Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0743/2007031857-d.html
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Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction | 976.335 SUB | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Tulare Public Library | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-fiction | 976.3 Sub | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune . Winner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Awarded 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.Author Notes
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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this thoughtful, well-researched history, Sublette (Cuba and Its Music) charts the development of New Orleans, from European colonization through the Haitian revolution (which was crucial to French and American negotiations over Louisiana) to the Louisiana Purchase. Central to his account are the African slaves, who began arriving in New Orleans in 1719, and their contributions to the city's musical life. He considers, for example, how musical influences from different parts of Africa-Kongo drumming and Senegambian banjo playing-combined to forge a distinctive musical culture. Sublette also lucidly discusses New Orleans' important role in the domestic slave trade, arguing persuasively that the culture of slavery in New Orleans was different from that in Virginia or South Carolina. In New Orleans, there was a large population of free blacks, and slaves there had "greater relative freedom" than elsewhere. Furthermore, by the early 19th century, Louisiana was home to more African-born slaves than the Upper South. Those factors, which helped perpetuate African religion and dance, combined to offer "an alternative path of development for African American culture." As our nation continues to ponder the future of the Big Easy, Sublette offers an informative accounting of that great city's past. 20 b&w photos. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the rush to analyze New Orleans after Katrina, this articulate and intensely researched history provides not only an impressive look at its subject but also should serve as a model for any future works on great American cities. As he tracks discovery by the French, colonization by the Spanish, and eventual possession by the Americans, Sublette reveals how each nation implanted its character on the Crescent City's development. Most startling will be his discussion of the deep Cuban and Haitian connections and the cultural and economic effect these Caribbean islands have on present day society and industry. As the author of Cuba and Its Music (2007), Sublette gives the city's musical legacy its due and investigates Congo Square with its tradition of late night celebrations rooted in distant African life, which provided a permanent link between the two continents. He finishes with an insightful discussion on the Mardi Gras Indians, significant groups who are keeping New Orleans' history of slavery and hard-fought freedom alive. Cultural studies and history do not get much better than this, a must read for anyone who wonders why this city must be saved.--Mondor, Colleen Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
An 1817 plan of New Orleans, engraved by William Rollinson. BY JASON BERRY IN August 1769, a fleet of 12 Spanish ships carrying 2,000 troops sailed into the port of New Orleans. Alejandro O'Reilly, a Dublin-born officer of the Spanish military, was sent there to punish the rebellious leaders of a French town that had recently become a property of Spain. Since its founding in 1718, tiny New Orleans had scraped by on tobacco and indigo crops, a profitless outback of the French Empire. In contrast, the island of St. Domingue, with 400,000 slaves, had booming profits in sugar. Louis XV, reeling from wartime losses to Britain, gave Louisiana's city to Spain. Deprived of French markets, Creole planters and merchants ran O'Reilly's predecessor out of town. O'Reilly promptly ordered that five rebel leaders be shot and five others shipped to prison in Havana, the base of Spain's colonial empire. Though O'Reilly established Spain's command "in no uncertain terms," the policies he and subsequent Spanish governors put in place "were relatively progressive, at least by colonial standards," Ned Sublette writes in "The World That Made New Orleans," an absorbing study of the transition from colony to American city. Spanish governors gave Louisiana planters access to Spanish markets. They gave slaves more latitude to buy their freedom, and used blacks in free militias to defend the city and suppress slave revolts. When Spain withdrew from New Orleans shortly before the Louisiana Purchase (1803), no other Southern city had as many taverns that catered to slaves or as many free people of color. The author of the well-received "Cuba and Its Music," Sublette here explores Cuba and St. Domingue as crucial influences on New Orleans. A slave revolt that erupted in 1791 in St. Domingue ended in 1804 as free blacks proclaimed the Republic of Haiti. In 1809-10, approximately 10,000 Domingans (more than a third of them slaves) who had fled to Cuba immigrated to New Orleans, doubling its population. "No aspect of New Orleans culture," Sublette writes, "remained untouched" by these whites, blacks and mulattoes. He is a passionate chronicler of the Africans' resilience, of how they revived a cultural memory that gave life to music and enduring folkways - a memory that would, in the timeless words of an 1819 traveler, "rock the city with their Congo dances." Sublette spotlights a gathering identity that formed in the open-air slave dances - hundreds of people, gyrating in sinuous rings, resurrecting tribal choreographies of a mother culture. "An African-American music was coming into existence," he writes. The field where Africans danced, behind the town's ramparts, near a huge cypress swamp, became known as Congo Square. Today, as a corner of Louis Armstrong Park, it is hallowed ground for musicians, a seedbed of classic jazz. For all of his lucid cultural probing, Sublette tends to use speculative terms that weaken his case. For example: "There must have been undocumented and unmeasurable contact between blacks in New Orleans and Havana." In part, the book is also a polemic against slavery, with Thomas Jefferson as archvillain. "He lived his entire life dependent on the income