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    The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
    The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
    The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
    Audiobook11 hours

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

    Written by Ned Sublette

    Narrated by Sean Crisden

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Offering a new perspective on the unique cultural influences of New Orleans, this entertaining history captures the soul of the city and reveals its impact on the rest of the nation. Focused on New Orleans' first century of existence, a comprehensive, chronological narrative of the political, cultural, and musical development of Louisiana's early years is presented. This innovative history tracks the important roots of American music back to the swamp town, making clear the effects of centuries-long struggles among France, Spain, and England on the city's unique culture, and the role of the Senegambia, Congo, and Haiti on the making of Afro-Louisiana. The origins of jazz and the city's eclectic musical influences, including the role of the slave trade, are also revealed. Featuring little known facts about the cultural development of New Orleans-such as the real significance of gumbo, the origins of the tango, and the first appearance of the words vaudeville and voodoo-this rich historical narrative explains how New Orleans' colonial influences shape the city still today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 17, 2017
    ISBN9781541483088

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    Reviews for The World That Made New Orleans

    4/5

    53 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Wonderful book to read, very entertaining Broadview of history and music personal knowledge of some that history and music
    • 5/5
      great book, loved the insight into New Orleans culture and history
    • 2/5
      I was both frustrated and inspired by The World That Made New Orleans. I am convinced that amidst all of Sublette's unqualified conjectures and bitter diatribes, there is a truly valuable historical contribution here. Unfortunately, it is perpetually undermined by an informal tone and leaps of faith that seem to ask too much of a critical reader. Who was this book for? Digressions on the etymology of the word funk, an entire chapter dedicated to anti-Jefferson apologetics, and various unsubstantiated claims of musical congruity from the Caribbean islands to New Orleans seriously damage an otherwise thought provoking account of the historical milieu that existed during the creation of the influential American port city. If viewed as a strict history, the book is poorly executed and largely unsuccessful in constructing a coherent and well supported argument, but I believe this book is better read as something else. Sublette’s book might qualify as a treatise—a lengthy speculative and interpretive essay on New Orleans and its various strands. Many sections of the book devolve into polemics and diatribe. While never directly stated, his argument seems to be that many factors in the world amalgamated to create the singular city of New Orleans, ranging from multinational colonialism, Caribbean revolutions, and a unique relationship to the social rights of African-American slaves. Many primary sources, some quoted in surfeit, are presented to support this hypothesis, though many of his main arguments about the details of New Orleans culture are unsubstantiated by these primary sources. More often than not, the cultural details of places like Santo Domingo and Cuba are given and the reader is asked to assume that the details must have been similar in New Orleans based on the “inevitability” of cultural exchange due to close proximity and constant trading between the islands and the city. In addition, attempts at interdisciplinary scholarship simply become distracting and convoluted. In fact, I’m not even sure if some of his material is interdisciplinary or just plain off topic. All of this criticism is valid only if one views his work as historical scholarship. As a speculative examination of the various networks that had an effect, however oblique, on the culture of New Orleans, it is quite expressive and certainly interesting. However, I would argue that historical conjecture should only occur when overwhelming historical evidence is present. In Sublette’s case, a simple introductory chapter explaining his intention of exploring the various reticular networks that came up when studying the roots of New Orleans’s culture and interpreting them within the larger global context of the city would have eased some of the frustration I felt when reading this book as a history.The World That Made New Orleans is a passionate albeit discombobulated attempt to create a synecdoche where the world surrounding New Orleans is used to represent a specific rendering of that city. Sublette doesn’t so much prove New Orleans to be a globalized city as much as assume it to be so. When the record is silent regarding New Orleans’s contact with the outside world, he assumes that the contact most likely continued undocumented. Sublette oversteps the role of the scholar in interpreting a lack of primary source information, seeming to simply insert what he assumes to be true, because it can neither be substantiated nor disconfirmed.For example, he claims that that the Kongos “were the strongest single influence on African culture in the New World” and that their legacy “permeates the popular music the world listens to today.” No footnote, no proof. He may be right, I don’t know. What’s certainly true is that claims like this have to be backed up. One statement this broad with no supporting evidence can completely undermine an entire piece of scholarship as far as I am concerned. Later, he claims that in order to know what the Kongo culture in New Orleans was like, “all we have to do today is visit Cuba. . . . The island still lives and breathes explicitly African culture, and perhaps the most influential of those traditions is the Kongo religion." Again, no footnote. Herein lies the problem: we are to believe this culture exercised an inordinate amount of influence, not only in New Orleans, but throughout the African Diaspora; yet to prove it, we are told to simply visit Cuba, where perhaps this culture exerts the most influence. I'm open to the theory, but I'm obliged to require some sort of substantial evidence. The burden of proof is with the author, not the reader.
    • 4/5
