Orleans Collection Research Articles

“Yet She Is Advancing”: New Orleans Women and the Right to Vote, 1878–1970. The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA

<i>“Yet She Is Advancing”: New Orleans Women and the Right to Vote, 1878–1970</i>. The Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, LA

French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor

Reviewed by: French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor Justin M. Carroll (bio) Keywords St. Louis, Missouri, Mississippi River, Francophones, Trade, Louisiana Territory French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy. Edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 319. Cloth, $65.00.) French St. Louis: Landscape, Context, and Legacy, edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor, evolved from a symposium at the Missouri History Museum to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis in February of 1764. This collected volume features articles from a variety of scholars at different stages of their careers; this creates a unique synthesis of perspectives and concerns. Together, they work toward pushing the study of St. Louis beyond the traditional civic mythologies and boosterism that often define the commemoration of American urban spaces into more critical realms, complicating both past and present in the process. Thematically, these scholars move the historical framework surrounding St. Louis into four new and exciting directions: [End Page 662] 1. The first quarter of the book contextualizes the founding and early years of St. Louis within the processes and structures of empire and frontier. 2. The following section situates St. Louis within the larger regional context of the Francophone world of the Mississippi River and the port city of New Orleans. 3. The next quarter opens new avenues of archival research and historical methods to recover ignored voices or lost landscapes. 4. The final quarter explores the persistence of French communities in St. Louis into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each chapter in this collected volume merits attention and reading by scholars and citizens interested in St. Louis, the larger Mississippi River Valley, Native North America, and the transatlantic French Empire. However, this review will focus on individual chapters from each section to highlight the diversity and depth offered by French St. Louis. For example, Robert Michael Morrissey's chapter, "Empire by Collaboration: St. Louis, the Illinois Country, and the French Colonial Empire," challenges persistent myths of the French Empire in North America and shows how, in places like Kaskaskia, outside of present-day St. Louis, "collaborative, opportunistic, and often quite functional" relationships developed between French settlers, Native Americans, and French officials (29). The inhabitants of the Illinois Country were hardly the submissive or dependent subjects of a distant and absolutist regime in Versailles as stereotyped by the British Empire and later American historians, but rather negotiated and directed the course of empire and day-to-day life in pragmatic and self-interested ways. In the context of regionalism, for example, Lawrence N. Powell's chapter, "You Are Who You Trade With: Why Antebellum St. Louis Industrialized and New Orleans Didn't," offers an excellent exploration of the diverging paths these two French-speaking communities followed in the nineteenth century. Despite similar colonial trajectories and intimate early entanglements, institutional differences connected to the evolution of plantations and enslaved labor in the South and the development of small-scale urbanization and market-oriented farms in the Midwest radically reoriented the trajectories of St. Louis and New Orleans. Economic patterns and antebellum politics disconnected borderland states like Missouri from the lower South during the early nineteenth century. By the end of [End Page 663] the Civil War, Powell shows "how St. Louis became the anchor of an urban region, while New Orleans became the American anomaly: the nation's only city system without an urban region" (133). Beyond the vistas of empire and region, John H. Lawrence's "The View from Upper Louisiana: Pierre-Clément de Laussat's Concerns and Contacts, 1803–1804" demonstrates how archive-building and translation, alongside careful scholarly attention, can profoundly reshape existing narratives. His article centers on the archive of Pierre-Clement de Laussat (1756–1835), a French colonial prefect in New Orleans between 1803 and 1804. Before the U.S. purchase of the Louisiana Territory, Laussat's brief tenure resulted in the creation of 600 manuscripts—reports, letters, proclamations, surveys, and other documents. Now housed at The Historic New Orleans Collection, these sources, most untranslated, reveal "the...

Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana by Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards and Nick Weldon

Reviewed by: Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana by Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards and Nick Weldon Joshua Brown (bio) Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana. By Brian K. Mitchell, Barrington S. Edwards, and Nick Weldon. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. 256. Paper, $19.95.) On March 18, 1873, the Louisiana state legislature passed Act 57, the goal of which was the erection of a monument in memory of Oscar J. Dunn, who had died suddenly—and mysteriously—two years earlier. That public commemoration of the first African American lieutenant government, and briefly acting governor, was never realized. And, in the wake of Democratic Redemption, Jim Crow, and the historiographical and popular desecration of Reconstruction, Dunn joined so many other Black southern lawmakers in the “cleansing” of the era’s past. Indeed, the unveiling twenty years later of an overtly white supremacist monument to the White League’s unsuccessful 1874 insurrection to overthrow the Republican state government could be interpreted as a final obliteration of the memory of Black Louisianans’ stalwartly “unselfish, incorruptible leader.”1 As we have recently seen, building monuments does not guarantee perpetual commemoration; the White League obelisk was removed in 2017. [End Page 294] While made of less durable stuff, the graphic biography Monumental: Oscar Dunn and His Radical Fight in Reconstruction Louisiana may serve as a more enduring tribute. It certainly is a significant act of documentary recovery, as well as a valuable scholarly study of a man, a place, and an era that, unusually, bridges the gap between popular history and rigorous academic research. Based on historian Brian K. Mitchell’s dissertation and written by Mitchell, visualized by artist Barrington S. Edwards, and edited by Historic New Orleans Collection’s associate editor Nick Weldon, Monumental is an often revelatory and, at times, evocative effort to restore Dunn’s place in New Orleans’s and Louisiana’s past. Rather than taking the tried-and-true path of a published monograph, Mitchell gathered his research and opted to collaborate on the labor-intensive project of a graphic history, seeking to use the accessibility and attraction of the form to extend his scholarship into the public arena. And for Mitchell, a descendant of Dunn’s, the project also consummated a personal quest that dated back to a second-grade class in New Orleans, when he learned that, contrary to his family’s proud memory, his ancestor’s achievements had been forgotten. Monumental carries out its mission with impressive intellectual rigor and admirable narrative vigor that rely on Mitchell’s extensive research into an often elliptical and elusive historical record. That research led to discoveries that revealed new aspects of Dunn’s life, such as his birth under enslavement and his emancipation. In addition, Mitchell corrected errors that have been repeated in historical accounts, such as the belief that Dunn fought in the Union army and, most persistent, the assertion that P. B. S. Pinchback, Dunn’s successor as lieutenant governor, was the state’s first Black acting governor. In eight chapters, most of which focus on 1866 to 1871, Monumental chronicles Oscar Dunn’s rise within the ranks of the New Orleans and Louisiana postwar Republican Party and his crucial role, especially as lieutenant governor, in promulgating and legislating equality and integration in the face of Democratic opposition, Republican divisions, corruption, and murderous racist violence. In the course of this chronicle, Mitchell dexterously charts Dunn’s efforts to bridge the long-standing tensions between New Orleans’s Anglo-African and Afro-Creole communities, as well as navigates the intricacies of Louisiana’s Republican Party factions, particularly the deceitful maneuvering of Dunn’s nemesis, Governor Henry Clay Warmoth. He also depicts Dunn’s personal confrontations with white supremacy (most powerfully captured in a section delineating the insults and obstacles he encountered on a spring 1869 trip from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Grant). In the [End Page 295] process, Monumental successfully links the city and state’s story to the larger history of Reconstruction. Monumental thus works as a lucid and engaging introduction to Reconstruction, assisted by the inclusion of supplementary resources...

Welcome Back to New Orleans!

