The World That Made New Orleans

From Spanish Silver to Congo Square

Ned Sublette

• Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781556527302
• eBook ISBN: 9781569765135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Named one of the Top 10 Books of 2008 by The Times-Picayune.
 
Winner of the 2009 Humanities Book of the Year award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
 

Awarded the New Orleans Gulf South Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for 2008.

 

New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.

 

The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans's first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana's statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, "rock the city." 

 

This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette's previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities.

INDEX

Abakuá, 280, 284, 297, 301

Abundance (street), 254

Accra, 117

Acuña, Hernando de, 19

Los Adaes, 44

Adair, Douglass, 215

Adams, John, 178, 190, 192, 193, 224

Adderly, Cannonball, 302

Affiches Africaines (Port-au-Prince), 103

Afonso I (Kongo), 109

Africain (ship), 57

African American culture: and interstate slave trade, 238

Africans in Colonial Louisiana (Hall), 57

Afro-Cuban music: and African-American music, 68, 107

Afro-Louisianan culture, 3, 5, 58–62, 97, 106–08, 118, 126, 227, 283, 285, 287

Akan (people), 117

Algiers (Louisiana), 74

Alfonso, Jesús, 116

Algonquin (language), 28

Alma Moyó, 277–78

Alps, 32

Álvarez de Pineda, Alonso, 20

American Protestantism: and camp meetings, 245

American Revolution, 4, 10, 147, 166, 172, 173, 196

and Louis XVI, 146

Spanish role in, 100

Amsterdam, 89

Anglican Church, 64

Angola, 30, 57, 58, 59, 61, 55, 107, 108, 116

Angola, João de, 30

Angolans, 23, 31, 61, 62, 77, 87, 109, 118

Antilles, 200, 252, 277

slave labor, as dependent on, 204

slavery in, 30, 190, 194

Antoinette, Marie, 154, 213

Antwerp, 22

Apalachicola River, 87, 269

Arada, see Arará; see also Ardra

Aragón, 20, 22

Arará (African group), 114, 118, 182

Arcadia, 91

Ardra, 57, 61, 68, 108, 118, 144, 184, 283

Argentina, 248

Arkansas, 231

Armstrong, Louis, 59, 297

d’Artaguette, Pierre, 42

Ash Wednesday, 37

Ashe, Thomas, 257, 259

asiento, 26, 48, 89

Atlantic Ocean, 20, 134

seaboard, 156

Auber, Daniel-François-E...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Swamp
• Colonization
• Revolution
• Purchase
• Coda
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index