Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs

Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs PDF Author: Craig Colten
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822972198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Human settlement of the Lower Mississippi River Valley—especially in New Orleans, the region’s largest metropolis—has produced profound and dramatic environmental change. From prehistoric midden building to late-twentieth century industrial pollution, Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs traces through history the impact of human activity upon the environment of this fascinating and unpredictable region. In eleven essays, scholars across disciplines––including anthropology, architecture, history, natural history, and geography––chronicle how societies have worked to transform untamed wetlands and volatile floodplains into a present-day sprawling urban center and industrial complex, and how they have responded to the environmental changes brought about by the disruption of the natural setting. This new text follows the trials of native and colonial settlers as they struggled to shape the environment to fit the needs of urbanization. It demonstrates how the Mississippi River, while providing great avenues for commerce, transportation, and colonization also presented the region’s greatest threat to urban centers, and details how engineers set about taming the mighty river. Also featured is an analysis of the impact of modern New Orleans upon the surrounding rural parishes and the effect urban pollution has had on the city’s water supply and aquatic life.

Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs

Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs PDF Author: Craig Colten
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822972198
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
Human settlement of the Lower Mississippi River Valley—especially in New Orleans, the region’s largest metropolis—has produced profound and dramatic environmental change. From prehistoric midden building to late-twentieth century industrial pollution, Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs traces through history the impact of human activity upon the environment of this fascinating and unpredictable region. In eleven essays, scholars across disciplines––including anthropology, architecture, history, natural history, and geography––chronicle how societies have worked to transform untamed wetlands and volatile floodplains into a present-day sprawling urban center and industrial complex, and how they have responded to the environmental changes brought about by the disruption of the natural setting. This new text follows the trials of native and colonial settlers as they struggled to shape the environment to fit the needs of urbanization. It demonstrates how the Mississippi River, while providing great avenues for commerce, transportation, and colonization also presented the region’s greatest threat to urban centers, and details how engineers set about taming the mighty river. Also featured is an analysis of the impact of modern New Orleans upon the surrounding rural parishes and the effect urban pollution has had on the city’s water supply and aquatic life.

New Orleans and Its Environs; the Domestic Architecture, 1727-1870

New Orleans and Its Environs; the Domestic Architecture, 1727-1870 PDF Author: Italo William Ricciuti
Publisher: Legare Street Press
ISBN: 9781016360807
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Changes in the Air

Changes in the Air PDF Author: Eleonora Rohland
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 178533932X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Hurricanes have been a constant in the history of New Orleans. Since before its settlement as a French colony in the eighteenth century, the land entwined between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River has been lashed by powerful Gulf storms. Time and again, these hurricanes have wrought immeasurable loss and devastation, spurring reinvention and ingenuity on the part of inhabitants. Changes in the Air offers a rich and thoroughly researched history of how hurricanes have shaped and reshaped New Orleans from the colonial era to the present day, focusing on how its residents have adapted to a uniquely unpredictable and destructive environment across more than three centuries.

The West Bank of Greater New Orleans

The West Bank of Greater New Orleans PDF Author: Richard Campanella
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807173665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Winner of the SESAH Book Award The West Bank has been a vital part of greater New Orleans since the city’s inception, serving as its breadbasket, foundry, shipbuilder, railroad terminal, train manufacturer, and even livestock hub. At one time it was the Gulf South’s St. Louis, boasting a diversified industrial sector as well as a riverine, mercantilist, and agricultural economy. Today the mostly suburban West Bank is proud but not pretentious, pleasant if not prominent, and a distinct, affordable alternative to the more famous neighborhoods of the East Bank. Richard Campanella is the first to examine the West Bank holistically, as a legitimate subregion with its own story to tell. No other part of greater New Orleans has more diverse yet deeply rooted populations: folks who speak in local accents, who exhibit longstanding cultural traits, and, in some cases, who maintain family ownership of lands held since antebellum times—even as immigrants settle here in growing numbers. Campanella demonstrates that West Bankers have had great agency in their own place-making, and he challenges the notion that their story is subsidiary to a more important narrative across the river. The West Bank of Greater New Orleans is not a traditional history, nor a cultural history, but rather a historical geography, a spatial explanation of how the West Bank’s landscape formed: its terrain, environment, land use, jurisdictions, waterways, industries, infrastructure, neighborhoods, and settlement patterns, past and present. The book explores the drivers, conditions, and power structures behind those landscape transformations, using custom maps, aerial images, photographic montages, and a detailed historical timeline to help tell that complex geographical story. As Campanella shows, there is no “greater New Orleans” without its cross-river component. The West Bank is an essential part of this remarkable metropolis.

Caribbean New Orleans

Caribbean New Orleans PDF Author: Cécile Vidal
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146964519X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.

Inventing New Orleans

Inventing New Orleans PDF Author: Lafcadio Hearn
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781578063536
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A selection of writings from the author who created America's notion of New Orleans as an exotic and mysterious place

Geographies of New Orleans

Geographies of New Orleans PDF Author: Richard Campanella
Publisher: University of Louisiana
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Geographies of New Orleans integrates hundred of historical sources with custom-made maps, graphs, photos, and satellite images to explore the intricate urban fabrics of one of the world's most fascinating cities from its fragile deltaic terrain to its striking built environment, from its diverse ethnic makeup to its devastation by Hurricane Katrina.

A River and Its City

A River and Its City PDF Author: Ari Kelman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520936515
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This engaging environmental history explores the rise, fall, and rebirth of one of the nation's most important urban public landscapes, and more significantly, the role public spaces play in shaping people's relationships with the natural world. Ari Kelman focuses on the battles fought over New Orleans's waterfront, examining the link between a river and its city and tracking the conflict between public and private control of the river. He describes the impact of floods, disease, and changing technologies on New Orleans's interactions with the Mississippi. Considering how the city grew distant—culturally and spatially—from the river, this book argues that urban areas provide a rich source for understanding people's connections with nature, and in turn, nature's impact on human history.

The Accidental City

The Accidental City PDF Author: Lawrence N. Powell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
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.

The Second Battle of New Orleans

The Second Battle of New Orleans PDF Author: Richard O. Baumbach
Publisher: University of Louisiana
ISBN: 9781946160577
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Today, one can hardly imagine a visit to New Orleans without a stroll through its famous French Quarter (the Vieux Carre), but this now national historic landmark was at the center of a two-decades-battle that pitted politicians against preservationists. In 1946, as suburban sprawl increased, a massive roadway project was designed for the city of New Orleans, which included a forty-foot-high, ninety-foot-wide interstate highway be built through the French Quarter district, the city's oldest, and arguably most historic, neighborhood. The project was supported and pushed by politicians and business leaders around the city and state. Supplemented by a wealth of photographs and maps, Baumbach and Borah provide a well-documented account of the expressway controversy in all its twists and turns, its ambiguities, and its acrimony.