Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization

Rating:
Summary: OUTSTANDING!
Review: Creole New Orleans is an excellent account of the shaping of the city of New Orleans, from its early days as a colonial city of the French and Spanish, through the modern city. The book focuses on the gradual americanization of the city and the implications this had for its residents, using the unique race relations in New Orleans as measuring stick.

The editors and co-authors Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon compiled a series of six essays, broken into three sections of the book. The first section focuses on colonial New Orleans, and the development of the French assimilationist ethos in the policies of French and Spanish Louisiana, especially with regards to slaves, free people of color, and native americans. Part Two deals with The American period. It traces the slow Americanization process of the city. It also explains how different groups, like the Foreign French helped, to stave off the rising tide of Americanization. And finally, Part Three focuses on New Orleans' black community. Attention is given to the rifts developing between Afro-Creoles and Afro-Americans and their struggles over Reconstruction. And it ends with New Orleans in the twentieth century. They explain how the Creole protest tradition in New Orleans was continued in the modern political and social arenas.

This book was extremely informative and thoroughly researched. It did a marvelous job of explaining why New Orleans, often thought to be an exotic and un-American city, is in fact, extremely American. The authors are able to give a convincing account about how the city of New Orleans, through its unique development, has maintained its heritage while adapting to the ways of the rest of the United States. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American History, Black History, or Louisiana History.