The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square - Hardcover

Sublette, Ned

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556527306 ISBN 13: 9781556527302

Publisher: Chicago Review Press, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Ned Sublette is the author of Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo. Cofounder of the record label Qbadisc, he coproduced the public radio program Afropop Worldwide for seven years. A writer, record producer, and musician, he lives in New York City.

Review:

"This articulate and intensely researched history provides not only an             impressive look at its subject but also should serve as a model for any future works on great American cities. Cultural studies and history do not get much better than this, a must read for anyone who wonders why this city must be saved."  Booklist

"An unmatchable snapshot of the exhilarating yet often ugly 1960s soul music scene."  Kirkus Reviews

"Made me weep."  The New Yorker

"A fresh a very readable book of scholarship . . . Sublette gets contemporary New Orleans."  The Times Picayune

"With staggering erudition and dazzling style, Sublette weaves things you always wanted to know together in a harmonious whole."  Madison Smartt Bell, author, Toussaint Louverture and All Souls' Rising

"The best argument yet for why we need to save New Orleans."  The Boston Globe

"A compelling portrait of the city as a capital of the Caribbean, an irrepressible source of artistic and political creativity."  Laurent Dubois, author, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution

 "With great detail and talented telling, Sublette especially chronicles the paths slaves took to New Orleans and how those paths led to the city’s personality today."  The Tampa Tribune

About this edition

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1556527306
• ISBN 13: 9781556527302
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368