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessWelcome Back to New Orleans!Margaret Bishop Baier, M.D., President, Louisiana Psychiatric Medical AssociationMargaret Bishop BaierSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., President, Louisiana Psychiatric Medical AssociationPublished Online:9 May 2022https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2022.05.5.39On behalf of the Louisiana Psychiatric Medical Association (LPMA), I want to welcome APA members and guests to New Orleans for our live Annual Meeting. As an APA district branch of the APA, LPMA supports the mission of advocacy for our patients and our profession through education, legislative action, research, and community outreach. We are a diverse group of psychiatrists living and practicing in Louisiana, and we are proud to welcome you into our home state.Many of you have visited us before and will relish reconnecting with colleagues while dining at your favorite restaurant or listening to some live local music. For those who are first time visitors to New Orleans, you are in for a real treat—lots of treats in fact! Much like the APA meeting itself, your host city offers an embarrassment of riches to share with you.While at this year’s meeting, I encourage you to read folks’ nametags—those who have Louisiana on their badge will be able to point you in the direction of their personally reviewed “five-bean”–rated restaurant for local specialties of red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya, beignets, etouffee, and a variety of seafood dishes. Though many visitors plan their trips around the meals they share, it's not all about the food. Most New Orleanians are equally eager to share recommendations on where to satisfy your tastes for live music: We are proud of our Grammy award–winning artists who perform in venues along Frenchman and Bourbon streets, as well as in their own namesake clubs and at some of the major hotels. If you’re interested, make a reservation for a jazz, gospel, or drag brunch, and you’ll enjoy an outstanding meal and show.The Historic New Orleans Collection, Jazz Museum, Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve, French Quarter Visitors Center, and World War II Museum are among those within a half hour’s walk from the Convention Center. The African American Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and numerous other art galleries are worth the pedicab or Uber ride fare. A streetcar-ride away from downtown along the oak-lined St Charles Avenue line will allow you to take in the architecture of the Garden District-Universities neighborhood, while the Canal Street/Cemeteries Line will take you through the MidCity–City Park neighborhoods. Shopping opportunities include shops for antiques and collectables along Royal Street and Magazine Street, with outlet stores close by at the Riverwalk.Saturday morning yoga at the Cabildo or beginner twerk classes at Crescent Park as well as bicycle and kayak rentals along Bayou St. John and the Lafitte Greenway are fun options for getting moving and outside.Do not worry if you cannot get your fill of the music, food, and beautiful architecture of our city in your few days here: To avoid FOMO, just start planning your next visit before you leave.Again–welcome back. We’re glad you’re here! ■ ISSUES NewArchived

Storyville: A Study of Artifacts

Operating from 1897 to 1917, sixteen blocks from the French Quarter district of New Orleans, Louisiana, several buildings were created to establish a legal red light district known as “Storyville.” The area was named after its creator, Alderman Sidney Story, who enacted the applicable ordinances and helped to establish the district. The creation of Storyville was meant to bring regulation to the sex trade and organized crime. The creation of the sixteen blocks of the district was influenced by a diverse range of experiences, ranging from cheap "cribs," vibrant music halls, saloons, and lavish mansions filled with "top dollar" ladies. The Storyville district is estimated to have boasted approximately 230 brothels and nearly 2,000 sex workers during the height of its popularity. The district was not only known for its sex work, however. In addition, it was also well-known for the solid feminist entrepreneurship seen from the women who ran the high-end brothels, such as LuLu White and Josie Arlington. In fact, there are historians who argue that Storyville allowed for some of the first entrepreneurial women in New Orleans at a time when there were no other options. Storyville is also considered groundbreaking for a vibrant music scene that allowed musicians, such as Jelly Roll Morton, to gain popularity (Permenter, 2021). However, after Storyville was abolished in 1917, New Orleans started slowly removing all buildings and disguising the fact that the district ever existed. While Storyville operated, the brothels would produce promotional postcards, guidebooks, and cameos of the girls. But, over the decades, many of these items have been considered lost or destroyed; most exist in few dedicated archives. This leads to the notion of Storyville’s mystique. But, if you are walking around the city, you will not find any standing buildings and very little information about its history. Further, some people that grew up in New Orleans do not even know the area ever existed, which leads more to its lore (Permenter, 2021). The study examines the artifacts available in The Historic New Orleans Collection Archives about The Storyville District, the city of New Orleans’ red-light district during a period ranging from 1897 to 1917.

