The Atlantic was, for centuries, crisscrossed by continuous fluxes of people moving either by choice or under pressure. These mobilities forged a complex web of relationships not only between the two shores of the Atlantic but also within the American space. Using a voluminous correspondence between two Saint-Domingue refugees, Jean Boze, a resident of New Orleans from 1809 until his death in 1842, and Henri de Sainte-Gême, who lived in New Orleans between 1809 and his relocation to France in 1818, this chapter examines the role played by the Saint-Domingue refugees in repositioning the city within the Atlantic and Greater Caribbean. It contends that by studying a group of people who migrated under pressure (the refugees from the Haitian Revolution), we can develop conceptual frameworks (in this case, the Greater Caribbean) and spur fertile historical reinterpretations (of, in the present case, New Orleans’s position in the Americas).

Finding the elixir of life has always been an important quest of humanity. The topic of longevity, hence answering the question about the maximal age attainable (now and in the future) of humans has fascinated civilizations throughout the ages. Starting from the example of the oldest person on record, Jeanne Calmant, we introduce basic statistical techniques from survival (also reliability) analysis in order to study the process of aging from a statistical point of view. Recent findings on the topic are applied to the question of whether there is a plateauing of the hazard rate at high age. We then turn to the important problem of risk communication in the case of hurricanes. In particular, we compare and contrast the two hurricanes Katrina (2005) and Ida (2016) that hit the coast of Florida around New Orleans. Especially in the case of Ida, we comment upon the communication around the risk due to the ensuing flash floods over the northeast coast of the United States. New architectural and city planning initiatives, such as sponge cities, deserve our attention.

Chapter 2, “Marie Laveau’s Generational Arts: Healing and Midwifery in New Orleans,” turns from Saint Domingue to the immigrant communities of New Orleans many of whom were of Haitian heritage. Through an excavation of the myth and legacy of New Orleans “voodoo queen” Marie Laveau, I argue that Laveau renegotiated her body as capital, resisting social, cultural, and legal forces that sought to commodify, exoticize, or criminalize her. Instead, she became a community leader, healer, and possibly a midwife. Situating Laveau within a longer genealogy of Black women’s birthwork and midwifery within the nineteenth-century US South and circum-Caribbean, this chapter argues for alternative ways of imagining reproduction, kinship, and energy economies. Ultimately, it puts pressure on the myriad myths surrounding Laveau’s dynastic legacy, drawing attention away from white heteropatriarchal logics of touristic consumption, and instead allowing for bodily autonomy, love among women, and the notion of gestation and labor as an autoregenerating, independent economy.

Often depicted by historians as a ‘forgotten’ war in the United States and unwanted distraction for Britain and its empire (with the exception of Canada), the Anglo-American War of 1812 for contemporaries was a conflict with high states. For the divided United States, the war was fought for a myriad of reasons, including outrage over British impressment of American sailors and infringements free trade, fear of American Indians, and a desire to re-assert American independence and lay claim to the position of pre-eminent power in North America. While victory offered tangible and moral prizes, defeat risked the shattering of the already-frail political unity of the young republic and relegation to secondary status in North America. For the British Empire, the war meant conflict with its primary overseas trading partner, which risked economic ruin for its manufacturing and shipping industries and resulted in severe opposition in some parts of the country. Victory, however, presented the tantalizing opportunity to avenge the embarrassment of the American Revolution and reaffix the young republic to the British sphere of influence. While the conflict itself resulted in few casualties and a treaty that recognized no victor, it ultimately shaped the future of North America and the direction of the British Empire.

The massacres in Memphis in early May, 1866, and in New Orleans in late July highlight the failure of Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policy to provide for black civil rights. The massacres are prompted by black soldiers in Memphis, black suffrage in New Orleans, and black claims to equality on both. Racial violence in the two major cities at either end of the lower Mississippi valley symbolize the failure of Johnson’s policy and help bring about Radical Reconstruction. Having been integral to the military outcome of the war and the ending of slavery, the lower Mississippi valley will continue to play an essential role in national affairs – especially with regard to race – throughout Reconstruction and for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans’ reputation at home and abroad was for French opera. Performances of opéra comique appeared on the city’s stages in the last decade of the eighteenth century; from the 1830s, grand opéra became a mainstay of the repertoire at the francophone Théâtre d’Orléans, whose resident company was recruited annually from Europe. ‘Rossini fever’ seems largely to have bypassed New Orleans, and the relatively few performances of Italian operas that the city did have in the first three decades of the century were always in French (or sometimes English) translation and often heavily adapted. Between 1837 and 1842, however, English-born impresario James Caldwell arranged several short seasons of Italian opera in an attempt to lure novelty-loving audiences to his St Charles Theatre. Although there were already numerous troupes performing opera in Italian further north in the United States, the troupes Caldwell engaged came to New Orleans from the south, from Cuba, where they were contracted to Havana’s theatres. This chapter focuses on the seasons given by these troupes, exploring the discussions that took place about the relative merits of French and Italian comedy, and the exchange of performers and materials between the permanent French troupe and the visiting Italians. When the Théâtre d’Orléans troupe was invited to visit Havana the press expressed concerns that Cuba was ‘uncivilised’ and unhygienic, and that news of a tour there would ultimately prevent New Orleans from recruiting high-quality performers for its own francophone troupe.

