The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans

This rich story of the emergence of the Crescent City from its unlikely floodplain site is the best history of early New Orleans ever written. Despite Powell’s claim that the Big Easy was an accidental, improvised city, in this respect it was not unlike many other human habitations. But from its origins in the late 17th century, New Orleans was unlike all others on this continent in its mixed population; its distinctive overlay of French, Spanish, African, and American peoples, languages, and ways; and its unfavorable location. “[T]he place was cobbled together from the bricolage of cultural borrowings and solutions improvised on the fly.” Nothing in this book surpasses Powell’s portrayal of the city’s mixed American-born people and its free people of color. “Early New Orleans was a place of reinvented identities, a crossroads of improvisation. People came there to make themselves anew.” In Katrina’s aftermath and the shock of nature’s claims on our lives, this timely work brings out the complexities of New Orleans’s history as well as the rich tapestry of its gritty people. Scholarly but readable, this is a splendid telling presented in a clear, robust voice. 19 illus., 2 maps. (Mar.)