Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories

Download Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Alabama Press
ISBN 13 : 0817313389
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (173 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories by : James Nagel

Download or read book Race and Culture in New Orleans Stories written by James Nagel and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2014-02-14 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of these historical factors energize and enrich the fiction of this important region. The literary context of these volumes is also central to understanding their place in literary history. They are short-story cycles--collections of short fiction that contain unifying settings, recurring characters or character types, and central themes and motifs. They are also examples of the "local color" tradition in fiction, a movement that has been much misunderstood. Nagel maintains that "local color" literature was meant to be the highest form of American writing, not the lowest, and its objective was to capture the locations, folkways, values, dialects, conflicts, and ways of life in the various regions of the country in order to show that the lives of common citizens were sufficiently important to be the subject of serious literature.

Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

Download Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801898781
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans by : Jennifer M. Spear

Download or read book Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans written by Jennifer M. Spear and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2009 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History, The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association A microcosm of exaggerated societal extremes—poverty and wealth, vice and virtue, elitism and equality—New Orleans is a tangled web of race, cultural mores, and sexual identities. Jennifer M. Spear's examination of the dialectical relationship between politics and social practice unravels the city’s construction of race during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spear brings together archival evidence from three different languages and the most recent and respected scholarship on racial formation and interracial sex to explain why free people of color became a significant population in the early days of New Orleans and to show how authorities attempted to use concepts of race and social hierarchy to impose order on a decidedly disorderly society. She recounts and analyzes the major conflicts that influenced New Orleanian culture: legal attempts to impose racial barriers and social order, political battles over propriety and freedom, and cultural clashes over place and progress. At each turn, Spear’s narrative challenges the prevailing academic assumptions and supports her efforts to move exploration of racial formation away from cultural and political discourses and toward social histories. Strikingly argued, richly researched, and methodologically sound, this wide-ranging look at how choices about sex triumphed over established class systems and artificial racial boundaries supplies a refreshing contribution to the history of early Louisiana.

Creole New Orleans

Download Creole New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807117743
Total Pages : 356 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (177 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Creole New Orleans by : Arnold R. Hirsch

Download or read book Creole New Orleans written by Arnold R. Hirsch and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1992-09-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community. Essays in the book's first section focus not only on the formation of the curiously blended Franco-African culture but also on how that culture, once established, resisted change and allowed New Orleans to develop along French and African creole lines until the early nineteenth century. Jerah Johnson explores the motives and objectives of Louisiana's French founders, giving that issue the most searching analysis it has yet received. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, in her account of the origins of New Orleans' free black population, offers a new approach to the early history of Africans in colonial Louisiana. The second part of the book focuses on the challenge of incorporating New Orleans into the United States. As Paul F. LaChance points out, the French immigrants who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase slowed the Americanization process by preserving the city's creole culture. Joesph Tregle then presents a clear, concise account of the clash that occurred between white creoles and the many white Americans who during the 1800s migrated to the city. His analysis demonstrates how race finally brought an accommodation between the white creole and American leaders. The third section centers on the evolution of the city's race relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell begin by tracing the ethno-cultural fault line that divided black Americans and creole through Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Arnold R. Hirsch pursues the themes discerned by Logsdon and Bell from the turn of the century to the 1980s, examining the transformation of the city's racial politics. Collectively, these essays fill a major void in Louisiana history while making a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, ethnicity, and race relations. The book will serve as a cornerstone for future study of the history of New Orleans.

Authentic New Orleans

Download Authentic New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814731864
Total Pages : 296 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (147 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Authentic New Orleans by : Kevin Fox Gotham

