When Belgian scientist Jean-Charles Houzeau arrived in New Orleans in 1857, he was disturbed that America, founded on the principle of freedom, still tolerated the institution of slavery. In late 1864, he became managing editor of the New Orleans Tribune, the first black daily newspaper published in the United States. Ardently sympathetic to the plight of Louisiana’s black population and reveling in the fact that his dark complexion led many people to assume he was black himself, Houzeau passionately embraced his role as the Tribune’s editor and principal writer. My Passage at the New Orleans “Tribune,” first published in Belgium in 1872, is Houzeau’s memoir of the four years he spent as both observer and participant in the drama of Reconstruction. Houzeau records the efforts of New Orleans’s free blacks to secure their civil rights and to assume as well the cause of the newly freed slaves. With a scientist’s keen and sensitive eye, he observes the turmoil of Reconstruction in Louisiana and recalls the per-sonalities of the black leaders, the tensions within the black community, and his own day-to-day struggle to make the Tribune a nationally respected vehicle for the advancement of black rights and equality. Scholars have long recognized the importance of the New Orleans Tribune as a source for both southern and African American history. My Passage at the New Orleans “Tribune,” meticulously edited and annotated by David C. Rankin, offers a unique firsthand account of the newspaper’s operation and crusade, written by the energetic and dedicated man who guided it to prominence.

When Belgian scientist Jean-Charles Houzeau arrived in New Orleans in 1857, he was disturbed that America, founded on the principle of freedom, still tolerated the institution of slavery. In late 1864, he became managing editor of the New Orleans Tribune, the first black daily newspaper published in the United States. Ardently sympathetic to the plight of Louisiana’s black population and reveling in the fact that his dark complexion led many people to assume he was black himself, Houzeau passionately embraced his role as the Tribune’s editor and principal writer. My Passage at the New Orleans “Tribune,” first published in Belgium in 1872, is Houzeau’s memoir of the four years he spent as both observer and participant in the drama of Reconstruction. Houzeau records the efforts of New Orleans’s free blacks to secure their civil rights and to assume as well the cause of the newly freed slaves. With a scientist’s keen and sensitive eye, he observes the turmoil of Reconstruction in Louisiana and recalls the per-sonalities of the black leaders, the tensions within the black community, and his own day-to-day struggle to make the Tribune a nationally respected vehicle for the advancement of black rights and equality. Scholars have long recognized the importance of the New Orleans Tribune as a source for both southern and African American history. My Passage at the New Orleans “Tribune,” meticulously edited and annotated by David C. Rankin, offers a unique firsthand account of the newspaper’s operation and crusade, written by the energetic and dedicated man who guided it to prominence.

Historian Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the 19th-century city. Using as examples New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco, Ryan illustrates the way in which American cities of the 19th century were as full of cultural differences and as fractured by social and economic changes as any metropolis today. 41 photos.

"During the nineteenth century, American and foreign travelers often found New Orleans a delightful, exotic stop on their journeys; few failed to marvel at the riverfront, the center of the city's economic activity. . . . But absent from the tourism industry's historical recollection is any reference to the immigrants or black migrants and their children who constituted the army of laborers along the riverfront and provided the essential human power to keep the cotton, sugar, and other goods flowing. . . . In examining one diverse group of workers--the 10,000 to 15,000 cotton screwmen, longshoremen, cotton and round freight teamsters, cotton yardmen, railroad freight handlers, and Mississippi River roustabouts--this book focuses primarily on the workplace and the labor movement that emerged along the waterfront."--From the preface

Nowhere in the United States did the Age of Democratic Revolution exert as profound an influence as in New Orleans. In 1809–10, refugees of the Haitian Revolution doubled the size of the city. In 1811, hundreds of Saint-Dominguan, African, and Louisianan plantation workers marched downriver toward the city in the nation’s largest-ever slave revolt. Itinerant revolutionaries from throughout the Atlantic congregated in New Orleans in the cause of Latin American independence. Together with the refugee soldiers of the Haitian Revolution (both Black and white), their presence proved decisive in the Battle of New Orleans. After defeating the British, the soldiers rejoined the struggle against Spanish imperialism. In Creole New Orleans in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1775–1877, Caryn Cossé Bell sets forth these momentous events and much more to document the revolutionary era’s impact on the city. Bell’s study begins with the 1883 memoir of Hélène d’Aquin Allain, a French Creole and descendant of the refugee community, who grew up in antebellum New Orleans. Allain’s d’Aquin forebears fought alongside the Savarys, a politically influential free family of color, in the Haitian Revolution. Forced from Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the allied families retreated to New Orleans. Bell’s reconstruction of the d’Aquin family network, interracial alliances, and business partnerships provides a productive framework for exploring the city’s presence at the crossroads of the revolutionary Atlantic. Residing in New Orleans in the heyday of French Romanticism, Allain experienced a cultural revolution that exerted an enormous influence on religious beliefs, literature, politics, and even, as Bell documents, the practice of medicine in the city. In France, the highly politicized nature of the movement culminated in the 1848 French Revolution with its abolition of slavery and enfranchisement of freed men and women. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Afro-Creole leaders of the diasporic community pointed to events in France and stood in the forefront of the struggle to revolutionize race relations in their own nation. As Bell demonstrates, their cultural and political legacy remains a formidable presence in twenty-first-century New Orleans.

A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white. In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all. In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day. The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.