans burial practices and tomb architecture, which, when compared with the popularization of architectural revivals across the country during the nineteenth century, reflect the multiculturalism that helped define New Orleans society. Recognizing the long-standing status of New Orleans's cemeteries as tourist attractions, Dedek includes a revealing chapter on the interrelationship between Voodoo beliefs and practices, how they manifested within the cemeteries, and how those associated with the religion, especially famed Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau and her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, were at once wildly misunderstood by the general public and irresistible attractions for visitors to the city. His concluding chapter, "Slums of the Dead: Decay and Cemetery Preservation," brings the history of New Orleans's burial places to the present, both analyzing the current state of preservation of these historic sites and calling for greater attention to be paid to the particular problems of protecting these and other historic cemeteries from the vagaries of time, vandalism, and tourism. For those who are unfamiliar with sepulchral architecture and architectural revivalism, Appendix A provides examples of the prevailing types and styles of tombs found in New Orleans cemeteries. Appendix B includes a list with brief histories of more than twenty cemeteries in the city. Altogether, The Cemeteries of New Orleans represents a significant contribution to scholarship on cemeteries, grave marker studies, architectural history, and the social and...

“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City

“The Blood Never Stops Flowing and the Party Never Ends”: The Originals and the Afterlife of New Orleans as a Vampire City

Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 by Julie M. Weise

Reviewed by: Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 by Julie M. Weise James P. Chaney Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910. Julie M. Weise. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 358pp. Halftones, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. $32.50 paper (ISBN 978-1-4696-2496-9), $29.99 e-book (ISBN 978-1-4696-2497-6). Since the late 1980s, the United States has witnessed an unprecedented shift in the geographic dispersal and settlement of Latinos within its borders. Bypassing traditional destinations and gateway cities, particularly in the southwest, Latino migrants, most notably of Mexican descent, have sought out economic opportunities in new locations. This trend is perhaps most conspicuously evident in communities throughout the U.S. South. Both rural and urban areas in states such as North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee have experienced a surge in Latino migration. This demographic phenomenon has spawned a burgeoning body of scholarly research on the societal impact and acceptance of a seemingly new ethnic group. However, few studies give significant attention to the earlier history of Latinos in the region. For that reason, Corazón de Dixie, an exemplary book by Julie W. Weise that explores the history of Mexican and Mexican American labor migration in southern states, is a welcome addition to migration scholarship. Weise employs a mixed methodology that includes oral histories and archival research (U.S. Census data, Mexican consular records, family photographs, school records, and newspapers) to provide a detailed account of the migratory motivations, struggles, and strategies of “Mexicanos” (Mexicans and Mexican Americans) in the U.S. South since [End Page 169] the beginning of the twentieth century. This approach successfully weaves together five case studies, each of which investigates the historical processes of Mexicano labor migration, settlement, and adaptation in different locations during different time periods. The result is a well-constructed narrative that systematically and chronologically demonstrates that Mexican migration to southern states is anything but a recent occurrence. Yet, Corazón de Dixie does more than spatially and temporally map out the movement and settlement of Mexicanos throughout the South. Rather, it meticulously illustrates the complex political and racial landscapes these newcomers encountered in their new communities. In doing so, Weise uncovers the tactics Mexicanos utilized to navigate the black/white dichotomy that historically defined race and ethnicity in the Jim Crow-era South. These tactics varied tremendously over the course of the century as migrants and Mexican consular officials continuously revised and updated their stratagems to ensure Mexicans were not negatively categorized in the U.S. racial system. In other words, Mexicans, they asserted, were distinct from blacks and should not be subject to the same racial classification. These schemes ranged from simple reliance on social activism and/or alliances with members of status in local communities (e.g., white employers and protestant churches) to more complex, formal assistance from Mexican consuls in New Orleans and Memphis. Indeed, Weise’s attention to the Mexican consulates’ advocacy of Mexican citizens vis-à-vis the specter of Jim Crow politics provides a transnational context to political discussions about racial structures and early voluntary migrant labor in the rural South. Corazón de Dixie begins in cosmopolitan New Orleans during the first decades of last century. The story of Mexicans in the Crescent City deviates significantly from the images and experiences of Mexicanos in the U.S. Southwest, where individuals of Mexican descent struggled against blatant labor exploitation and anti-Mexican violence. Rather, Mexicans in New Orleans, Weise asserts, were able to integrate with relative ease into white society with the help of the Mexican consul by presenting Mexico as a culturally Europeanized nation. Thus, Mexican nationalism was the vehicle that enabled Mexican residents to transcend the established color line in interwar New Orleans. This strategic portrayal of nationalism and identity coupled with the lucrative economic ties that bound the city’s port to coastal Mexico certainly played a role in affording Mexicans the societal privileges of a middle-class white racial status. Nevertheless, readers familiar with the Spanish colonial and Latino history of New Orleans may find this assertion somewhat circumscribed, if...