Download or read book Authentic New Orleans written by Kevin Fox Gotham and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention for the 2008 Robert Park Outstanding Book Award given by the ASA’s Community and Urban Sociology Section Mardi Gras, jazz, voodoo, gumbo, Bourbon Street, the French Quarter—all evoke that place that is unlike any other: New Orleans. In Authentic New Orleans, Kevin Fox Gotham explains how New Orleans became a tourist town, a spectacular locale known as much for its excesses as for its quirky Southern charm. Gotham begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina amid the whirlwind of speculation about the rebuilding of the city and the dread of outsiders wiping New Orleans clean of the grit that made it great. He continues with the origins of Carnival and the Mardi Gras celebration in the nineteenth century, showing how, through careful planning and promotion, the city constructed itself as a major tourist attraction. By examining various image-building campaigns and promotional strategies to disseminate a palatable image of New Orleans on a national scale Gotham ultimately establishes New Orleans as one of the originators of the mass tourism industry—which linked leisure to travel, promoted international expositions, and developed the concept of pleasure travel. Gotham shows how New Orleans was able to become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the United States, especially through the transformation of Mardi Gras into a national, even international, event. All the while Gotham is concerned with showing the difference between tourism from above and tourism from below—that is, how New Orleans’ distinctiveness is both maximized, some might say exploited, to serve the global economy of tourism as well as how local groups and individuals use tourism to preserve and anchor longstanding communal traditions.

Subversive Sounds

Download Subversive Sounds PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226328694
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (263 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Subversive Sounds by : Charles B. Hersch

Download or read book Subversive Sounds written by Charles B. Hersch and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Subversive Sounds probes New Orleans’s history, uncovering a web of racial interconnections and animosities that was instrumental to the creation of a vital American art form—jazz. Drawing on oral histories, police reports, newspaper accounts, and vintage recordings, Charles Hersch brings to vivid life the neighborhoods and nightspots where jazz was born. This volume shows how musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton, Nick La Rocca, and Louis Armstrong negotiated New Orleans’s complex racial rules to pursue their craft and how, in order to widen their audiences, they became fluent in a variety of musical traditions from diverse ethnic sources. These encounters with other music and races subverted their own racial identities and changed the way they played—a musical miscegenation that, in the shadow of Jim Crow, undermined the pursuit of racial purity and indelibly transformed American culture. “More than timely . . . Hersch orchestrates voices of musicians on both sides of the racial divide in underscoring how porous the music made the boundaries of race and class.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans

Download Desire and Disaster in New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822376350
Total Pages : 405 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Desire and Disaster in New Orleans by : Lynnell L. Thomas

Download or read book Desire and Disaster in New Orleans written by Lynnell L. Thomas and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-25 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the narratives packaged for New Orleans's many tourists cultivate a desire for black culture—jazz, cuisine, dance—while simultaneously targeting black people and their communities as sources and sites of political, social, and natural disaster. In this timely book, the Americanist and New Orleans native Lynnell L. Thomas delves into the relationship between tourism, cultural production, and racial politics. She carefully interprets the racial narratives embedded in tourism websites, travel guides, business periodicals, and newspapers; the thoughts of tour guides and owners; and the stories told on bus and walking tours as they were conducted both before and after Katrina. She describes how, with varying degrees of success, African American tour guides, tour owners, and tourism industry officials have used their own black heritage tours and tourism-focused businesses to challenge exclusionary tourist representations. Taking readers from the Lower Ninth Ward to the White House, Thomas highlights the ways that popular culture and public policy converge to create a mythology of racial harmony that masks a long history of racial inequality and structural inequity.

New Orleans after the Civil War

Download New Orleans after the Civil War PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801899974
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis New Orleans after the Civil War by : Justin A. Nystrom

Download or read book New Orleans after the Civil War written by Justin A. Nystrom and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We often think of Reconstruction as an unfinished revolution. Justin A. Nystrom’s original study of the aftermath of emancipation in New Orleans takes a different perspective, arguing that the politics of the era were less of a binary struggle over political supremacy and morality than they were about a quest for stability in a world rendered uncertain and unfamiliar by the collapse of slavery. Commercially vibrant and racially unique before the Civil War, New Orleans after secession and following Appomattox provides an especially interesting case study in political and social adjustment. Taking a generational view and using longitudinal studies of some of the major political players of the era, New Orleans after the Civil War asks fundamentally new questions about life in the post–Civil War South: Who would emerge as leaders in the prostrate but economically ambitious city? How would whites who differed over secession come together over postwar policy? Where would the mixed-race middle class and newly freed slaves fit in the new order? Nystrom follows not only the period’s broad contours and occasional bloody conflicts but also the coalition building and the often surprising liaisons that formed to address these and related issues. His unusual approach breaks free from the worn stereotypes of Reconstruction to explore the uncertainty, self-doubt, and moral complexity that haunted Southerners after the war. This probing look at a generation of New Orleanians and how they redefined a society shattered by the Civil War engages historical actors on their own terms and makes real the human dimension of life during this difficult period in American history.

Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans

Download Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807167762
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans by : Urmi Engineer Willoughby

Download or read book Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans written by Urmi Engineer Willoughby and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-13 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the innovative perspective of environment and culture, Urmi Engineer Willoughby examines yellow fever in New Orleans from 1796 to 1905. Linking local epidemics to the city’s place in the Atlantic world, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans analyzes how incidences of and responses to the disease grew out of an environment shaped by sugar production, slavery, and urban development. Willoughby argues that transnational processes—including patterns of migration, industrialization, and imperialism—contributed to ecological changes that enabled yellow fever–carrying Aedes aëgypti mosquitoes to thrive and transmit the disease in New Orleans, challenging presumptions that yellow fever was primarily transported to the Americas on slave ships. She then traces the origin and spread of medical and popular beliefs about yellow fever immunity, from the early nineteenth-century contention that natives of New Orleans were protected, to the gradual emphasis on race as a determinant of immunity, reflecting social tensions over the abolition of slavery around the world. As the nineteenth century unfolded, ideas of biological differences between the races calcified, even as public health infrastructure expanded, and race continued to play a central role in the diagnosis and prevention of the disease. State and federal governments began to create boards and organizations responsible for preventing new outbreaks and providing care during epidemics, though medical authorities ignored evidence of black victims of yellow fever. Willoughby argues that American imperialist ambitions also contributed to yellow fever eradication and the growth of the field of tropical medicine: U.S. commercial interests in the tropical zones that grew crops like sugar cane, bananas, and coffee engendered cooperation between medical professionals and American military forces in Latin America, which in turn enabled public health campaigns to research and eliminate yellow fever in New Orleans. A signal contribution to the field of disease ecology, Yellow Fever, Race, and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans delineates events that shaped the Crescent City’s epidemiological history, shedding light on the spread and eradication of yellow fever in the Atlantic World.

Caribbean New Orleans

Download Caribbean New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 146964519X
Total Pages : 552 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Caribbean New Orleans by : Cécile Vidal

Download or read book Caribbean New Orleans written by Cécile Vidal and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Stories of the South

Download Stories of the South PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 1469614189
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (696 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Stories of the South by : K. Stephen Prince

Download or read book Stories of the South written by K. Stephen Prince and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2014 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the North assumed significant power to redefine the South, imagining a region rebuilt and modeled on northern society. The white South actively resisted these efforts, battling the legal strictures of Reconstruction on the ground. Meanwhile, white southern storytellers worked to recast the South's image, romanticizing the Lost Cause and heralding the birth of a New South. Prince argues that this cultural production was as important as political competition and economic striving in turning the South and the nation away from the egalitarian promises of Reconstruction and toward Jim Crow.

Tremé

Download Tremé PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Georgia Press
ISBN 13 : 0820337609
Total Pages : 188 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (23 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Tremé by : Michael E. Crutcher, Jr.

Download or read book Tremé written by Michael E. Crutcher, Jr. and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-12-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, the Faubourg Tremé neighborhood is arguably the most important location for African American culture in New Orleans. Closely associated with traditional jazz and “second line” parading, Tremé is now the setting for an eponymous television series created by David Simon (best known for his work on The Wire). Michael Crutcher argues that Tremé’s story is essentially spatial—a story of how neighborhood boundaries are drawn and take on meaning and of how places within neighborhoods are made and unmade by people and politics. Tremé has long been sealed off from more prominent parts of the city, originally by the fortified walls that gave Rampart Street its name, and so has become a refuge for less powerful New Orleanians. This notion of Tremé as a safe haven—the flipside of its reputation as a “neglected” place—has been essential to its role as a cultural incubator, Crutcher argues, from the antebellum slave dances in Congo Square to jazz pickup sessions at Joe’s Cozy Corner. Tremé takes up a wide range of issues in urban life, including highway construction, gentrification, and the role of public architecture in sustaining collective memory. Equally sensitive both to black-white relations and to differences within the African American community, it is a vivid evocation of one of America’s most distinctive places.