Journeys to Louisiana and the Natchez Country

Journeys to Louisiana and the Natchez Country David Narrett (bio) Erin M. Greenwald, ed., and Teri F. Chalmers, trans. A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies. A Memoir by Marc-Antoine Caillot. New Orleans: Historic New Orleans Collection, 2013. xlii + 182 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00. George Edward Milne. Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. xv + 293 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $84.95 (cloth); $26.95 (paper). Cécile Vidal, ed. Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. vi + 278 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $49.95. Marc-Antoine Caillot, bookkeeper and clerk, learned a great deal during his two years in New Orleans from 1729 to 1731. Fortunately for today’s readers, he wrote a lively memoir of his Louisiana venture, which, though unpublished and all but forgotten for 250 years after his death in 1758, has now come to light courtesy of a beautiful edition by The Historic New Orleans Collection. While Caillot’s account is emblematic of his time and place, it also bears on issues of cross-cultural encounters, gender, and sexuality that occupy a central place in recent historiography on colonial Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi Valley. The two books considered alongside Caillot’s in this review contribute appreciably to that scholarly literature. George Edward Milne’s Natchez Country analyzes “landscapes” of racial identity among Native peoples and colonials during the movement from uneasy coexistence to bloody warfare. Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World is a collection of essays elucidating imperial law and administration, international relations, and, above all, the intimacies of marriage and sexuality in a racially charged social order. The Natchez War of 1729–31 is a stark example of French-Indian antagonism in contrast to “the Middle Ground” of the pays d’en haut and the mission villages of the St. Lawrence Valley. Scholars have generally attributed the war’s [End Page 227] outbreak to the Natchez Indian reaction against colonial land engrossment for purposes of commercial tobacco production. In Natchez Country, Milne follows this broad outline while tracing the geography of power relations over a thirty-year period prior to full-scale conflict. Most significantly, the author draws parallels between Natchez Indians’ internal divisions and coincidental discord within the colonial hierarchy during the mid-1710s, when the first serious violence erupted between the Natchez (“the people of the Sun”) and European newcomers. In Milne’s view, the Natchez were as much bewildered as angered by the French refusal to accept a subordinate role in Indian country. Natchez-French relations deteriorated during the 1720s owing to Louisiana’s incipient turn toward a plantation economy under policies advanced by the Compagnie d’Occident and its successor the Compagnie des Indes. Milne’s study briefly addresses French entrepreneurial designs connecting the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic world. Under company policy, substantial land grants were awarded to concessionaires who obtained proprietary rights besides the command of indentured servants and enslaved Africans whom they purchased on credit or obtained by favor or other means.1 Milne meticulously maps the micro-geography of frontier relations in which European settlers, along with African slaves, were interspersed between Indian population centers. He also juxtaposes Natchez social hierarchies with customs prevalent in the court of Louis XIV. Indians and Europeans had certain mutually recognizable social traits, but differences in cultural outlook allowed only intermittent and limited understanding across ethnic bounds. The Natchez attack of November 27, 1729, was triggered by exploitative conduct by Étienne de Chépart, the newly appointed officer of the local French fort. In one telling episode, the commander evicted an Indian man from his home in order to convert it into a domicile for African slaves. Milne sees the Natchez as readying for war by summoning a “red” identity embedded in their culture, and not mimed from European stereotyping (p. 170). This is an intriguing thesis, and one that should spark future debate. “Redness” was an indigenous cultural landmark, though Native pride in being red did not transcend disparate...

French Baroque Music of New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursu -line Convent (1736) ed. by Alfred E. Lemmon (review)

