New Orleans has long been a city fixated on its own history and culture. Founded in 1718 by the French, transferred to the Spanish in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and sold to the United States in 1803, the city’s culture, law, architecture, food, music, and language share the influence of all three countries. This cultural mélange also manifests in the city’s approach to sport, where each game is steeped in the city’s history.

Tracing that history from the early nineteenth century to the present, while also surveying the state of the city’s sports historiography, New Orleans Sports places sport in the context of race relations, politics, and civic and business development to expand that historiography—currently dominated by a text that stops at 1900—into the twentieth century, offering a modern examination of sports in the city.

Thomas Aiello is associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana and The Kings of Casino Park: Race and Race Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932.

“New Orleans Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy is a collection of thirteen diverse chapters linked by an attempt to explain the unique sporting culture and the broader history of New Orleans from the nineteenth century to the recent past.This work is part of the excellent University of Arkansas Press series Sport, Culture, and Society, which uses the study of sport to illuminate diverse aspects of history, including race, economics, gender, urbanization, and much more. New Orleans Sports is an excellent book overall. It is well written and well researched, and it provides easily digestible insights from several leading scholars of sport history. It will appeal to anyone interested in sport history,urban history, or the history of Louisiana.”
—Christopher Thrasher, Journal of Southern History, May 2020

“Taken as a whole, [these essays] make an important contribution to the historiography of sport in New Orleans and to the broader history of the urban South. … New Orleans is unique, but, as this collection shows, it is also closely tied to the larger South and the entire nation. As a commercial center of the vast cotton empire, a segregated city in the postbellum New South, and a sunbelt metropolis in recent decades, the city and its sports both reflected and illuminated larger historical forces at work in the region and across the nation. By engaging these larger issues, Aiello accomplishes his goal of providing ‘an expanded, modern examination of sports in the city’ (xii). Scholars of sport, the South, and urban America—along with lovers of New Orleans—will enjoy the result.
—Christopher R. Davis, Journal of Sport History, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2020