“Peculiar and Characteristic”: New Orleans’s Exceptionalism from Olmsted to the Deluge

Two hundred years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out to limn the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase, demonstrating its seamlessness with the national body in direct travel to the West Coast, a different kind of travel narrative—one that demonstrated New Orleans’s profound discontinuity from the United States in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—dominated the national conversation about the city’s suffering and recovery. This paper seeks to examine what Barbara Eckstein calls “claims for New Orleans’s exceptionalism,” considering theorizations of the city’s uniqueness as products of terror at the abandonment of national amity and the evacuation of the category of citizenship. It adumbrates a history of New Orleans’s exceptionalism through Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), considering the ways that African American women’s bodies become signifiers of disorder and potential in the city, as well as aberrations from economic norms of enslavement in the Upper South.

Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz &amp; Heritage Festival

Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz &amp; Heritage Festival

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

New Orleans: A Disaster Waiting to Happen?

“Midnight Scenes and Orgies”: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy

This article examines “public narratives” of Voodoo in newspapers, travel narratives, magazines, and scholarly journals as a register of the shifting anxieties and discourses of white patriarchal supremacy across the second half of the nineteenth century. These popularized narratives authenticated the hegemonic narrative of white supremacy by offering “proof” of black criminality and hypersexuality. Post–Civil War public Voodoo narratives served as forerunners and companions to the myth of the black rapist, which was prominent by the 1880s and justified disenfranchisement, racial violence, and segregation. Together, these public narratives revealed widespread angst about black political power, interracial marriage, and virtually any form of consensual intimacy, especially involving white women, across the color line.

New Orleans in the World and the World in New Orleans

New Orleans became another crossroads, where the river, the bayous, and the sea were open roads, where various nations ruled but the folk continued to reign. They turned inhospitable swamplands into a refuge for the independent, the defiant, and the creative unimportant people who tore down barriers of language and culture among peoples throughout the world and continue to sing to them of joy and the triumph of the human spirit through the sounds of jazz. --Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1992, 87) ... so my people's still scattered Ain't like we ever mattered So I ain't surprised both poverty level and black death on the rise. --Truth Universal (Patterson and Truth Universal 2007) Unless we can control the space we occupy, we will not be able to really love one another. --Kalamu Ya Salaam (Senter 1991, 37) The complex culture of New Orleans offers us an opportunity to rethink the concept of diaspora, to discern the ways in which New Orleans is always African--but never only African. The social history of New Orleans helps us understand that diasporic models of exile and return home to a motherland tell us less about the way African identities are lived in the world than do frameworks based on Afro-diasporic practices of world-traversing and world-transcending citizenship. We owe a great debt to past scholars for proving the persistence of African beliefs, practices, and processes in North America. African retentions helped black people to counter the dominant culture's racist erasures of the African past and its presumptions that Africans in America lacked any enduring or meaningful connections to their native lands. Yet in the United States, African retention has always been paired with New World invention (Buff 2001, 31). Cut off from ancestral homelands in and denied full franchise and social membership in the United States, many blacks forged ideals of world-traversing and world- transcending citizenship and cultural production. Some retained hopes of return to Africa, not just by participating in black nationalist back-to- movements, but also by instantiating memories of in everyday practices of household decoration, healing, craft work, and religious rituals (Thompson 1984; Smith 1995). As Charles Joyner notes, even when slaves were compelled to work exclusively with American or European tools, they nonetheless employed them in African ways (1986, xxi). These practices could not function the same way they did in Africa, however, because of the grim realities of slavery and white supremacy in the United States. Instead, these African retentions provided the basis for New World inventions, evidencing not so much a literal desire to return to as much as demonstrating a commitment to living and working In African ways in the New World. They helped produce a diasporic imagination that affirmed that wherever Africans are, is. New Orleans is a special place. People all over the world revere it as a significant center of the African diaspora. The Crescent City's music, dance, food, architecture, speech, religion, and performance styles all display African influences and retentions. Hand-drawn illustrations by Henry Benjamin Latrobe of performances by black musicians in Congo Square in the nineteenth century depicted instruments that closely resembled those made and played traditionally in Africa. These images displayed traces of African practices such as carving figures on stringed wooden instruments and making drums by stretching the skins over hollowed-out pieces of wood (Latrobe 1951; Blassingame 1976, 5; Rose 1999, 514). Dena Epstein argues that displays of African culture persisted openly in New Orleans before the Civil War to a greater degree than in any other North American city (2003, 85). Sidney Bechet argued that when slaves dreamed things would come to them out of Africa (2002, 7). Today, the parade umbrellas and percussive polyrhythms of second liners display the enduring and irrepressible African presence in the local culture. …