THE EARLIEST SURVIVING MUSIC MANUSCRIPT FROM NEW ORLEANSFrench Baroque Music New Orleans: Spiritual Songs from the Ursu - line Convent (1736) = Musique francaise baroque la Nouvelle-Orleans: Recueil d'airs spirituels des Ursulines (1736). Edited by Alfred E. Lemmon, with essays by Jean Duron, Alfred E. Lemmon, Mark McKnight, Jennifer Gipson, and Andrew Justice. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 2014. [Pref. in Eng. with summary in Fre., p. vi-vii; introd. in Fre. with summary in Eng., p. viii-xii; other essays in Eng. with summaries in Fre., p. 1-26; featured composers and contributors, p. 27; color facsim., p. 29-283. Softcover. ISBNs 0-917860- 65-9 & 978-0-917860-65-2; ISMN 979-0-800031-00-7. $110.]The French founded the city New Orleans in 1718, and immediately populated it largely with adventurers, vagabonds, and undesirables from Paris and the rest France. In 1724 the colony had enough young boys sired by the colonials to bring in priests to educate them. Not to be outdone by the boys, in 1727 the girls New Orleans were provided with education, too. A small contingent Ursuline nuns, brought in to offer medical support for the colony, also had the goal to save these young girls from the sins their fathers through religious instruction. A significant tool for such education was the singing songs with proper texts.The Ursuline manuscript, the facsimile which is the subject this review, is collection 294 such songs. It was copied in France in 1736 by an anonymous young woman D. and brought to New Orleans in 1754 as giftfrom Mr Nicollet. As such it is the oldest music any kind that was performed in the city that has survived to the present day. The Ursuline facsimile has been carefully and beautifully edited by Alfred Lemmon, director the Williams Research Center the Historic New Orleans Collection where the manuscript has resided since 1998. The handwriting the original is very clear, including an original one-page avis by C. D., and there are no problems in reading the music or the texts. The intent is to serve performers who wish to sing the songs, but it also provides the scholar with important material for the early history music in what became one the most important centers music in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (A few the songs were recorded on the compact disc Manuscrit des Ursulines de La Nouvelle Orleans, Le Concert Lorrain, cond. Anne- Catherine Bucher, K617 K617134 [2001].)To understand the significance the Ursuline manuscript, Lemmon has included five essays that place the document in context. All are well annotated. Jean Duron introduces the facsimile with an overview the manuscript as well as the printed edition on which it is based: the Nouvelles poesies spirituelles et morales sur les plus beaux airs de la musique francoise et italienne avec la basse, which was published in Paris in eight recueils (collections) from 1730 to 1737. As the title the printed publication suggests, most the music consists of contrafacta-spiritual texts set to fashionable tunes (p. viii). He surmises that Monsieur Nicollet was Gabriel-Francois Nicollet, who authored a guidebook to practicing the Sacred Heart aspect Catholic adoration (p. viii) at about the same time that he donated the manuscript to New Orleans. Duron then describes all that is known the Ursuline convent during its earliest years. Lemmon's own essay reviews the history colonial music in the city from 1718 to 1804, when New Orleans leftthe realms France and Spain and joined the United States. In the preface, Lemmon also describes the Historic New Orleans Collection and its importance as an archive for historical research into the life and music New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.Mark McKnight describes the Nouvelles poesies in greater detail. This is huge collection more than 450 songs, which were accompanied by fables in the style La Fontaine, but the fables were not copied into the Ursuline manuscript. …

“darling” Pru: Four Unpublished Tennessee Williams Letters to Truman Capote

Archived at the Historic New Orleans Collection are four unpublished Tennessee Williams’s letters, written from Rome and Paris in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to an unidentified recipient named Pru. This article includes these four letters, with the permission of the Williams Estate, and argues that Pru is actually Truman Capote (an example of Williams camping a name) based upon the people, places, times, and events mentioned in the letters. Valuable literary artifacts, these letters shed light on the circle of gay expatriate writers to which Williams and Capote belonged and give us a window into the complicated relationship Williams had with Capote. In the course of his correspondence to Pru, Williams reveals his fears about casting for the film adaptations of The Rose Tattoo and Orpheus Descending, including his candid opinions of Anna Magnani, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and others.

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

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

New Orleans Jazz and the Blues

Based on questions raised by Paul Oliver, this article argues that the blues was integral to the development of jazz rather than an external influence. The blues scale of Winthrop Sargeant and Gerhard Kubik and their relation to blues tonality are considered in relation to “Careless Love” and “Pallet on the Floor.” “I'm Alabama Bound” is also considered. This was a repertoire common to rural songsters and the emerging jazz bands of New Orleans. The 12-bar blues of piano players and the relationship between the blues of Mamie Desdunes and the “2:19 Blues” is explored, as is the role of New Orleans songsters. This essay draws on the oral history files of the Hogan Jazz Archive, Library of Congress, and the Historic New Orleans Collection. In particular the Papers of Frederic Ramsey Jr. and the interview conducted by Charles Edward Smith with Willie Cornish for Jazzmen (1939) confirm that Buddy Bolden played the 12-bar blues in the early years of the twentieth century. From this it is safe to conclude that the blues in all its forms was present in New Orleans around the turn of the century and was integral to the emergence of jazz. Search lists A list: Paul Oliver, Winthrop Sargeant, Gerhard Kubik, “Careless Love,” “Pallet on the Floor,” “Alabama Bound,” “Mamie's Blues” “2:19 Blues,” “I'm Alabama Bound,” Frederic Ramsey Jr., Charles Edward Smith, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Albert Glenny, Willie “Bunk” Johnson, Perry Bradford, W. C. Handy. B list: Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, Mississippi John Hurt, Charlie Galloway, Henry Peyton, Tony Jackson, Richard M. Jones, Richard “Rabbit” Brown, Nooky Johnson, New Orleans Willie Jackson, Lemon Nash, Lonnie Johnson, Punch Miller (Earnest Burden), Kid Ory, John Joseph, Manuel Manetta, Jim Robinson, Charles “Sunny” Henry, Willie and George “Pops” Foster, Eddie Dawson, Johnny St. Cyr, Ed Montudi, John Wiggs, George Lewis, Clarence “Little Dad” Vincent, Eddie Morris, Hypolite Charles, Joseph “Fan” Bourgeau, R. Emmet Kennedy.

