Joseph Heathcott

Associate Professor

New Orleans was forged at the crossroad of empires. The Chitimacha and Natchez people originally occupied the area, subsisting through fishing in the rich estuarial waters.  French colonists founded La Nouvelle Orleans in 1718, and while the French Empire ceded their Mississippi territory to the Spanish in 1763, the area remained culturally francophone.  Colonists brought enslaved people to the region, both directly from West Africa and from Haiti, to provide labor for agriculture and town building.  French, African, and Native people intermixed over the course of two centuries to create a unique, though racially differentiated, culture.  This culture is evident in the architecture and landscape of the region, from elite civic and religious spaces to the ordinary homes of the Creole city.  By the 1840s and 1850s, New Orleans emerged as the major southern port for the importation of goods from Central and South America.  Still, the assertion of control over the city by the United States was a rough, multifaceted, and long-term process that would challenge the city's complex Creole culture in profound ways.

Lecture 1. Notes

Lecture 1. Quiz

Lecture 1. Handout

Race
, 
Culture, and Built Environment in New Orleans: 
Global Trajectories, 
1700
-1850

Lecture 1. Global Trajectories, 1700-1850

In this lecture we look at New Orleans as it undergoes a profound transformation from a Creole city to an American metropolis.  This involved not only the change in population from predominantly Black and Creole to white.  It also involved the different experiences of race and culture that newcomers—both white and Black—brought with them as they moved to New Orleans during the mid-nineteenth century.  Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, New Orleans experienced a large influx of white Northerners and European immigrants seeking opportunities.   By the early twentieth century, these varied groups had in some ways merged with, and in other ways superseded the older Creole world.  While we must avoid romanticizing antebellum New Orleans, which, after all, was a society grounded thoroughly in enslavement, we are interested in the shifting racial imaginaries and geographies that a Creole city like New Orleans undergoes as it is transformed by Anglo-American culture and the expanding system of racial apartheid extant in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Lecture 2. Notes

Lecture 2. Quiz

Lecture 2. Handout

Race
, 
Culture, and Built Environment in New Orleans: 
Forging an American Metropolis, 1850-1940

Vieux
Carré
Mid-City
Central City
Uptown
Gentilly
Tremé
Faub'g
Marigny
Bywater
Lower
Ninth
Ward
Garden
District
Irish
Channel
Algiers

Lecture 2. Forging and American Metropolis, 1850-1940

This module examines the evolution of the built environment of New Orleans amid the global movement of diverse groups and changing conceptions of race in the so-called "New World."  We pay particular attention to how New Orleans changes architecturally, socially, and culturally as it transforms from a French outpost to a Creole town to an American metropolis.  At root are key questions about the encounter and conflict of ideas about race, architecture, empire, and town building as these diffuse into continental space.

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Race, Culture, and Built Environment in New Orleans, 1700-1940

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Lectures (2)

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