      POSTCARD FROM NEW ORLEANSEvery street here has its own soundtrack. I can't walk along Royal without hearing ‘One last walk down Royal Street…same old blues, sad and sweet…’ playing in my head. I can't go for a drink on Burgundy without visions of Tom Waits growling ‘Arm in arm down Burgundy, a bottle and my friends and me…’ Everything here is a song, and songs pound out of every shitty overpriced barroom in the Quarter, blues, jazz, funk, drums improvised from upturned buckets.On Bourbon Street (‘There's a mooon…over Bourbon…Street’) I find a country bar where the bar-stools are topped by real saddles. I mount one, with some difficulty, and drink sazeracs while I watch a three-piece burn through the Hank Williams songbook. TV screens around the bar are showing commercials for rifles and other firearms. In the corner they have one of those mechanised bucking bronco things, and halfway through ‘I'm a Long Gone Daddy’, some girl in a Saints T-shirt gets up and starts riding it, and then, apparently enjoying the crowd reaction, removes her shirt and bra. Conceivably this was for aerodynamic reasons, since she really clung onto that thing for an impressive amount of time.It is gloriously trashy, and so is the rest of the district. I am Instagramming shots of the neon signs as fast as I can take them – Boogie Woogie, Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler, Reverend Zombi's House of Voodoo. I build my days around the food, a series of catfish po'-boys, blackened tuna, crab gumbo, red beans and rice. In Pat O'Brien's, where the central fountain is on fire for no good reason, I drink the obligatory hurricanes, which taste like very alcoholic flat Dr Pepper but kind of nicer than that sounds. A sober-looking middle-aged couple, dressed for dinner, come out of a posh seafood place, cross the street, and walk into the Hustler Barely Legal Club. I assume this name means that the women working there are young, although I do entertain the possibility that the dancers all have ten points on their driver's licenses, or green cards up for renewal.If I had thought about it for more than a second I'm sure I would have realised before now that Bourbon Street is not named after the American liquor, but after the French dynasty. More surprising is to learn that New Orleans itself is not – as I had imagined – named in memory of the early settlers' hometown of Orléans, but after the Duc d'Orléans, who was Prince Regent at the time. There is a surprising amount of French here, still, what with the beignets and lagniappes and banquettes. But the French were only the first wave: perhaps the key thing that made New Orleans so unlike any other American city is thatLouisiana had what amounted to three colonial eras in rapid succession: French, Spanish, Anglo-American. Moreover, each colonial power that ruled Louisiana was associated not only with a different European language, but with a different slave regime.And these Europeans weren't necessarily (as Donald Trump might have put it) sending their best – France originally used Louisiana as a penal colony. ‘To say “Louisiana” in the France of 1719,’ according to Sublette, ‘was more or less the equivalent of saying “Siberia” in twentieth-century Russia.’ They made a special effort to send women, because the colony had been so male-heavy when it was founded – so thousands of convicted prostitutes were sent from France, branded on the shoulder with a fleur-de-lis.The languages now are thoroughly mixed together, their origins often disguised under multiple layers of translation. Signs on Royal Street remind you that it was originally the Calle Real. A guy I interviewed called LaBranche turned out to be from a German family called Zweig – their name was simply translated into French on arrival in the nineteenth century.The area was settled as a strategic port for the Mississippi, which it remains – but in every other way, it's a strikingly inappropriate place to build a city. Driving along the 17th Street canal until I hit Lake Pontchartrain, I stand by the new pumping station and look out over the city. The lake, the canals, the river – New Orleans is basically defined by its water. More than one person describes the city to me as being like a bowl held in a basin of water: the slightest breach in the levees, or rise in water level, and the water will rush in and fill up the city, which is still sinking at a rate of an inch and a half a year.That's what does the damage. Katrina in 2005 didn't actually do that much damage to the town, as a storm – the problem was that the levees broke, and the city simply filled up with water. That's why they've spent so much money on this new pumping facility, which just went online: the operations manager tells me proudly that it can pump out the volume of an Olympic swimming pool every 3.8 seconds.The cemeteries, of which there are several either side of the road as I drive back into town, have a preponderance of above-ground mausoleums – the water table is so high that bodies buried underground are washed away within a few years. Death is, as people often remark, quite a visible presence in New Orleans. (There's a Museum of Death next to my hotel.) I associate this with the local voodoo tradition, which grew from West African religions and was then shaped by an influx of Haitians, which was a huge event in New Orleans's history.Sublette's treatment of the Haitian Revolution is one of the best things in the book: he shows it to be the formative event of its time for the entire region. Thousands of refugees from Saint-Domingue – Creole landowners, slaves, and free blacks in roughly equal proportions – streamed over the ocean, first to eastern Cuba and then, when the French were evicted from there in 1809, over the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans. For future generations, this would become a foundational myth – an archetypal story of independence, for Afro-Louisianans, and of paradise lost for white Creoles. ‘The ghost that haunted New Orleans was the ghost of Saint-Domingue.’The multicultural swirl of influences, the music and food, the friendliness, all make for a very enticing atmosphere. ‘Aw, you goin' home, baby?’ says my Uber driver when I confirm I'm heading for Louis Armstrong International. ‘I won't say goodbye, 'cause I know you'll be back!’ I didn't want to say goodbye either.
    • 4/5
      From Ned Sublette comes a lively, rollicking recounting of the three histories of New Orleans: French, Spanish, and American. Covering the earliest days of the city through the first quarter century or so of the Nineteenth Century, Sublette’s is detailed, nuanced work, focusing particularly on the connections between La Nouvelle Orleans and Havana and Saint Domingo. Drawing the musical and spiritual connections between the three locations and their roots in West Africa, Sublette describes the interplay of cultures and the central role of free people of color in the burgeoning port as well as the world-wide political events that influenced the city’s history.