Through Hell and High Water: New Orleans, August 29–September 15, 2005

In October of 2005 the Historic New Orleans Collection initiated an oral history project entitled “Through Hell and High Water: New Orleans, August 29–September 15, 2005.” The intent of the project was to capture the stories of first responders who worked in the New Orleans metropolitan area during the storm and the weeks that followed. The interview process has been linked with the after-action studies done by some of the local first-responding agencies and has provided a much-needed outlet for first responders. To date over three hundred subjects have been interviewed, and our work thus far has shown us that top-down methods of documentation do not work with an event like Katrina. The almost total loss of communications made it impossible for high-ranking members of the different agencies to control or even know what lower-ranking members were doing. As a result it will be necessary to cast a wide net in our documentation effort.

Fred W. Todd and the Tennessee Williams Holdings at The Historic New Orleans Collection

Fred W. Todd and the Tennessee Williams Holdings at The Historic New Orleans Collection

DNA technology, interstate commerce, and the likely origin of formosan subterranean termite (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae) infestation in Atlanta, Georgia.

This study was the first to use DNA sequencing data to infer the origin of a Formosan subterranean termite, Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki, infestation. Cytochrome oxidase II gene sequence was used to define eight specific maternal lineages from 14 geographic locations across the southeastern United States, Hawaii, and China. One maternal lineage, A, was unique to all the Atlanta collections and one New Orleans collection, which indicated that termites at these sites shared a common maternal ancestor. The impact of interstate commerce in terms of Formosan subterranean termite introductions is addressed as is the industry response needed to arrest the spread of these termites via commercial traffic in used railroad cross ties.

Many of New Orleans’ Riches Lie Beyond French Quarter

Many of New Orleans’ Riches Lie Beyond French Quarter

On pattern-directed search of archives and collections

This article begins by presenting and discussing the distinction between record-oriented and pattern-oriented search. Examples of record-oriented (or item-oriented) questions include: “What (or how many, etc.) glass items made prior to 100 A.D. do we have in our collection?” and “How many paintings featuring dogs do we have that were painted during the 19th century, and who painted them?” Standard database systems are well suited to answering such questions, based on the data in, for example, a collections management system. Examples of pattern-oriented questions include: “How does the (apparent) production of glass objects vary over time between 400 B.C. and 100 A.D.?” and “What other animals are present in paintings with dogs (painted during the 19th century and in our collection)?” Standard database systems are not well suited to answering these sorts of questions (and pattern-oriented questions in general), even though the basic data is properly stored in them. To answer pattern-oriented questions it is the accepted solution to transform the underlying (relational) data to what is called the data cube or cross tabulation form (there are other forms as well). We discuss how this can be done for non-numeric data, such as are found widely in museum collections and archives. Further we discuss and demonstrate two distinct, but related, approaches to exploring for patterns in such cross tabulated museum data. The two approaches have been implemented as the prototype systems Homer and MOTC. We conclude by discussing initial experimental evidence indicating that these approaches are indeed effective in helping people find answers to their pattern-oriented questions of museum and archive collections. Two Kinds of Questions One’s purpose, when approaching an archive or museum collection for information, might be characterized as seeking an answer to one or more questions. Thus, if an information system is to be helpful in answering one’s questions of archives and collections, it would seem that categorizing the questions to be asked can only be helpful in designing an information system to assist in answering them. What kinds of questions are there that are pertinent to archives and museum collections? This is a large and difficult issue, and we do not expect to resolve it here. Our aim in this article is more modest: we wish to distinguish two kinds of questions, and to explore their relevance to museum and archive informatics. We devote the remainder of the present section to making and exploring our basic distinction. The sections that follow explore the distinction in the context of a particular information system, the Core of Discovery system, installed at The Historic New Orleans Collection. The distinction we wish to make here, and to exploit in designing museum and archive information systems, is deeply embedded in folklore and ordinary language. “You cannot see the wood for the trees” is perhaps the earliest recorded embodiment of the distinction in English. [The quotation is from John Heywood’s Proverbs, itself the earliest published (1546) collection of English folk sayings.] Proverbially, there is a distinction to be made between seeing (or asking about) the trees and seeing (or asking about) the forest. But how can we characterize the distinction and what can we do to provide computerized support for these two kinds of questions? One question at a time. First a characterization of the distinction. The distinction is best seen through a series of examples. Let us compare some tree questions with some forest questions. Here are some questions about trees in a forest.

