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A review by ramseyhootman
The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette
3.0
I started reading this book as a prep for a (very short) trip I was taking to New Orleans for a wedding. I had never been in the southern US before and knew next to nothing about the city except for its Mardi Gras celebration. My trip was in May, and it's taken me until the end of August to work my way to the end of this book! It's extremely dense, both in the writing style and the sheer volume of information packed in these pages. I spent a lot of time reading one page and then turning to my husband to tell him about whatever astonishing fact I had just learned. You think you "know" about slavery - but Sublette digs into the details of the social and economic context and you realize there's all sorts of horrors that never even occurred to you. He doesn't often draw lines between these historical facts to the present, but he doesn't need to - it's very obvious. I think I learned as much about the current political and social climate in the US from this book as I did about the history of New Orleans.
I probably should have paid a little more attention to the time period that would be covered in this book, because I didn't realize that it ends at the year 1812, when Louisiana attained statehood. Sublette filters most of the history of the city through two lenses: slavery and music. He also often goes very wide, geographically, spending entire chapters detailing events in Europe, Cuba, and Haiti which affect various populations coming in to New Orleans. I appreciated that the focus of this book was not on "European settlers" with only a few passing mentions of "their slaves." In fact most of this book is (very appropriately) about the huge variety of black citizens of New Orleans.
I thought the book lost clarity toward the end, and it actually took me longer to read the last quarter of the book as it did the first three quarters. The "coda" at the end that discussed the modern day Mardi Gras Indians was absolutely fascinating, but it really felt like Sublette was more excited to write that than the rest of the book - had it been written with as much enthusiasm, I think it would have made the book much easier to read!
Overall, a very informative, enlightening read, and it definitely gave me a much better appreciation for the place I was visiting.
I probably should have paid a little more attention to the time period that would be covered in this book, because I didn't realize that it ends at the year 1812, when Louisiana attained statehood. Sublette filters most of the history of the city through two lenses: slavery and music. He also often goes very wide, geographically, spending entire chapters detailing events in Europe, Cuba, and Haiti which affect various populations coming in to New Orleans. I appreciated that the focus of this book was not on "European settlers" with only a few passing mentions of "their slaves." In fact most of this book is (very appropriately) about the huge variety of black citizens of New Orleans.
I thought the book lost clarity toward the end, and it actually took me longer to read the last quarter of the book as it did the first three quarters. The "coda" at the end that discussed the modern day Mardi Gras Indians was absolutely fascinating, but it really felt like Sublette was more excited to write that than the rest of the book - had it been written with as much enthusiasm, I think it would have made the book much easier to read!
Overall, a very informative, enlightening read, and it definitely gave me a much better appreciation for the place I was visiting.