      Sublette’s technique is the opposite of dry history; it is told in a louche, mischievous voice that occasionally slips into the first person and draws incisive connections between historical events and those more contemporary, such as Hurricane Katrina. Sublette’s sorrow over the displacement of residents and disruption of (especially black) culture post-Katrina causes him to get a bit lost in the out-of-place coda to the book; here, the narrative loses a little force due to nostalgia. But overall, Sublette, a New Yorker but Louisiana native gives us an admirable and entertaining work about America’s most interesting city.
    • 5/5
      All I can say is that I wish I'd had this book before my visit to New Orleans, but, that being said, I do plan to go back. It is a wonderful history of the development of New Orleans and it's history. I look forward to re-visiting sites that impressed me the first time, but that I can now look at with a more knowledgeble eye. I learned a lot from this book, not just about the history of New Orleans, but also the world events that affected it's growth and development and why it's culture is so very different from other parts of the US. This book makes it to my keepers list! If you haven't been to New Orleans and you enjoy history, this is a good place to start, but whether you read it or not....New Orleans is a wonderful place to visit!
    • 5/5
      History writing at its best - well researched and well-written - very digestible. A look at the cultural, political and musical history of what is, without doubt, North America's most unique and flamboyant city. I enjoyed this book so much, I went on to buy another history of New Orleans - Building the Devil's Empire. Recommended for history buffs AND for folks who just want to know more about the Big Easy.
    • 1/5
      I was ultimately disappointed with The World That Made New Orleans. Sublette started well, with an interesting discussion of the early days of the Louisiana Territory and the growth of New Orleans, especially in the interaction between the early French settlers and the Spanish who were nominally occupying the area. But as the book went on, it became pretty clear that there were only a few things Sublette wanted to say - New Orleans came from the interplay between the French and Spanish approaches to colonization and slave trade, the city culture was dominated by the majority black population and their surviving African culture, and periodic infusions of refugees from Cuba and Saint Domingue kept the city's culture alive and steered it to what we nominally think of as New Orleans today. Ok, good stuff, but he didn't need nearly 400 pages to say it and the text got very repetitive in the last half of the book. As compensation for the repetitiveness, the tone got (for lack of a better term) snarkier as he went along until it became a polemic against the Anglo-American culture in the city and further abroad. In the end, the book felt like a graduate thesis with not much meat that tries to be controversial for the sake of being controversial.