New Orleans The Place And The People

Photographic reproduction of Grace King's classic 1917 account of New Orleans and some of the people who made it great. Illustrated.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895 edition. Excerpt: ... THE CONVENT OF THE HOLY FAMILY. TT epitomizes a great section of the city's past, this -*- Convent of the Holy Family. And in no other place of the city do the heart and the mind seem to be working together so reverently to spell from its past indications for its future. And, it would seem, in no other place to the historian, sociologist, or may we simply say humanitarian, does the future appear, not so bright, not so purely hopeful, but so providentially directed as in this institution. It was on New Year's day, 1888, that the news spread through the community that the Mother Superior of the Coloured Convent of the Holy Family was dead. It was an occasion for the inquisitive to satisfy curiosity, as well as for the friends and well-wishers of the convent to pay the respect of a call; for those of the Catholic faith to do more. The body had not yet been transported to the chapel. She lay on the cot on which she had died a few hours before. Can one ever forget the sight? So small, so shrunken, so withered, such a mummy of a human figure, with a face, under the glitter of the burning candles, so yellow, wrinkled, sunken, so devitalized, so dehumanized, of all the elements of earthly passions. All around the bed were kneeling figures from the street, from the market, servants, beggars, sisters, orphans, and white ladies, the latter predominating, not by their number but by the elegance and distinction they cast over the assemblage. It was the time and the opportunity of all others to ask who was she, this Mother Juliette -- and what is this Convent of the Holy Family? During the ancien rSgime in Louisiana, the pureblooded African was never called coloured, but always negro. The gens de couleur, coloured people, were a class apart, separated...

Marking the10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, this companion to The Great American Dust Bowl combines lively drawings and authoritative memoir in graphic novel form to recount one of the most destructive and devastating natural disasters in our American history.

STRONGNamed one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune. STRONGWinner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.STRONG STRONGAwarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008. New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans's first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana's statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, &“rock the city.&” This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette's previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.

Chronicles the history of the city from its being contended over as swampland through Louisiana's statehood in 1812, discussing its motley identities as a French village, African market town, Spanish fortress, and trade center.