All New Orleans' glories, tragedies, contributions, and complexities can be traced back to the geographical dilemma Bienville confronted in 1718 when selecting the primary location of New Orleans. "Bienville's Dilemma" presents sixty-eight articles on the historical geography of New Orleans, covering the formation and foundation of the city, its urbanization and population, its "humanization" into a place of distinction, the manipulation of its environment, its devastation by Hurricane Katrina, and its ongoing recovery.

Exploring the Crescent City from the ground up, Richard Campanella takes us on a winding journey toward explaining the city’s distinct urbanism and eccentricities. In Cityscapes of New Orleans, Campanella—a historical geographer and professor at Tulane University—reveals the why behind the where, delving into the historical and cultural forces that have shaped the spaces of New Orleans for over three centuries. For Campanella, every bewildering street grid and linguistic quirk has a story to tell about the landscape of Louisiana and the geography of its bestknown city. Cityscapes of New Orleans starts with an examination of neighborhoods, from the origins of faubourgs and wards to the impact of the slave trade on patterns of residence. Campanella explains how fragments of New Orleans streets continue to elude Google Maps and why humble Creole cottages sit alongside massive Greek Revival mansions. He considers the roles of modern urban planning, environmentalism, and preservation, all of which continue to influence the layout of the city and its suburbs. In the book’s final section, Campanella explores the impact of natural disasters as well-known as Hurricane Katrina and as unfamiliar as “Sauvé’s Crevasse,” an 1849 levee break that flooded over two hundred city blocks. Cityscapes of New Orleans offers a wealth of perspectives for uninitiated visitors and transplanted citizens still confounded by terms like “neutral ground,” as well as native-born New Orleanians trying to understand the Canal Street Sinkhole. Campanella shows us a vibrant metropolis with stories around every corner.

Biographical look at Bienville's life from his beginnings in Canada through his last years.

Chronicles the history of the city from its being contended over as swampland through Louisiana's statehood in 1812, discussing its motley identities as a French village, African market town, Spanish fortress, and trade center.

Building the Devil’s Empire is the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, tracing the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth features a cast of strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. But she also widens her lens to reveal the port city’s global significance, examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean, and she concludes that by exemplifying a kind of rogue colonialism—where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entwined—New Orleans should prompt us to reconsider our notions of how colonialism works. "[A] penetrating study of the colony's founding."—Nation “A brilliant and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence of French New Orleans. Dawdy leads us deep into the daily life of the city, and along the many paths that connected it to France, the North American interior, and the Greater Caribbean. A major contribution to our understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic, the work is also a model of interdisciplinary research and analysis, skillfully bringing together archival research, archaeology, and literary analysis.”—Laurent Dubois, Duke University

In From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, design expert Alison Sant focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. Sant presents 12 case studies, drawn from research and over 90 interviews with people who are working in these communities to make a difference. These efforts show how US cities are reclaiming their streets from cars, restoring watersheds, growing forests, and adapting shorelines to improve people's lives while addressing our changing climate. From the Ground Up is a call to action. When we make the places we live more climate resilient, we need to acknowledge and address the history of social and racial injustice. Advocates, non-profit organizations, community-based groups, and government officials will find examples of how to build alliances to support and embolden this vision together.

Argues that post-Katrina New Orleans is a key site for exploring competing narratives of American decline and renewal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Through the lens provided by the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, After Katrina argues that the city of New Orleans emerges as a key site for exploring competing narratives of US decline and renewal at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Deploying an interdisciplinary approach to explore cultural representations of the post-storm city, Anna Hartnell suggests that New Orleans has been reimagined as a laboratory for a racialized neoliberalism, and as such might be seen as a terminus of the American dream. This US disaster zone has unveiled a network of social and environmental crises that demonstrate that prospects of social mobility have dwindled as environmental degradation and coastal erosion emerge as major threats not just to the quality of life but to the possibility of life in coastal communities across America and the world. And yet After Katrina also suggests that New Orleans culture offers a way of thinking about the United States in terms that transcend the binary of national renewal or declension. The post-Hurricane city thus emerges as a flashpoint for reflecting on the contemporary United States.