New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera

New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera

Author: Charlotte Bentley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0226823091

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A history of nineteenth-century New Orleans and the people who made it a vital, if unexpected, part of an emerging operatic world. New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 explores the thriving operatic life of New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century, drawing out the transatlantic connections that animated it. By focusing on a variety of individuals, their extended webs of human contacts, and the materials that they moved along with them, this book pieces together what it took to bring opera to New Orleans and the ways in which the city’s operatic life shaped contemporary perceptions of global interconnection. The early chapters explore the process of bringing opera to the stage, taking a detailed look at the management of New Orleans’s Francophone theater, the Théâtre d’Orléans, as well as the performers who came to the city and the reception they received. But opera’s significance was not confined to the theater, and later chapters of the book examine how opera permeated everyday life in New Orleans, through popular sheet music, novels, magazines and visual culture, and dancing in its many ballrooms. Just as New Orleans helped to create transatlantic opera, opera in turn helped to create the city of New Orleans.


Draining New Orleans

Draining New Orleans

Author: Richard Campanella

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2023-05-03

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0807179426

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In Draining New Orleans, the first full-length book devoted to “the world’s toughest drainage problem,” renowned geographer Richard Campanella recounts the epic challenges and ingenious efforts to dewater the Crescent City. With forays into geography, public health, engineering, architecture, politics, sociology, race relations, and disaster response, he chronicles the herculean attempts to “reclaim” the city’s swamps and marshes and install subsurface drainage for massive urban expansion. The study begins with a vivid description of a festive event on Mardi Gras weekend 1915, which attracted an entourage of elite New Orleanians to the edge of Bayou Barataria to witness the christening of giant water pumps. President Woodrow Wilson, connected via phoneline from the White House, planned to activate the station with the push of a button, effectively draining the West Bank of New Orleans. What transpired in the years and decades that followed can only be understood by examining the large swath of history dating back two centuries earlier—to the geological formation and indigenous occupation of this delta—and extending through the colonial, antebellum, postbellum, and Progressive eras to modern times. The consequences of dewatering New Orleans proved both triumphant and tragic. The city’s engineering prowess transformed it into a world leader in drainage technology, yet the municipality also fell victim to its own success. Rather than a story about mud and machinery, this is a history of people, power, and the making of place. Campanella emphasizes the role of determined and sometimes unsavory individuals who spearheaded projects to separate water from dirt, creating lucrative opportunities in the process not only for the community but also for themselves.


New Orleans in the Atlantic World

New Orleans in the Atlantic World

Author: William Boelhower

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1317988442

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The thematic project ‘New Orleans in the Atlantic World’ was planned immediately after hurricane Katrina and focuses on what meteorologists have always known: the city’s identity and destiny belong to the broader Caribbean and Atlantic worlds as perhaps no other American city does. Balanced precariously between land and sea, the city’s geohistory has always interwoven diverse cultures, languages, peoples, and economies. Only with the rise of the new Atlantic Studies matrix, however, have scholars been able to fully appreciate this complex history from a multi-disciplinary, multilingual and multi-scaled perspectivism. In this book, historians, geographers, anthropologists, and cultural studies scholars bring to light the atlanticist vocation of New Orleans, and in doing so they also help to define the new field of Atlantic Studies. This book was published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.


Building the Land of Dreams

Building the Land of Dreams

Author: Eberhard L. Faber

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-07-10

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0691180709

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The history of New Orleans at the turn of the nineteenth century In 1795, New Orleans was a sleepy outpost at the edge of Spain's American empire. By the 1820s, it was teeming with life, its levees packed with cotton and sugar. New Orleans had become the unquestioned urban capital of the antebellum South. Looking at this remarkable period filled with ideological struggle, class politics, and powerful personalities, Building the Land of Dreams is the narrative biography of a fascinating city at the most crucial turning point in its history. Eberhard Faber tells the vivid story of how American rule forced New Orleans through a vast transition: from the ordered colonial world of hierarchy and subordination to the fluid, unpredictable chaos of democratic capitalism. The change in authority, from imperial Spain to Jeffersonian America, transformed everything. As the city’s diverse people struggled over the terms of the transition, they built the foundations of a dynamic, contentious hybrid metropolis. Faber describes the vital individuals who played a role in New Orleans history: from the wealthy creole planters who dreaded the influx of revolutionary ideas, to the American arrivistes who combined idealistic visions of a new republican society with selfish dreams of quick plantation fortunes, to Thomas Jefferson himself, whose powerful democratic vision for Louisiana eventually conflicted with his equally strong sense of realpolitik and desire to strengthen the American union. Revealing how New Orleans was formed by America’s greatest impulses and ambitions, Building the Land of Dreams is an inspired exploration of one of the world’s most iconic cities.