The Greatest Fury

Download The Greatest Fury PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0399585230
Total Pages : 412 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (995 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Greatest Fury by : William C Davis

Download or read book The Greatest Fury written by William C Davis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Davis’s accounts of small fights won by hot blood and cold steel are thrilling.”—The Wall Street Journal From master historian William C. Davis, the definitive story of the Battle of New Orleans, the fight that decided the ultimate fate not only of the War of 1812 but the future course of the fledgling American republic. It was a battle that could not be won. Outnumbered farmers, merchants, backwoodsmen, smugglers, slaves, and Choctaw Indians, many of them unarmed, were up against the cream of the British army, professional soldiers who had defeated the great Napoleon and set Washington, D.C., ablaze. At stake was nothing less than the future of the vast American heartland, from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, as the ragtag American forces fought to hold New Orleans, the gateway of the Mississippi River and an inland empire. Tipping the balance of power in the New World, this single battle irrevocably shifted the young republic's political and cultural center of gravity and kept the British from ever regaining dominance in North America. In this gripping, comprehensive study of the Battle of New Orleans, William C. Davis examines the key players and strategy of King George's Red Coats and Andrew Jackson's makeshift "army." A master historian, he expertly weaves together narratives of personal motivation and geopolitical implications that make this battle one of the most impactful ever fought on American soil.

The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction

Download The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393247457
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (932 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by : Daniel Brook

Download or read book The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction written by Daniel Brook and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white. Brutal slavery existed all over the New World, but only America followed emancipation with a twisted system of segregation. The Accident of Color asks why. Searching for answers, Daniel Brook journeys to the places that resisted Jim Crow the longest. In the cosmopolitan port cities of New Orleans and Charleston, integrated streetcars plied avenues patrolled by integrated police forces for decades after the Civil War. This progress was ushered in during Reconstruction when long-free, openly biracial communities joined in coalition with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness. Tragically, their victories—including integrated schools—and their alliance itself were violently uprooted by segregation along a stark, new black-white color line. By revisiting a turning point in the construction of America’s uniquely restrictive racial system, The Accident of Color brings to life a moment from our past that illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans

Download Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780691121482
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (214 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans by : James B. Bennett

Download or read book Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans written by James B. Bennett and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

The Story of French New Orleans

Download The Story of French New Orleans PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496804872
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Story of French New Orleans by : Dianne Guenin-Lelle

Download or read book The Story of French New Orleans written by Dianne Guenin-Lelle and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2016-02-04 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

Lords of Misrule

Download Lords of Misrule PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 9781604736380
Total Pages : 316 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (363 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Lords of Misrule by : James Gill

Download or read book Lords of Misrule written by James Gill and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1997 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mardi Gras remains one of the most distinctive features of New Orleans. Although the city has celerated Carnival since its days as a French and Spanish colonial outpost, the rituals familiar today were largely established in the Civil War era by a white male elite." -- back cover.

The 'Baby Dolls'

Download The 'Baby Dolls' PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 080715072X
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The 'Baby Dolls' by : Kim Marie Vaz

Download or read book The 'Baby Dolls' written by Kim Marie Vaz and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-01-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the first women's organizations to mask and perform during Mardi Gras, the Million Dollar Baby Dolls redefined the New Orleans carnival tradition. Tracing their origins from Storyville-era brothels and dance halls to their re-emergence in post-Katrina New Orleans, author Kim Marie Vaz uncovers the fascinating history of the "raddy-walking, shake-dancing, cigar-smoking, money-flinging" ladies who strutted their way into a predominantly male establishment. The Baby Dolls formed around 1912 as an organization of African American women who used their profits from working in New Orleans's red-light district to compete with other Black prostitutes on Mardi Gras. Part of this event involved the tradition of masking, in which carnival groups create a collective identity through costuming. Their baby doll costumes -- short satin dresses, stockings with garters, and bonnets -- set against a bold and provocative public behavior not only exploited stereotypes but also empowered and made visible an otherwise marginalized female demographic. Over time, different neighborhoods adopted the Baby Doll tradition, stirring the creative imagination of Black women and men across New Orleans, from the downtown Trem area to the uptown community of Mahalia Jackson. Vaz follows the Baby Doll phenomenon through one hundred years with photos, articles, and interviews and concludes with the birth of contemporary groups, emphasizing these organizations' crucial contribution to Louisiana's cultural history.