Enslaved Africans and free people of color of Louisiana deserve the title of "Founding Fathers" just as much as the French, the Spanish, and the Americans. In spite of their subjugated role as slaves, African Americans of Louisiana, and subsequently New Orleans, were contributors to the success of the state and the city far beyond their role within the labor force. Imported into the Louisiana Territory by John Law's Company of the Indies, enslaved Africans, fed on a pound of corn a day, gave birth to American figures of the 19th and 20th centuries. Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Homer Plessy, Marie Laveau, Buddy Bolden, Julies Lion, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the fighting men of the Louisiana Native Guard, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, and many other African Americans contributed to the growth and development of New Orleans. Every African American citizen of New Orleans is intrinsically connected to the city's cultural and political landscape.

Ten years in the making, Gary Rivlin’s Katrina is “a gem of a book—well-reported, deftly written, tightly focused….a starting point for anyone interested in how The City That Care Forgot develops in its second decade of recovery” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. A decade later, journalist Gary Rivlin traces the storm’s immediate damage, the city of New Orleans’s efforts to rebuild itself, and the storm’s lasting effects not just on the area’s geography and infrastructure—but on the psychic, racial, and social fabric of one of this nation’s great cities. Much of New Orleans still sat under water the first time Gary Rivlin glimpsed the city after Hurricane Katrina as a staff reporter for The New York Times. Four out of every five houses had been flooded. The deluge had drowned almost every power substation and rendered unusable most of the city’s water and sewer system. Six weeks after the storm, the city laid off half its workforce—precisely when so many people were turning to its government for help. Meanwhile, cynics both in and out of the Beltway were questioning the use of taxpayer dollars to rebuild a city that sat mostly below sea level. How could the city possibly come back? “Deeply engrossing, well-written, and packed with revealing stories….Rivlin’s exquisitely detailed narrative captures the anger, fatigue, and ambiguity of life during the recovery, the centrality of race at every step along the way, and the generosity of many from elsewhere in the country” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Katrina tells the stories of New Orleanians of all stripes as they confront the aftermath of one of the great tragedies of our age. This is “one of the must-reads of the season” (The New Orleans Advocate).

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast counties. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs. Questions linger: What went wrong? Can it happen again? Is our government equipped to plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural and manmade disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Does race matter? Racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. Race plays out in natural disaster survivors' ability to rebuild, replace infrastructure, obtain loans, and locate temporary and permanent housing. Generally, low-income and people of color disaster victims spend more time in temporary housing, shelters, trailers, mobile homes, and hotels - and are more vulnerable to permanent displacement. Some 'temporary' homes have not proved to be that temporary. In exploring the geography of vulnerability, this book asks why some communities get left behind economically, spatially, and physically before and after disasters strike.

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.

In this critical reader, the best writing of two dozen key figures in qualitative research is gathered together to help students to identify emerging themes in the field and the latest thinking of the leaders in qualitative inquiry. These groundbreaking articles are pulled from a decade of social justice-focused plenary volumes emanating from the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. These are the ideas that have helped shape the landscape of the field over the past decade. This work-brings together the latest work of 25 leading figures in qualitative research from 4 continents;-addresses the central themes of the field over the past decade in theory, methodology, politics, and interventions;-includes contextualizing essays by the volume editors, who direct the Congress.

The incredible story of how New Orleans came back after Hurricane Katrina stronger than before, and how its success can be reproduced, from the man who spearheaded the efforts

Reflects on black politics in America and what it will take to to see equality.