The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans

The Faubourg Marigny of New Orleans

Author: Scott S. Ellis

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2018-10-03

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0807170054

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Leaving the crowded, tourist-driven French Quarter by crossing Esplanade Avenue, visitors and residents entering the Faubourg Marigny travel through rows of vibrantly colored Greek revival and Creole-style homes. For decades, this stunning architectural display marked an entry into a more authentic New Orleans. In the first complete history of this celebrated neighborhood, Scott S. Ellis chronicles the incomparable vitality of life in the Marigny, describes its architectural and social evolution across two centuries, and shows how many of New Orleans’s most dramatic events unfolded in this eclectic suburb. Founded in 1805, the Faubourg Marigny benefited from waves of refugees and immigrants settling on its borders. Émigrés from Saint-Domingue, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, in addition to a large community of the city’s antebellum free people of color, would come to call Marigny home and contribute to its rich legacy. Shaped as well by epidemics and political upheaval, the young enclave hosted a post–Civil War influx of newly freed slaves seeking affordable housing and suffered grievous losses after deadly outbreaks of yellow fever. In the twentieth century, the district grew into a working-class neighborhood of creolized residents that eventually gave way to a burgeoning gay community, which, in turn, led to an era of “supergentrification” following Hurricane Katrina. Now, as with many historic communities in the heart of a growing metropolis, tensions between tradition and revitalization, informality and regulation, diversity and limited access contour the Marigny into an ever more kaleidoscopic picture of both past and present. Equally informative and entertaining, this nuanced history reinforces the cultural value of the Marigny and the importance of preserving this alluring neighborhood.


Globalization and the City

Globalization and the City

Author: Collectif

Publisher: innsbruck University Press

Published: 2016-09-29

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 3903122238

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The world today is far less a global village than a “global city”, as global network of multidimensional urban spaces of congestion prominently forming – and also formed by – globalization. But the relevance of cities is nothing but new. They were essential for culture and civilization worldwide, they allowed a centralization of power and knowledge and they were crucial for the division of labor and for the organization of mass demand. Further, as places of intense and continuous interactions, cities are the locations par excellence for global history to take place. Thus, there is a need to study the history of cities in connection with the history of globalization from this perspective. This book is dedicated to contribute to the still underdeveloped but growing literature connecting the history of cities worldwide and their relation to global processes. The authors do so from various disciplinary backgrounds and by referring to different times and places. We visit ancient Alexandria, nineteenth century Zanzibar, and modern-day São Paolo, among others, and we view these cities not only in their globality, but also through their heritage, their economic relevance, their architecture, or financial flows connecting them. Further, the book also contains systematic considerations about “global city”, especially the general role of cities in development, cities in global history teaching, and cities' relationships to global commodity chains.


Atlantic Environments and the American South

Atlantic Environments and the American South

Author: Thomas Blake Earle

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2020-03-01

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0820356476

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There is clear overlap in interests and influences for the fields of Atlantic, environmental, and southern history, but scholarship in them has often advanced on parallel tracks. This anthology places itself at the intersection, pushing for a new confluence. Editors Thomas Blake Earle and D. Andrew Johnson provide a lucid introduction to this collection of essays that brings these disciplines together. With this volume, historians explore crucial insights into a self-consciously Atlantic environmental history of the American South, touching on such topics as ideas about slavery, gender, climate, “colonial ecological revolution,” manipulation of the landscape, infrastructure, resources, and exploitation. By centering this project on a region, the American South—defined as the southeastern reaches of North America and the Caribbean— the authors interrogate how European colonizers, Native Americans, and Africans interacted in and with the (sub)tropics, a place foreign to Europeans. Challenging the concepts of “Atlantic” and “southern” and their intersection with “environments” is a discipline-defining strategy at the leading edge of emerging scholarship. Taken collectively, this book should encourage more readers to reimagine this region, its time periods, climate(s), and ecocultural networks.


Caribbean New Orleans

Caribbean New Orleans

Author: Cécile Vidal

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-04-23

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 146964519X

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Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.


City of a Million Dreams

City of a Million Dreams

Author: Jason Berry

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 146964715X

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In 2015, the beautiful jazz funeral in New Orleans for composer Allen Toussaint coincided with a debate over removing four Confederate monuments. Mayor Mitch Landrieu led the ceremony, attended by living legends of jazz, music aficionados, politicians, and everyday people. The scene captured the history and culture of the city in microcosm--a city legendary for its noisy, complicated, tradition-rich splendor. In City of a Million Dreams, Jason Berry delivers a character-driven history of New Orleans at its tricentennial. Chronicling cycles of invention, struggle, death, and rebirth, Berry reveals the city's survival as a triumph of diversity, its map-of-the-world neighborhoods marked by resilience despite hurricanes, epidemics, fires, and floods. Berry orchestrates a parade of vibrant personalities, from the founder Bienville, a warrior emblazoned with snake tattoos; to Governor William C. C. Claiborne, General Andrew Jackson, and Pere Antoine, an influential priest and secret agent of the Inquisition; Sister Gertrude Morgan, a street evangelist and visionary artist of the 1960s; and Michael White, the famous clarinetist who remade his life after losing everything in Hurricane Katrina. The textured profiles of this extraordinary cast furnish a dramatic narrative of the beloved city, famous the world over for mysterious rituals as people dance when they bury their dead.