from slave labor," Sublette writes of Jefferson, whom he calls "both insolvent and fabulously wealthy." Plantation owners' "best, and most liquid, asset was their Negroes, who formed the basis of their credit," he asserts. Slavery may be the great sin of American history; however, it had its ambiguities. In New Orleans, free people of color made up a sizable slave-owning class - even though they identified with revolutionary France's Declaration of the Rights of Man. Such ironies converged in a Creole society that the French would call un métissage culturel - a culture made of mingled bloodlines. Stories of fictitious gold and silver mines in Parisian newspapers failed to lure early settlers. And so, officials in Paris shipped prostitutes and female prisoners to a faraway port whose founder, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, complained about his men running off with Indian women. Hammered by heat and floods, Bienville's town would have succumbed to starvation had it not been for sympathetic Indians in times of famine. In the early slaves from Senegambia who brought rice seedlings and artisan skills, Sublette finds nurturers of a culture. Later waves of Germans, Irish and Italians found laws barring interracial marriage that stood out in relief from real life, as people paired across color lines. The city as a crossroads of humanity inspired a long line of writers, from George Washington Cable to Valerie Martin. But the cultural memory truly radiated in music, from Louis Moreau Gottschalk to Louis Armstrong, from Fats Domino to Wynton Marsalis and Donald Harrison Jr. Hurricane Katrina traumatized the city; the country that had put men on the moon could not rescue people in a flood. "They refused to cooperate in their own erasure," Sublette writes in a ringing coda about Mardi Gras Indians after Katrina. "They rocked the city with their Congo dances." Jason Berry's books include "Last of the Red Hot Poppas" and "Up From the Cradle of Jazz." He is at work on a book and companion film that follow funeral traditions as a mirror on New Orleans history.
Choice Review
Sublette's latest book should be of great interest to nonspecialist readers of history and students of African American music and the culture of New Orleans. The bulk of the book recounts the history of Louisiana from the earliest colonial enterprises through statehood, based exclusively on secondary sources. While this limits the book's appeal to students of Louisiana history, the author's dedication to placing the familiar events in global and hemispheric economic, political, and social contexts makes the history relevant and understandable. The book contains several contemporary maps, but the inclusion of additional specifically drawn illustrative maps would strengthen the narrative. Throughout the book, Sublette features the roots of African American musical tradition. This coverage concludes with an absolutely fascinating ethnographic chapter on the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians and the struggle to preserve that cultural heritage in the post-Hurricane Katrina environment. The book merits strong consideration by libraries that collect African American music and culture, ethnomusicology, and the cultural heritage of New Orleans and Louisiana. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries. B. M. Banta Arkansas State University
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-This book explores the economic and cultural roots of New Orleans. With the exception of a brief coda that reflects on recent Mardi Gras celebrations, Sublette focuses on the pre-20th-century history that shaped the modern city. The author traces its origins across the Atlantic to 18th-century monarchs and the French Revolution. He follows the city's development chronologically, noting that Spanish explorers and a thriving slave trade with the west coast of Africa also left their mark. These influences are evident in the music and dance whose legacy reaches far beyond the Mississippi Delta. Sublette's style is delightfully readable, avoiding stilted academic prose while maintaining a scholarly approach that is peppered with fascinating details. Filled with period maps, this volume will appeal to history buffs and readers interested in the musical heritage of New Orleans.-Heidi Dolamore, San Mateo County Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Broad, overambitious cultural history of New Orleans, from its inauspicious beginnings to its arrival as an important American city by 1819. Radio and music producer Sublette (Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, 2004) plows through several centuries, never quite deciding whether to concentrate on history or culture--or on what to omit. After a marshy site at the mouth of the Mississippi was reluctantly chosen by the French in 1698 as a post to keep out the British, he writes, New Orleans soon joined Santo Domingo and Havana as part of a preeminent metropolis in the region--the three cities constantly changed colonial masters and influenced each other profoundly. Unable to make New Orleans attractive to settlers, the French had to rely on forced emigration (it was briefly a penal colony). The duc d'Orleans hoped to make the city profitable by licensing Scottish speculator John Law's notorious Mississippi Company; frenzied speculation and then a hideous 1721 crash did nothing for the city's financial stability. Consequently, the fledgling town took on a unique personality during the two principal periods identified by the author. The French era got underway when African slaves began arriving in 1719. Mostly from Senegal, many were sophisticated artisans and brought with them distinct forms of dancing, drums and music. The Spanish period began in 1762, when Louis XV gave the territory to his cousin Carlos III, and ended with Napoleon's sale of Louisiana to America in 1803. The Spanish, Sublette argues, gave New Orleans its definitive character, establishing a strong town council and creating a true urban center. Under a relatively progressive legal code, slaves could own property and buy their freedom. Describing New Orleans culture as an ajiaco (stew), Sublette throws a few too many ingredients into the pot, incorporating revolutions in America, France and Haiti as well as myriad forms of music and religion. A heady but often murky brew. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.