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Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize in United States History

During the nineteenth century, American and foreign travelers often found New Orleans a delightful, exotic stop on their journeys. Few failed to marvel at the riverfront, the center of the city's economic activity. But historical memory overlooks the immigrants and Black migrants who served in the riverfront's army of laborers and provided the essential human power that kept the cotton, sugar, and other goods flowing. Eric Arnesen examines the diverse group of 10,000 to 15,000 cotton screwmen, longshoremen, cotton and round freight teamsters, cotton yardmen, railroad freight handlers, and Mississippi River roustabouts that formed the backbone of the Crescent City's trade and economic life.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The principal Vietnamese-American enclave was a remote, low-income area that flooded badly. Many residents arrived decades earlier as refugees from the Vietnam War and were marginally fluent in English. Yet, despite these poor odds of success, the Vietnamese made a surprisingly strong comeback in the wake of the flood. In Weathering Katrina, public health scholar Mark VanLandingham analyzes their path to recovery, and examines the extent to which culture helped them cope during this crisis.

Contrasting his longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews of Vietnamese residents with the work of other research teams, VanLandingham finds that on the principal measures of disaster recovery—housing stability, economic stability, health, and social adaptation—the Vietnamese community fared better than other communities. By Katrina’s one-year anniversary, almost 90 percent of the Vietnamese had returned to their neighborhood, higher than the rate of return for either blacks or whites. They also showed much lower rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than other groups. And by the second year after the flood, the employment rate for the Vietnamese had returned to its pre-Katrina level.

While some commentators initially attributed this resilience to fairly simple explanations such as strong leadership or to a set of vague cultural strengths characteristic of the Vietnamese and other “model minorities”, VanLandingham shows that in fact it was a broad set of factors that fostered their rapid recovery. Many of these factors had little to do with culture. First, these immigrants were highly selected—those who settled in New Orleans enjoyed higher human capital than those who stayed in Vietnam. Also, as a small, tightly knit community, the New Orleans Vietnamese could efficiently pass on information about job leads, business prospects, and other opportunities to one another. Finally, they had access to a number of special programs that were intended to facilitate recovery among immigrants, and enjoyed a positive social image both in New Orleans and across the U.S., which motivated many people and charities to offer the community additional resources. But culture—which VanLandingham is careful to define and delimit—was important, too. A shared history of overcoming previous challenges—and a powerful set of narratives that describe these successes; a shared set of perspectives or frames for interpreting events; and a shared sense of symbolic boundaries that distinguish them from broader society are important elements of culture that provided the Vietnamese with some strong advantages in the post-Katrina environment.

By carefully defining and disentangling the elements that enabled the swift recovery of the Vietnamese in New Orleans, Weathering Katrina enriches our understanding of this understudied immigrant community and of why some groups fare better than others after a major catastrophe like Katrina.

Walt Whitman’s 1848 stint in New Orleans was a crucial moment of development for the poet. Working for The Daily Crescent, a new local newspaper, Whitman spent his days strolling through the multiracial city and turning his impressions into prose sketches, news items, and fiery editorials. While in the southern metropolis, the young journalist brushed shoulders with American soldiers returning from Mexico, cheered on European revolutions in the French Quarter, and explored raunchy performances at the St. Charles Theatre. Yet 1848 was also the year Whitman began lobbying for “Free Soil,” after encountering in New Orleans, Creole citizens, enslaved Black people, and the slaveholder who would become America’s next president.

Far from some brief escape, New Orleans was a significant milestone in Whitman’s development as a political firebrand, as well as a major step for a professional journalist on the rise. Through a wealth of new texts, contexts, and personalities, Stefan Schöberlein and Zachary Turpin paint a vivid picture of a writer on the verge of Leaves of Grass, embracing the contradictions and the multitudes of New Orleans.