Results by title

Anderson leads readers through the tumultuous years just after World War II when the Roman Catholic Church in the American South struggled to reconcile its commitment to social justice with the legal and social heritage of Jim Crow society. Though these early efforts at reform, by and large, failed, they did serve to galvanize Catholic supporters and opponents of the Civil Rights Movement and provided a model for more successful efforts at desegregation in the '60s.

As a Jesuit himself, Anderson has access to archives that remain off-limits to other scholars. His deep knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church also allows him to draw connections between this historical period and the present. In the resistance to desegregation, Anderson finds expression of a distinctly American form of Catholicism, in which lay people expect Church authorities to ratify their ideas and beliefs in an almost democratic fashion. The conflict he describes is as much between popular and hierarchical models of the Church as between segregation and integration.

On many Sundays, Black New Orleanians dance through city streets in Second Lines. These processions invite would-be spectators to join in, grooving to an ambulatory brass band for several hours. Though an increasingly popular attraction for tourists, parading provides the second liners themselves with a potent public expression of Black resistance.

Rachel Carrico examines the parading bodies in motion as a form of negotiating and understanding power. Seeing pleasure as a bodily experience, Carrico reveals how second liners’ moves link joy and liberation, self and communal identities, play and dissent, and reclamations of place. As she shows, dancers’ choices allow them to access the pleasure of reclaiming self and city through motion and rhythm while expanding a sense of the possible in the present and for the future.

In-depth and empathetic, Dancing the Politics of Pleasure at the New Orleans Second Line blends analysis with a chorus of Black voices to reveal an indelible facet of Black culture in the Crescent City.

Winner, Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize, Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2010

From iconic neighborhoods such as the French Quarter and the Garden District to more economically modest but no less culturally vibrant areas, architecture is a key element that makes New Orleans an extraordinary American city. Delirious New Orleans began as a documentary project to capture the idiosyncratic vernacular architecture and artifacts—vintage mom-and-pop businesses, roadside motels, live music clubs, neon signs, wall murals, fast-food joints, and so on—that helped give the city's various neighborhoods their unique character. But because so many of these places and artifacts were devastated by Hurricane Katrina, Delirious New Orleans has become both a historical record of what existed in the past and a blueprint for what must be rebuilt and restored to retain the city's unique multicultural landscape.

Stephen Verderber starts with the premise that New Orleans's often-overlooked neighborhoods imbue the city with deep authenticity as a place. He opens Delirious New Orleans with a photo-essay that vividly presents this vernacular architecture and its artifacts, both before Katrina and in its immediate aftermath. In the following sections of the book, which are also heavily illustrated, Verderber takes us on a tour of the city's commercial vernacular architecture, as well as the expressive folk architecture of its African American neighborhoods. He discusses how the built environment was profoundly shaped by New Orleans's history of race and class inequities and political maneuvering, along with its peculiar, below-sea-level geography. Verderber also considers the aftermath of Katrina and the armada of faceless FEMA trailers that have, at least temporarily and by default, transformed this urban landscape.

An illuminating look at the festival performances of slaves in Havana and New Orleans

However urban slave societies might have differed from their rural counterparts, they still relied on a concerted assault on the psychological, social, and cultural identity of their African-descended inhabitants to maintain power and control. This ambitious book looks at how people of African descent in two such societies—Havana and New Orleans in the nineteenth century—created and maintained their own forms of cultural resistance to the slave regime’s assault and, in the process, put forth autonomous views of self and the social landscape.

The devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina has been imprinted in our collective visual memory by thousands of images in the media and books of dramatic photographs by Robert Polidori, Larry Towell, Chris Jordan, Debbie Fleming Caffrey, and others. New Orleanians want the world to see and respond to the destruction of their city and the suffering of its people—and yet so many images of so much destruction threaten a visual and emotional overload that would tempt us to avert our eyes and become numb.

In The Color of Loss, Dan Burkholder presents a powerful new way of seeing the ravaged homes, churches, schools, and businesses of New Orleans. Using an innovative digital photographic technology called high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, in which multiple exposures are artistically blended to bring out details in the shadows and highlights that would be hidden in conventional photographs, he creates images that are almost like paintings in their richness of color and profusion of detail. Far more intense and poetic than purely documentary photographs, Burkholder's images lure viewers to linger over the artifacts of people's lives—a child's red wagon abandoned in a mud-caked room, a molding picture of Jesus—to fully understand the havoc thrust upon the people of New Orleans.

In the deserted, sinisterly beautiful rooms of The Color of Loss, we see how much of the splendor and texture of New Orleans washed away in the flood. This is the hidden truth of Katrina that Dan Burkholder has revealed.

Winner of the 3rd Annual Miguel Mármol Prize from Curbstone Press, Mary Helen Lagasse's The Fifth Sun is an inspiring story of an immigrant who struggles valiantly for a better life for herself and her family. A young Mexican woman, Mercedes, leaves her village to work as a housemaid in New Orleans. This fast-paced novel takes us through her adventures in New Orleans, her marriage, her struggle to raise her children, her deportation, and her attempt to re-cross the river and be reunited with her children.

The archaeology of four New Orleans neighborhoods that were replaced by public housing projects

Uprooted: Race, Public Housing, and the Archaeology of Four Lost New Orleans Neighborhoods uses archaeological research on four neighborhoods that were razed during the construction of public housing in World War II–era New Orleans. Although each of these neighborhoods was identified as a “slum” historically, the material record challenges the simplicity of this designation. D. Ryan Gray provides evidence of the inventiveness of former residents who were marginalized by class, color, or gender and whose everyday strategies of survival, subsistence, and spirituality challenged the city’s developing racial and social hierarchies.

These neighborhoods initially appear to have been quite distinct, ranging from the working-class Irish Channel, to the relatively affluent Creole of Color–dominated Lafitte area, to the former location of Storyville, the city’s experiment in semilegal prostitution. Archaeological and historical investigations suggest that race was the crucial factor in the areas’ selection for clearance. Each neighborhood manifested a particular perceived racial disorder, where race intersected with ethnicity, class, or gender in ways that defied the norms of Jim Crow segregation.

Gray’s research makes use of both primary documents—including census records, city directories, and even the brothel advertising guides called “Blue Books”—and archaeological data to examine what this entailed at a variety of scales, reconstructing narratives of the households and communities affected by clearance. Public housing, both in New Orleans and elsewhere, imposed a new kind of control on urban life that had the effect of making cities both more segregated and less equal. The story of the neighborhoods that were destroyed provides a reminder that their erasure was not an inevitable outcome, and that a more equitable and just city is still possible today. A critical examination of the rise of public housing helps inform the ongoing debates over its demise, especially in light of the changing face of post-Katrina New Orleans.