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Standing in the Need presents an intimate account of an African American family’s ordeal after Hurricane Katrina. Before the storm struck, this family of one hundred fifty members lived in the bayou communities of St. Bernard Parish just outside New Orleans. Rooted there like the wild red iris of the coastal wetlands, the family had gathered for generations to cook and share homemade seafood meals, savor conversation, and refresh their interconnected lives.

In this lively narrative, Katherine Browne weaves together voices and experiences from eight years of post-Katrina research. Her story documents the heartbreaking struggles to remake life after everyone in the family faced ruin. Cast against a recovery landscape managed by outsiders, the efforts of family members to help themselves could get no traction; outsiders undermined any sense of their control over the process. In the end, the insights of the story offer hope. Written for a broad audience and supported by an array of photographs and graphics, Standing in the Need offers readers an inside view of life at its most vulnerable.

A true-to-life impression of Storyville, the only legally established red light district in the US

At the turn of the twentieth-century, there were hundreds of red-light districts in the United States, ranging in size from a discreet “house” or two in or near small towns and cities to block after bawdy block of brothels in larger cities such as Chicago and San Francisco. Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red Light District seeks to offer the reader a reasonably true-to-life impression of Storyville, the most famous of the large districts and the only such district in the United States that was legally established.

Storyville was an area, carefully defined by law, outside of which prostitutes or women “notoriously abandoned to lewdness” were not permitted to live or work. Prostitutes working within the District were considered to be engaged in legal enterprises so long as they confined themselves to prostitution and other related activities such as dispensing food and drink to their customers.

From the early days of the French colony of Louisiana, a great number of prostitutes, women from correctional centers, and those with so-called “loose morals” were transported to the New World, resulting in a large proportion of the earliest female residents in New Orleans engaging in prostitution. During the course of Storyville’s legal existence from January 1, 1898 to November 12, 1917—it is evident that in establishing this district the New Orleans city council acted out of a sense of frustration after decades of attempting to deal rationally with a serious social problem. As the author says in the preface, “You may see this as a disorderly book about disorderly houses—and so it may be. But I doubt you will find it dull.”
 

Examination of the Creek War which integrates that struggle into the larger conflict that broke out in 1812 between Great Britain and the United States
 
Using American, British, and Spanish documents, many previously unknown, Frank Owsley’s study establishes the Creek War and the struggle to control the Gulf borderlands as integral parts of the War of 1812. The war between the United States and a large part of the Creek nation is usually studied as local or regional history. These documentary sources, however, show the larger picture. They show Spain to have been a major influence in the Creek War and indicate the extent to which the British were aiding the Indians and using them to redirect American troops. On the other hand, Andrew Jackson, in charge of the American forces on the Gulf Coast, emerged from the conflict as a first-rate military commander. His victories on the Gulf gave the West a leader and aided in shifting political power from the eastern seaboard to the South and West.
 
Owsley concludes that the victories in the Gulf region were of sufficient magnitude to justify the claim that the War of 1812 was not a draw but a decisive American victory and that had there been a general of Jackson's caliber on the northern frontier, the United States might have had a clear-cut victory there.
 
As a result of the war, the United States held its claim on Louisiana, annexed the Mobile district, forced Spain out of Florida, and broke the power of the southern Indians, thus opening vast lands for settlement from the new nation on the eastern seaboard.