Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans PDF Author: Thomas N. Ingersoll
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
"Since Louisiana fell under the administration of France and Spain before becoming a U.S. territory in 1803, the case of New Orleans offers an opportunity to test the long-standing thesis that slave regimes under the French, Spanish, and Anglo-Americans were significantly different. Ingersoll finds that, by contrast, the city's development was remarkably continuous, affected mainly by the changing volume of its slave trade between 1719 and 1808 and thereafter primarily by urban conditions."--Couv.

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans

Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans PDF Author: Thomas N. Ingersoll
Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press
ISBN: 9781572330245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
"Since Louisiana fell under the administration of France and Spain before becoming a U.S. territory in 1803, the case of New Orleans offers an opportunity to test the long-standing thesis that slave regimes under the French, Spanish, and Anglo-Americans were significantly different. Ingersoll finds that, by contrast, the city's development was remarkably continuous, affected mainly by the changing volume of its slave trade between 1719 and 1808 and thereafter primarily by urban conditions."--Couv.

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans PDF Author: Jennifer M. Spear
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801898781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer M. Spear's examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear’s narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories. Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.

A Degraded Caste of Society

A Degraded Caste of Society PDF Author: Andrew T. Fede
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820367109
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
A Degraded Caste of Society traces the origins of twenty-first-century cases of interracial violence to the separate and unequal protection principles of the criminal law of enslavement in the southern United States. Andrew T. Fede explains how antebellum appellate court opinions and statutes, when read in a context that includes newspaper articles and trial court and census records, extended this doctrine to the South’s free Black people, consigning them to what South Carolina justice John Belton O’Neall called “a degraded caste of society,” in which they were “in no respect, on a perfect equality with the white man.” This written law either criminalized Black insolence or privileged private white interracial violence, which became a badge of slavery that continued to influence the law in action, contrary to the Constitution’s mandate of equal protection of the criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court enabled this denial of equal justice, as did Congress, which did not make all private white racially motivated violence a crime until 2009, when it adopted the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Fede’s analysis supports that law’s constitutionality under the Thirteenth Amendment, while suggesting why—during the Jim Crow era and beyond—equal protection of the criminal law was not always realized, and why the curse of interracial violence has been a lingering badge of slavery.

A New Orleans Voudou Priestess

A New Orleans Voudou Priestess PDF Author: Carolyn Morrow Long
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813040809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 539

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Book Description
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, showmanship, intimidation, and shrewd business sense, she also was known for her kindness and charity, nursing yellow fever victims and ministering to condemned prisoners, and her devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. The true story of Marie Laveau, though considerably less flamboyant than the legend, is equally compelling. In separating verifiable fact from semi-truths and complete fabrication, Long explores the unique social, political, and legal setting in which the lives of Marie Laveau's African and European ancestors became intertwined. Changes in New Orleans engendered by French and Spanish rule, the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation affected seven generations of Laveau's family, from enslaved great-grandparents of pure African blood to great-grandchildren who were legally classified as white. Simultaneously, Long examines the evolution of New Orleans Voudou, which until recently has been ignored by scholars.

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949 PDF Author: Darryl Barthé, Jr.
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807175528
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

The Accidental City

The Accidental City PDF Author: Lawrence N. Powell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674068939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world. Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city’s history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric—and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel. Powell’s tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.

The Story of French New Orleans

The Story of French New Orleans PDF Author: Dianne Guenin-Lelle
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496804872
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

Gods of the Mississippi

Gods of the Mississippi PDF Author: Michael Pasquier
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253008034
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
From the colonial period to the present, the Mississippi River has impacted religious communities from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Exploring the religious landscape along the 2,530 miles of the largest river system in North America, the essays in Gods of the Mississippi make a compelling case for American religion in motion—not just from east to west, but also from north to south. With discussion of topics such as the religions of the Black Atlantic, religion and empire, antebellum religious movements, the Mormons at Nauvoo, black religion in the delta, Catholicism in the Deep South, and Johnny Cash and religion, this volume contributes to a richer understanding of this diverse, dynamic, and fluid religious world.

Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955

Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955 PDF Author: Sylvie Dubois
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168467
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Over the course of its three-hundred-year history, the Catholic Church in Louisiana witnessed a prolonged shift from French to English, with some south Louisiana churches continuing to prepare marriage, baptism, and burial records in French as late as the mid-twentieth century. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 navigates a complex and lengthy process, presenting a nuanced picture of language change within the Church and situating its practices within the state’s sociolinguistic evolution. Mining three centuries of evidence from the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives, the authors discover proof of an extraordinary one-hundred-year rise and fall of bilingualism in Louisiana. The multiethnic laity, clergy, and religious in the nineteenth century necessitated the use of multiple languages in church functions, and bilingualism remained an ordinary aspect of church life through the antebellum period. After the Civil War, however, the authors show a steady crossover from French to English in the Church, influenced in large part by an active Irish population. It wasn’t until decades later, around 1910, that the Church began to embrace English monolingualism and French faded from use. The authors’ extensive research and analysis draws on quantitative and qualitative data, geographical models, methods of ethnography, and cultural studies. They evaluated 4,000 letters, written mostly in French, from 1720 to 1859; sacramental registers from more than 250 churches; parish reports; diocesan council minutes; and unpublished material from French archives. Their findings illuminate how the Church’s hierarchical structure of authority, its social constraints, and the attitudes of its local priests and laity affected language maintenance and change, particularly during the major political and social developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 goes beyond the “triumph of English” or “tragedy of Cajun French” stereotypes to show how south Louisiana negotiated language use and how Christianization was a powerful linguistic and cultural assimilator.

French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World

French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World PDF Author: Bradley G. Bond
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807151394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
French colonial Louisiana has failed to occupy a place in the historic consciousness of the United States, perhaps owing to its short duration (1699--1762) and its standing outside the dominant narrative of the British colonies in North America. This anthology seeks to locate early Louisiana in its proper place, bringing together a broad range of scholarship that depicts a complex and vibrant sphere. Colonial Louisiana comprised the vast center of what would become the United States. It lay between Spanish, British, and French colonies in North America and the Caribbean, and between woodland and eastern plains Indians. As such, it provided a meeting place for Europeans, Africans, and native Americans, functioning as a crossroads between the New World and other worlds. While acknowledging colonial Louisiana's peripheral position in U.S. and Atlantic World history, this volume demonstrates that the colony stands at the thematic center of the shared narratives and historiographies of diverse places. Through its twelve essays, French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World tells a whole story, the story of a place that belongs to the historic narrative of the Atlantic World.