The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square

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Chicago Review Press, 1 ene 2008 - 368 páginas
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.

Dentro del libro

Índice

COLONIZATION
17
REVOLUTION
131
PURCHASE
207
CODA
291
Acknowledgments
314
Notes
319
Bibliography
327
Index
343
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Página 213 - Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.
Página 237 - Jesus, my All, to heaven is gone, He whom I fix my hopes upon; His track I see, and I'll pursue The narrow way, till him I view.
Página 68 - May it please, your worships, these men are great disturbers of the peace, they cannot meet a man upon the road but they must ram a text of Scripture down his throat.
Página 240 - twill never be light; A few more days till we totter on the road: — Then my old Kentucky home, good-night ! Weep no more, my lady, O, weep no more to-day!
Página 214 - ... recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race. To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral.
Página 214 - This greater degree of transpiration renders them more tolerant of heat, and less so of cold, than the whites.
Página 214 - They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning.

Sobre el autor (2008)

Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. Cofounder of the record label Qbadisc, he coproduced the public radio program Afropop Worldwide for seven years. A writer, record producer, and musician, he lives in New York City.

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