New Orleans Yesterday and Today

New Orleans Yesterday and Today
Author: Walter G. Cowan
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807127438

Updated by the two living original authors, this new paper edition of New Orleans Yesterday and Today provides information on recent additions to the New Orleans scene, including countless new restaurants and music venues, casino gambling, the D-Day Museum, and the Aquarium of the Americas. The book provides a well-rounded sense of New Orleans' unique and multi-faceted culture and its evolution as a city. In addition to being a help to tourists, the book will provide a refresher history course to New Orleans natives.

The West Bank of Greater New Orleans

The West Bank of Greater New Orleans
Author: Richard Campanella
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2020-05-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807173673

Winner of the SESAH Book Award The West Bank has been a vital part of greater New Orleans since the city’s inception, serving as its breadbasket, foundry, shipbuilder, railroad terminal, train manufacturer, and even livestock hub. At one time it was the Gulf South’s St. Louis, boasting a diversified industrial sector as well as a riverine, mercantilist, and agricultural economy. Today the mostly suburban West Bank is proud but not pretentious, pleasant if not prominent, and a distinct, affordable alternative to the more famous neighborhoods of the East Bank. Richard Campanella is the first to examine the West Bank holistically, as a legitimate subregion with its own story to tell. No other part of greater New Orleans has more diverse yet deeply rooted populations: folks who speak in local accents, who exhibit longstanding cultural traits, and, in some cases, who maintain family ownership of lands held since antebellum times—even as immigrants settle here in growing numbers. Campanella demonstrates that West Bankers have had great agency in their own place-making, and he challenges the notion that their story is subsidiary to a more important narrative across the river. The West Bank of Greater New Orleans is not a traditional history, nor a cultural history, but rather a historical geography, a spatial explanation of how the West Bank’s landscape formed: its terrain, environment, land use, jurisdictions, waterways, industries, infrastructure, neighborhoods, and settlement patterns, past and present. The book explores the drivers, conditions, and power structures behind those landscape transformations, using custom maps, aerial images, photographic montages, and a detailed historical timeline to help tell that complex geographical story. As Campanella shows, there is no “greater New Orleans” without its cross-river component. The West Bank is an essential part of this remarkable metropolis.

End of An Era

End of An Era
Author: Robert C. Reinders
Publisher: Pelican Publishing
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1999-07-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781455603848

In the decade preceding the Civil War, New Orleans was a boisterous port with one of the most diverse populations in the world. But the city was enjoying a transient heyday, soon to be replaced by devastation and Reconstruction. During the mid-nineteenth century, commerce, culture, architecture, education, and other important facets of life reached their zenith in the fabled Crescent City. But beneath the outwardly carefree surface, yellow fever and typhus claimed thousands of lives every year, branding New Orleans "the most unhealthy city in the world." In this detailed account of an exciting era, Professor Robert C. Reinders weaves the colorful tapestry of a city in its prime; yet what he presents is a New Orleans devoid of many of the legends and myths that have surrounded the city's history. According to Reinders, the Creole aristocracy of the 1850s was a bold lot, much shrewder than has been assumed, with effective commercial ties to American merchants, as well as cultural ties to native France. With more than sixty illustrations and photographs of the city and its key personalities from this period, the New Orleans that emerges in End of an Era is even more fascinating than the one of storied fame.

Touring the Antebellum South with an English Opera Company

Touring the Antebellum South with an English Opera Company
Author: Michael Burden
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2020-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807174467

The diary of Anton Reiff Jr. (c. 1830–1916) is one of only a handful of primary sources to offer a firsthand account of antebellum riverboat travel in the American South. The Pyne and Harrison Opera Troupe, a company run by English sisters Susan and Louisa Pyne and their business partner, tenor William Harrison, hired Reiff, then freelancing in New York, to serve as musical director and conductor for the company’s American itinerary. The grueling tour began in November 1855 in Boston and then proceeded to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, where, after a three-week engagement, the company boarded a paddle steamer bound for New Orleans. It was at that point that Reiff started to keep his diary. Diligently transcribed and annotated by Michael Burden, Reiff’s diary presents an extraordinarily rare view of life with a foreign opera company as it traveled the country by river and rail. Surprisingly, Reiff comments little on the Pyne-Harrison performances themselves, although he does visit the theaters in the river towns, including New Orleans, where he spends evenings both at the French Opera and at the Gaiety. Instead, Reiff focuses his attention on other passengers, on the mechanics of the journey, on the landscape, and on events he encounters, including the 1856 Mardi Gras and the unveiling of the statue of Andrew Jackson in New Orleans's Jackson Square. Reiff is clearly captivated by the river towns and their residents, including the enslaved, whom he encountered whenever the boat tied up. Running throughout the journal is a thread of anxiety, for, apart from the typical dangers of a river trip, the winter of 1855–1856 was one of the coldest of the century, and the steamer had difficulties with river ice. Historians have used Reiff’s journal as source material, but until now the entire text, which is archived in Louisiana State University’s Special Collections in Hill Memorial Library, has only been available in its original state. As a primary source, the published journal will have broad appeal to historians and other readers interested in antebellum riverboat travel, highbrow entertainment, and the people and places of the South.