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The fourth volume of the acclaimed series captures in more than 400 photographs and text the distinctive architecture of the six creole faubourgs, or neighborhoods, of the modern city of New Orleans. As in all books in the series, emphasis is placed on historic documentation, with a goal of preserving important structures. Twelve distinct architectural types germane to the faubourgs are defined, identified, and analyzed. Also included is a chapter on the craftsmanship of the many free persons of color who contributed significantly to the city's architecture. Researched by The Friends of the Cabildo, one of the nation's leading preservation organizations, the oversize volume was compiled by Roulhac Toledano, Sally Evans, and Mary Louise Christovich, all of New Orleans. A history of the faubourgs by Samuel Wilson, Jr. is featured as well. The books photographs, both color and black and white, were the work of Betsy Swanson, photographer for the first three volumes of the series.
In 1853, Eyre Crowe, a young British artist, visited a slave auction in Richmond, Virginia. Harrowed by what he witnessed, he captured the scene in sketches that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including the culminating painting, Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia. This innovative book uses Crowe’s paintings to explore the texture of the slave trade in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans, the evolving iconography of abolitionist art, and the role of visual culture in the transatlantic world of abolitionism. Tracing Crowe’s trajectory from Richmond across the American South and back to London—where his paintings were exhibited just a few weeks after the start of the Civil War—Maurie D. McInnis illuminates not only how his abolitionist art was inspired and made, but also how it influenced the international public’s grasp of slavery in America. With almost 140 illustrations, Slaves Waiting for Sale brings a fresh perspective to the American slave trade and abolitionism as we enter the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.
A journalist visits five of America’s disaster-zone towns and the devoted residents who chose to stay despite hellish conditions. As a young reporter, Jake Halpern became obsessed with stories about "some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave." His fellow reporters joked with him and nicknamed him the Bad Homes Correspondent. But the more he learned about these people, the more he was drawn to them. Braving Home is Halpern’s irresistible portrait of these hometowns and his friendships with their most loyal residents. In North Carolina, Halpern meets a retired mill worker who single-handedly manned his hometown in the wake of a devasta...
Each year, thousands of pilgrims visit the celebrated New Orleans tomb where Marie Laveau is said to lie. They seek her favors or fear her lingering influence. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau is the first study of the Laveaus, mother and daughter of the same name. Both were legendary leaders of religious and spiritual traditions many still label as evil. The Laveaus were free women of color and prominent French-speaking Catholic Creoles. From the 1820s until the 1880s when one died and the other disappeared, gossip, fear, and fierce affection swirled about them. From the heart of the French Quarter, in dance, drumming, song, and spirit possession, they ruled the imagination ...
Described in an 1835 bill of sale as une belle maison, the Lombard plantation house is a rare survivor. Built in the early nineteenth century as a West Indian-style residence, it was the focal point of a large plantation that stretched deep into the cypress swamps of what is now New Orleans's Bywater neighborhood. Featuring the best Norman trussing in North America, it was one of many plantations homes and grand residences that lined the Mississippi downriver from the French Quarter. A working farm until the 1800s, its lands were eventually absorbed into the expanding city. After years of prosperity, the entire area of the Ninth Ward, now known as Bywater, sank into poverty and neglect. This...
Joy J. Jackson’s Where the River Runs Deep tells two stories—both significant and both fascinating. It is a biography of the author’s father, Oliver Jackson, who spent virtually his entire life on or near the Mississippi River. And it is a history of the river itself, and the many changes that have transformed it in the twentieth century. Born in an oysterman’s camp in south Louisiana, only a few miles from the Gulf of Mexico, and raised in an orphanage in New Orleans, Oliver Jackson (1896–1985) grew up to become a pilot boat crew member, a merchant seaman, a tugboat-man, and ultimately a Mississippi River pilot, the profession to which he had always aspired. Drawing extensively on...
Chronicles the history of the city from its being contended over as swampland through Louisiana's statehood in 1812, discussing its motley identities as a French village, African market town, Spanish fortress, and trade center.
"A stunning piece of scholarship, rich in both theory and evidence, that takes the reader to a new plateau of understanding" (Charles Joyner, University of South Carolina) of the African-American folklife.
Against the backdrop of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New Orleans, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau disentangles the complex threads of the legend surrounding the famous Voudou priestess. According to mysterious, oft-told tales, Laveau was an extraordinary celebrity whose sorcery-fueled influence extended widely from slaves to upper-class whites. Some accounts claim that she led the "orgiastic" Voudou dances in Congo Square and on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, kept a gigantic snake named Zombi, and was the proprietress of an infamous house of assignation. Though legendary for an unusual combination of spiritual power, beauty, charisma, showmansh...
“A remarkable, vivid, and meticulously researched story about an unjustly forgotten major figure of the nineteenth century.” - Nicholas B. Lemann “It’s more than a bio. It’s a way to understand Jewishness, the South, and America.” - Walter Isaacson “Peter Wolf’s The Sugar King is an absorbing ancestral journey.” - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Peter M. Wolf unearths Southern Jewish history in a major new work, with a foreword by Calvin Trillin. A penniless, illiterate, Jewish thirteen-year-old from France crosses the Atlantic alone. Landing in raucous and polyglot New Orleans in 1837, the third largest city in America, he starts out as a peddler of notions to plantations along the...