Civic Engagement in the City That Care Forgot
During the last two spring semesters, I have had students compare selected stories from the Miller collection—all of which were written before the Katrina disaster—with the series of podcasts recorded by Andrei Codrescu for NPR’s All Things Considered under the title, “Poet On Call.” Codrescu, a Romanianborn poet who has lived in New Orleans for 25 years, is only among the latest writers to have adopted the city as his home. From among the podcasts he recorded in the days, months, and years after Hurricane Katrina, I have selected 19 of the most poignant and powerful and made them available to my students via hyperlink on Blackboard.31 While I make the podcast transcripts available as well, I encourage students to listen to the audio recordings to experience Codrescu deliver his witty, often acerbic, and always trenchant observations in his unmistakable gravelly, accented, and poetic voice. After students listen to these podcasts (most of which are just two pages or three minutes long), they then write up a single 3-4 page reaction paper where they compare Codrescu’s portraits of the city after 2005 with the other literary portraits “painted” by authors in previous years from the Miller collection. History While Lawrence M. Powell’s recent, minutely detailed academic history of New Orleans’s first century of existence (1718–1810), The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans reminds readers of the unique strengths of a measured (and copiously researched and referenced) scholarly work, much of the most useful, engaging, and original work done recently on the city’s history has been done by non-historians.32 First among these is the fabulous popular history of that same first century recently published by the musician and ethnomusicologist Ned Sublette: The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.33 While I have used both books in the early weeks of the course to provide students with the essential historical foundations of the city, they respond better to Sublette’s writing style and unique ability to connect the city’s past to its still evolving present. Likewise, the geographers Pierce F. Lewis and Richard Campanella have included extremely useful historical synthesis in their work. For example, while it is primarily a text of geographical analysis, Pierce Lewis’s New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (2003) benefits from a keen historical awareness that allows him to masterfully compare the city’s first two-and-a-half centuries with its most recent quarter century (1976–2001).34 First published in 1976, Lewis’s work quickly became the classic geographical study of the 34
city. After returning to the city in 2001, Lewis updated his earlier work by publishing a new 2003 edition with a “Book Two” that richly details how and why the city was so thoroughly transformed in the quarter century between 1976 and 2003. My students have also benefitted from the prolific and richly illustrated work of Tulane geographer Richard Campanella (described below), who is Lewis’s rightful heir in many ways. A new primary text of great historical value that I have just incorporated into the historical foundations section of the course is the recently translated and never-before-published memoir/journal of French “company man” Marc Antoine-Caillot, who departed Paris for New Orleans in 1729 at the tender age of 21. The text of his memoir, A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies35 was rediscovered and edited by Erin M. Greenwald, a curator and researcher for Historic New Orleans Collection, which published the book in a richly illustrated edition accompanied by a helpful introductory essay by Greenwald. Being able to provide students with access to such a rare primary document helps me (as an educator) transport them back to the very different context of an early-seventeeth-century French colonial outpost. Moreover, one of the things that makes this study-away, servicelearning course so unique is that I have been able to schedule a visit to the Historic New Orleans Collection for my students during our stay in the city, which includes a viewing of the original French manuscript of the text as well as a guided tour of the French Quarter given by Greenwald herself. Two final extremely useful resources for covering “historical New Orleans” are the 2006 PBS documentary American Experience: New Orleans36 and a special December 2007 issue of the Journal of American History—“Through the Eye of Katrina: Past as Prologue?”37—dedicated to the “writing of a ‘second draft’ of the history” of the hurricane’s impact on the city. Given that I have yet to encounter a single text that does justice to the entire sweep of the city’s almost 300-year history, I have turned again and again to the PBS documentary to fill in historical gaps. The film is especially good at covering the city’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century history, including the birth of Mardi Gras, the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction and the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, the birth of jazz, the 1927 Mississippi flood and the city father’s decision to (unnecessarily) blow up protective levees downriver in rural Plaquemines Parish, supposedly to protect the city from an imminent flood.38 While the special issue of the Journal of American History has been particularly helpful