They Called Us River Rats

They Called Us River Rats PDF Author: Macon Fry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833090
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

They Called Us River Rats

They Called Us River Rats PDF Author: Macon Fry
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496833090
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book

Book Description
They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

Inventing the Fiesta City

Inventing the Fiesta City PDF Author: Laura Hernández-Ehrisman
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826343112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
The story of how the multicultural identity of San Antonio, Texas, has been shaped and polished through its annual fiesta since the late nineteenth century.

Cajun Country Guide

Cajun Country Guide PDF Author: Macon Fry
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
ISBN: 9781455601752
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
There's just nowhere else but South Louisiana to find real knee-slapping, crowd-hooting Zydeco music. Even the big-city chefs can't cook up a Cajun meal the way they do at the roadside restaurants deep in the bayous of Acadiana. Likewise, no other guide matches the amount of in-depth information presented in Cajun Country Guide. It's a study of Cajuns that tells visitors how to find the sights, sounds, and flavors of one of America's most culturally unique regions. Take a vacation to a part of our own country that, in some places, didn't even speak English until nearly fifty years ago. While modern technology is weeding out some of the one-of-a-kind qualities of this subculture, not all of them are gone, or even hard to find, if you know how to hunt for them. And there are no better hunters than authors Macon Fry and Julie Posner. With the handy maps, reviews, and recommendations packed into the Cajun Country Guide, a trip to the bayous won't leave one feeling like a visitor, but more like a native who has come back home.

A Place in the Rain Forest

A Place in the Rain Forest PDF Author: Darryl Cole-Christensen
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 9780292711914
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In the 1950s, Darryl Cole-Christensen and his family were among the first settlers of the Coto Brus, an almost impenetrable, mountainous rain forest region of southeastern Costa Rica. In this evocative book, he captures the elemental struggles and rewards of settling a new frontier—an experience forever closed to most people in Western, urbanized society. With the perspective of more than forty years' residence in the Coto Brus, Cole-Christensen ably describes both the settlers' dreams of bringing civilization and progress to the rain forest and the sweeping and irreversible changes they caused throughout the ecosystem as they cut the rain forest down. Writing neither to apologize for nor to defend their actions, he instead illuminates the personal and subjective factors that cause people to risk danger and hardship for the uncertain rewards of settling a frontier. In his own words, Cole-Christensen says, "This is a book for the scientist who wants to recapture a sense of an incalculable world departed, for the student who asks: How is it that our forebears changed and restructured this land? For the adventurer who dreams of the expanse of frontiers, for every person who, having passed once through the darkening forest along a path in twilit stillness looks back to find that a blanket of murmurs remains."

Game Changer

Game Changer PDF Author: Glen Martin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520266269
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Assesses the rising influence of the animal rights movement in Africa to find that the policies championed by animal welfare groups could lead paradoxically to the elimination of the very species that are the most cherished.

Kitty Comes Home

Kitty Comes Home PDF Author: Louise A. Jellyman
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1524619612
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
I believe Kitty Comes Home shows an example of how animals respond when they are given extra attention and care. Animals just like people want to be treated with respect.

East Along the Equator

East Along the Equator PDF Author: Helen Winternitz
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 9780871131621
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
In this brilliant mix of political journalism and travel writing, Helen Winternitz and fellow journalist Timothy Phelps witness what few Westerners have: life in the ecologically rich but financially impoverished American-backed dictatorship of Zaire, the former Belgian Congo.

Crooked River Burning

Crooked River Burning PDF Author: Mark Winegardner
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0358541328
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 591

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Book Description
In 1948 Cleveland was America's sixth largest city; by 1969 it was the twelfth. For Easterners, Cleveland is where the Midwest begins; for Westerners, it is where the East begins. In the summer of 1948, fourteen-year-old David Zielinsky can look forward to a job at the docks. Anne O'Connor, at twelve, is the apple of her political boss father's eye. David and Anne will meet-and fall in love-four years later, and for the next twenty years this pair will be reluctant star-crossed lovers in a troubled and turbulent country. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Winegardner spins an epic tale of those twenty years, artfully weaving such real-life Clevelanders as Eliot Ness, Alan Freed, and Carl Stokes into the tapestry. His narrative gifts may bring the fiction of E. L. Doctorow to some readers' minds, but Winegardner is very much his own man, and his observations of Cleveland are laced with a loving skepticism. His masterful saga of this conflicted city is a novel that speaks a memorable truth.

Down on the Batture

Down on the Batture PDF Author: Oliver A. Houck
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604734620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called “the batture.” On this remote and ignored piece of land thrives a humanity unique to the region—ramblers, artists, drinkers, fishers, rabbit hunters, dog walkers, sunset watchers, and refugees from immigration, alimony, and other aspects of modern life. Author Oliver A. Houck has frequented this place for the past twenty-five years. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising. From this place he meditates on Louisiana, the state of the waterway, and its larger environs. He describes all the actors who have played lead roles on the edge of the mightiest river of the continent, and includes in his narrative plantations, pollution, murder, land grabs, keelboat brawlers, slave rebellions, the Corps of Engineers, and the oil industry. Houck draws from his experience in New Orleans since the early 1970s in the practice and teaching of law. He has been a player in many of the issues he describes, although he does not undertake to argue them here. Instead, story by story, he uses the batture to explore the forces that have shaped and spell out the future of the region. The picture emerges of a place that—for all its tangle of undergrowth, drifting humanity, shifting dimensions in the rise and fall of floodwater—provides respite and sanctuary for values that are original to America and ever at risk from the homogenizing forces of civilization.

Buffalo Days

Buffalo Days PDF Author: Diane Hoyt-Goldsmith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 40

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Book Description
Describes life on a Crow Indian reservation in Montana, and the importance these tribes place on buffalo, which are once again thriving in areas where the Crow live.