Beyond Adapting to Climate Change: Embedding Adaptation in Responses to Multiple Threats and Stresses

Climate change impacts are already being experienced in every region of the United States and every part of the world—most severely in Arctic regions—and adaptation is needed now. Although climate change adaptation research is still in its infancy, significant adaptation planning in the United States has already begun in a number of localities. This article seeks to broaden the adaptation effort by integrating it with broader frameworks of hazards research, sustainability science, and community and regional resilience. To extend the range of experience, we draw from ongoing case studies in the Southeastern United States and the environmental history of New Orleans to consider the multiple threats and stresses that all communities and regions experience. Embedding climate adaptation in responses to multiple threats and stresses helps us to understand climate change impacts, themselves often products of multiple stresses, to achieve community acceptance of needed adaptations as cobenefits of addressing multiple threats, and to mainstream the process of climate adaptation through the larger envelope of social relationships, communication channels, and broad-based awareness of needs for risk management that accompany community resilience.

A pattern book of New Orleans architecture

Nearly five years ago, Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans, subjecting one of North America’s most beloved cities to tremendous water damage. The architecture of New Orleans is a unique reflection of the city’s rich and colorful history, and so as the city continues to rebuild, architects, planners, and building professionals endeavor to preserve the city’s architectural heritage. With this book, homeowners and professionals alike can pore over 100 of the nearly 5,000 watercolor and gouache renderings of New Orleans architecture currently preserved at the New Orleans Notarial Archives. Author, lecturer, authority on historical architecture, and winner of the 1997 American Institute of Architects International Book Award, Roulhac B. Toledano has gathered 121 historical color illustrations dating from 1803 to 1918, and combined those images with thirty color and thirty-five black and white photos to capture what “old, renovated, restored, and new buildings might look like and should look like…[the] paintings and drawings serve as a pattern book of New Orleans architecture.” In addition to the many elevations and neighborhood plot plans, twenty-five black and white illustrations provide floor plans of many traditional homes, including Creole townhouses, shotguns, camelbacks, and villas. Toledano’s history of New Orleans’ architecture is broken into four sections. Though the first two sections, “Who and What Created New Orleans?” and “Recorders of New Orleans Building History,” read like a genealogy report, they comprise only ten percent of the book, and those who wish to trace the history of New Orleans’ surveyors or the method by which the architectural documents were commissioned or gathered may find this interesting. The bulk of the book is pictorial, divided between two additional sections, “Pattern Book for New Orleans Architecture” and “New Orleans Neighborhoods from Archival Drawings,” each of which is subdivided into chapters, according to the nationality of the architects or surveyors. The textual history in these sections is more lively than the earlier two sections, but it is the diversity of the

Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow William R. Freudenberg, Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai T. Erikson . Washington, DC:Island Press, 2009. 209 pp. ISBN: 978-1-59726-682-6, $26.95

Catastrophe in the Making: The Engineering of Katrina and the Disasters of Tomorrow <i>William R. Freudenberg, Robert Gramling, Shirley Laska, and Kai T. Erikson</i> . Washington, DC:Island Press, 2009. 209 pp. ISBN: 978-1-59726-682-6, $26.95