Focus on Libraries: The Historic New Orleans Collection

Presentation et description de la collection historique de la Nouvelle Orleans du centre de recherche William

&lt;sc&gt;Lois Green Carr&lt;/sc&gt;&lt;italic&gt;et al&lt;/italic&gt;. &lt;italic&gt;Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland&lt;/italic&gt;. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1991. Pp. xxi, 362. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95

Lois Green Carret al. Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1991. Pp. xxi, 362. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95 Carr Lois Green et al. Robert Cole's World: Agriculture and Society in Early Maryland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va. 1991. Pp. xxi, 362. Cloth $39.95, paper $19.95. Jon Kukla Jon Kukla Historic New Orleans Collection Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 98, Issue 1, February 1993, Page 231, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.1.231 Published: 01 February 1993

Southern Comfort: The Garden District of New Orleans, 1800-1900.

This pioneering study of the opulent Garden District of Orleans is a fascinating and entertaining account of how immigrant merchants and craftsmen from throughout the United States and abroad combined efforts to create one of America's first and most elegant suburbs, a lavish and enduring symbol of southern comfort in the Victorian era.Southern is the first study of Orleans to relate economic and social movements to the architectural face of the city, unveiling the process by which a predominantly Yankee suburb became a profoundly southern community Using Orleans' unique notarial archive - a detailed written record of issues relating to real estate and architecture there - Starr skillfully creates an active interchange with the people who built the District.Starr introduces the architects, builders, craftsmen, servants, and retainers and recounts the colorful details of their lives. provides a highly readable portrait of the intertwined careers of two gifted architects who worked in the Garden District - Henry Howard and Lewis Reynolds - the former among the shrewdest practitioners of the architecture of flattery. And his portrayal of the career and clientage of Thomas Sully presents a series of important discoveries.Southern Comfort shows how Anglo Saxon newcomers to the Crescent City capitalized on the boom of King Cotton' and the possibilities posed by improved urban transportation to create a semirural village within the teeming Mississippi River metropolis. The text includes evocative photographs by Robert Brantley, as well as documentary illustrations from the rich archives of the Historic Orleans Collection that are published here for the first time.S. Frederick Starr is President of Oberlin College. From 1982 to 1984 he was Scholar in Residence at The Historic Orleans Collection, and he is the author of New Orleans Unmasqued. He has also written numerous books in the field of Soviet affairs and on topics ranging from art and architecture to jazz.

The Archival Legacy of Spanish Louisiana's Colonial Records

Louisiana was a Spanish colony from 1762 to 1803. The author traces the short history of Spanish Louisiana and the archival legacy of its colonial records. Through two centuries, administrators, historians, and archivists have undertaken copying, reorganization, and reformatting projects in an effort to preserve the records and to provide increased access. A massive microfilming collaboration by the Spanish National Archives and several American institutions, including Loyola University of New Orleans, Louisiana State University, and the Historic New Orleans Collection, has just been completed. This thirty-year endeavor achieved the ultimate preservation of the records and increased international access to these dispersed documents. In the process, the project influenced the archival policy of the archives of Spain, the former parent country.

Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802. By James Pitot, Translated By Henry C. Pitot. The Historic New Orleans Collection Monograph Series. Edited by Robert D. Bush. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979, P. xxi. $14.95

Observations on the Colony of Louisiana from 1796 to 1802. By James Pitot, Translated By Henry C. Pitot. The Historic New Orleans Collection Monograph Series. Edited by Robert D. Bush. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979, P. xxi. $14.95 - Volume 41 Issue 2