“A remarkable, vivid, and meticulously researched story about an unjustly forgotten major figure of the nineteenth century.” - Nicholas B. Lemann “It’s more than a bio. It’s a way to understand Jewishness, the South, and America.” - Walter Isaacson “Peter Wolf’s The Sugar King is an absorbing ancestral journey.” - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Peter M. Wolf unearths Southern Jewish history in a major new work, with a foreword by Calvin Trillin. A penniless, illiterate, Jewish thirteen-year-old from France crosses the Atlantic alone. Landing in raucous and polyglot New Orleans in 1837, the third largest city in America, he starts out as a peddler of notions to plantations along the Mississippi. He remains unable to read or to write in English or in French his entire life. Nevertheless, by the end of his intrigue-filled life, Leon Godchaux is known as the “Sugar King of Louisiana,” the owner of fourteen plantations, the largest sugar producer in the region and the top taxpayer in the state. He refuses to enter the sugar business until the end of slavery. Unsympathetic to the Lost Cause, caught up in the Civil War, and negotiating Reconstruction and Jim Crow, Godchaux simultaneously builds an esteemed New Orleans clothing empire. Godchaux relies on the accomplishments of two Black men. Joachim Tassin, a slave whose birth status both men conceal, is entwined with Leon Godchaux in his clothing business, and Norbert Rillieux is a free man of color whose overlooked ingenious invention enables Godchaux to build his sugar empire.

Charter schools have been promoted as an equitable and innovative solution to the problems plaguing urban schools. Advocates claim that charter schools benefit working-class students of color by offering them access to a "portfolio" of school choices. In Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space, Kristen Buras presents a very different account. Her case study of New Orleans—where veteran teachers were fired en masse and the nation's first all-charter school district was developed—shows that such reform is less about the needs of racially oppressed communities and more about the production of an urban space economy in which white entrepreneurs capitalize on black children and neighborhoods. In this revealing book, Buras draws on critical theories of race, political economy, and space, as well as a decade of research on the ground to expose the criminal dispossession of black teachers and students who have contributed to New Orleans' culture and history. Mapping federal, state, and local policy networks, she shows how the city's landscape has been reshaped by a strategic venture to privatize public education. She likewise chronicles grassroots efforts to defend historic schools and neighborhoods against this assault, revealing a commitment to equity and place and articulating a vision of change that is sure to inspire heated debate among communities nationwide.

Facets of the Fifties. A reference guide to an iconic Decade of Movie Palaces, Television, Classic Cars, Sports, Department Stores, Trains, Music, Food, Fashion and more

New Orleans in Golden Age Postcards showcases over three hundred vintage postcard images of the city, printed in glorious color. From popular tourist attractions, restaurants, and grand hotels to local businesses, banks, churches, neighborhoods, civic buildings, and parks, the book not only celebrates these cards’ visual beauty but also considers their historic value. After providing an overview of the history of postcards in New Orleans, Matthew Griffis expertly arranges and describes the postcards by subject or theme. Focusing on the period from 1900 to 1920, the book is the first to offer information about the cards’ many publishers. More than a century ago, people sent postcards like we make phone calls today. Many also collected postcards, even trading them in groups or clubs. Adorned with colorized views of urban and rural landscapes, postcards offered people a chance to own images of places they lived, visited, or merely dreamed of visiting. Today, these relics remain one of the richest visual records of the last century as they offer a glimpse at the ways a city represented itself. They now appear regularly in art exhibits, blogs, and research collections. Many of the cards in this book have not been widely seen in well over a century, and many of the places and traditions they depict have long since vanished.

A gateway to the West and an outpost for eastern capital and culture, St. Louis straddled not only geographical and political divides but also cultural, racial, and sectional ones. At the same time, it connected a vast region as a gathering place of peoples, cultures, and goods. The essays in this collection contextualize St. Louis, exploring French-Native relations, the agency of empire in the Illinois Country, the role of women in “mapping” the French colonial world, fashion and identity, and commodities and exchange in St. Louis as part of a broader politics of consumption in colonial America. The collection also provides a comparative perspective on America’s two great Creole cities, St. Louis and New Orleans. Lastly, it looks at the Frenchness of St. Louis in the nineteenth century and the present. French St. Louis recasts the history of St. Louis and reimagines regional development in the early American republic, shedding light on its francophone history.

Traversing 2,500 years of global history, Ulbe Bosma shows how sugar, once a luxury reserved for Eastern emperors, stoked a mania in the West, transforming diets and ecosystems, destroying and creating cultures, and shaping the history of bondage and freedom. A major source of calories only since 1900, sugar has suddenly revolutionized our world.