Comprehensive examination of the state's spiritual development.

"Marking the first study to take the Louisiana Purchase as the focal point for considering development of American religious history, this collection of essays takes up the religious history of the region including perspectives from New Orleans and the Caribbean and the roots of Pentecostalism and Vodou"-- Provided by publisher.

Over the course of its three-hundred-year history, the Catholic Church in Louisiana witnessed a prolonged shift from French to English, with some south Louisiana churches continuing to prepare marriage, baptism, and burial records in French as late as the mid-twentieth century. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 navigates a complex and lengthy process, presenting a nuanced picture of language change within the Church and situating its practices within the state’s sociolinguistic evolution. Mining three centuries of evidence from the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives, the authors discover proof of an extraordinary one-hundred-year rise and fall of bilingualism in Louisiana. The multiethnic laity, clergy, and religious in the nineteenth century necessitated the use of multiple languages in church functions, and bilingualism remained an ordinary aspect of church life through the antebellum period. After the Civil War, however, the authors show a steady crossover from French to English in the Church, influenced in large part by an active Irish population. It wasn’t until decades later, around 1910, that the Church began to embrace English monolingualism and French faded from use. The authors’ extensive research and analysis draws on quantitative and qualitative data, geographical models, methods of ethnography, and cultural studies. They evaluated 4,000 letters, written mostly in French, from 1720 to 1859; sacramental registers from more than 250 churches; parish reports; diocesan council minutes; and unpublished material from French archives. Their findings illuminate how the Church’s hierarchical structure of authority, its social constraints, and the attitudes of its local priests and laity affected language maintenance and change, particularly during the major political and social developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 goes beyond the “triumph of English” or “tragedy of Cajun French” stereotypes to show how south Louisiana negotiated language use and how Christianization was a powerful linguistic and cultural assimilator.

Voodoo probably isn’t what you believe it is. Louisiana Voodoo, also identified as New Orleans Voodoo, represents an inclination of spiritual folkways developed from the traditions of the African displacement. Voodoo is one of America’s great native-born religious beliefs.

The social dichotomy in Louisiana between Protestantism and Catholicism, already statistically apparent by religious census data in 1890, remained apparent into the twentieth century. By 1936, the date of the United States government's fifth and last religious census, North and South Louisiana had become more firmly differentiated by religious affiliation than in 1890, when the first government religious census was taken. From the beginning of Louisiana's settlement by different ethnic and national populations, religion was the primary social institution that reinforced ethnic, linguistic, economic, and other differences of custom, allowing cultural identities, once formed, to persist even once other cultural boundary-maintaining mechanisms weakened or disappeared. Louisiana's cultural dichotomy perpetuated itself throughout the period of rapid social change between Reconstruction and World War II, largely through the survival of different cultural identities associated with Catholicism and with evangelical Protestantism. During the twentieth century, Catholics and Protestants alike used Louisiana's developing public school system not only to maintain and strengthen their own influence in those geographic areas where they were dominant, but they also used public education to help preserve the cultural boundary between the northern and southern sections of the Pelican State. A Question of Inheritance is the most important study to date of the deep and enduring cultural and religious differences between North and South Louisiana.

The racialized and exoticized cult of Voodoo occupies a central place in the popular image of the Crescent City. But as Kodi A. Roberts argues in Voodoo and Power, the religion was not a monolithic tradition handed down from African ancestors to their American-born descendants. Instead, a much more complicated patchwork of influences created New Orleans Voodoo, allowing it to move across boundaries of race, class, and gender. By employing late nineteenth and early twentieth-century first-hand accounts of Voodoo practitioners and their rituals, Roberts provides a nuanced understanding of who practiced Voodoo and why. Voodoo in New Orleans, a melange of religion, entrepreneurship, and business networks, stretched across the color line in intriguing ways. Roberts's analysis demonstrates that what united professional practitioners, or "workers," with those who sought their services was not a racially uniform folk culture, but rather the power and influence that Voodoo promised. Recognizing that social immobility proved a common barrier for their patrons, workers claimed that their rituals could overcome racial and gendered disadvantages and create new opportunities for their clients. Voodoo rituals and institutions also drew inspiration from the surrounding milieu, including the privations of the Great Depression, the city's complex racial history, and the free-market economy. Money, employment, and business became central concerns for the religion's practitioners: to validate their work, some began operating from recently organized "Spiritual Churches," entities that were tax exempt and thus legitimate in the eyes of the state of Louisiana. Practitioners even leveraged local figures like the mythohistoric Marie Laveau for spiritual purposes and entrepreneurial gain. All the while, they contributed to the cultural legacy that fueled New Orleans's tourist industry and drew visitors and their money to the Crescent City.