Nicholas Kelly was born a slave on a plantation just north of Charleston in 1823. His enslaver, William Kelly, purchased him from Thomas N. Gadsden, one of the most successful slave traders in Charleston. William, a general building contractor who specialized in masonry work, trained Nicholas as a plasterer, a skill he soon mastered. Banks and slave brokers issued short-term mortgages on slave purchases, thus encouraging speculation in slaves. In 1845, William participated directly in the Gulf Coast slave trade, when he brought Nicholas and eleven more slaves to New Orleans. William hired Nicholas out to a New Orleans plasterer. A year later, he left Nicholas in New Orleans to continue working in New Orleans because he commanded such high wages. Nicholas negotiated with William that he could purchase his freedom for $1,000. The deal soured when his slave broker in New Orleans reported Nicholas had not been paying his wages. Nicholas argued he had paid $200 above his normal wages. Regardless, William went to New Orleans to retrieve Nicholas and he literally whipped Nicholas in to the cargo hold.

This chapter invites us to understand New Orleans not only as an historic rim city and a great world port but also as a poetic ecosphere filled with resonant sounds, wavelike rhythms, and a buzzing profusion of messages. Such a poetics takes shape within the city’s understudied lyric traditions, formed and informed by three centuries of multicultural confluence and botanical excess.Desire unfolds not simply in terms of human longing, but as the comingled energies of plant, animal, and wetland life-forms that drive myriad currents and subtle undercurrents of imagination. Now facing submersion, New Orleans maintains as both a great port city and a port of entry into poems. The surrounding Mississippi River and Gulf waters saturate consciousness. Images and sound meld within a rich linguistic and ecological alluvium. We seek messages within sedimentations and intonations. The metamorphic work of poetry becomes dead serious in this tenuous rim of a city, where a desire for meaning unfolds in the thick of things –– stirred on by water, water everywhere.

“Shadows of Haiti” examines echoes of the Haitian Revolution in three texts from the extended Caribbean:Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre,”, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, and Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand F.M.C.After an overview of world-systems theory and an introduction to the historical context in which each of these texts is situated, this chapter compares the ways in which the potentially violent revolt of a mixed-race heterosexual male protagonist is neutered or silenced by the conventions of sentiment. Haunting all three texts is the dark shadow of the violent revolt in Saint-Domingue, enmeshed with the consequences of deadly family secrets related to race and violence. In “Le Mulâtre” and Sab, the male protagonist dies. In Paul Marchand F.M.C, however, the hero survives but is silenced and forced into exile in France.

New Orleans provides the context for this chapter’s reading of Les Cenelles in relation to the concerns of the city’s community of francophone free people of color. As this chapter shows, the 1845 collection of poetry not only emerged from discussions over how to provide an education to the city’s Black francophone children, but also articulated a specific theory of education that would later find an institutional home in the city’s first school for free children of color.

Chapter 7, ‘Most of My Sheroes Don’t Appear on a Stamp: Contextualising the Contributions of Women Musicians to the Progression of Jazz’, considers the vital part that women – both vocalists and instrumentalists – made to the development of jazz, although they have tended to be excluded from standard historiographical narratives of the genre. With a focus on the development of jazz in the United States, Tammy L. Kernodle considers women jazz musicians’ work from the early days of New Orleans jazz, through jazz in Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Europe, to the emergence of women jazz singers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and to the all-girl swing bands of the 1940s.

This chapter explores the early performance history and reception of Carmen in New Orleans following its premiere in the city on 17 December 1879. While New Orleans had for long time been home to a resident French opera troupe – indeed, for a period of some thirty years, this was the only permanent opera company in North America – Carmen’s premiere there was given as part of a season mounted by a visiting Italian opera company, under the direction of Max Strakosch. Using local critics’ reflections on change and progress as a starting point, this chapter argues that Carmen’s somewhat cursory initial reception in New Orleans (followed by its swift adoption on the city’s stages in various forms) yields insights into both specifically local conditions and processes of operatic globalisation in the period. Their assessments of Carmen, set alongside other documents such as programme booklets, reveal a rupture with New Orleans’s operatic past in the post-Civil War period, and at the same time reflect fundamental changes in the broader operatic culture of the United States, as well as the wider internationalism of operatic performance in the late nineteenth century.

Already by the 1820s, the national capital of Washington, D.C. had emerged as a significant depot in the increasingly professionalized domestic slave trade. The introduction sketches the history of slave dealing in the capital, William H. Williams’ emergence on to the slave-trading scene there, and the broad contours of how the slave trade functioned, often depositing its victims for sale in New Orleans, Louisiana. It argues that the story of William H. Williams and his one shipment of convict slaves purchased in 1840 provides a snapshot of the antebellum era socially, economically, politically, and legally.