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The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans
This is the story of a city that shouldn't exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America's most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.
Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city's history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric-and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel.
Powell's tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.
Lawrence N. Powell, a decades-long resident and observer of New Orleans, gives us the full sweep of the city's history from its founding through Louisiana statehood in 1812. We see the Crescent City evolve from a French village, to an African market town, to a Spanish fortress, and finally to an Anglo-American center of trade and commerce. We hear and feel the mix of peoples, religions, and languages from four continents that make the place electric-and always on the verge of unraveling. The Accidental City is the story of land-jobbing schemes, stock market crashes, and nonstop squabbles over status, power, and position, with enough rogues, smugglers, and self-fashioners to fill a picaresque novel.
Powell's tale underscores the fluidity and contingency of the past, revealing a place where people made their own history. This is a city, and a history, marked by challenges and perpetual shifts in shape and direction, like the sinuous river on which it is perched.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published March 30, 2012
185 people are currently reading
2267 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence N. Powell
9 books18 followersLawrence N. Powell, former holder of the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization, is Professor Emeritus of History at Tulane University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 87 reviews
June 5, 2012
Pleasant read and overview on the history of New Orleans as a city if you can survive getting over the French building of the city. Yes, as mentioned in the book, I also found that New Orleanians tend to be more proud of their French roots than their Spanish roots, but based on the "funness" of the read and cultural impact implied in the book, it's the Spanish and their absurd self-identification as Catholic warriors that really built and shaped the intricateness of the city. Honestly, I was sad that it had to end with American Protestants taking over and trying to turn the city culture to Boston.
I feel like I understand the pulse of the city and its uniqueness much better after learning about the history and culture that influenced it. As the author declares, it is a city where people come to reinvent themselves, where it tries to be governed by the Catholic rule and laws of Enlightenment, but somehow maintains this hierarchy through a society where everyone is equal through raucousness.
Can't wait to learn more about this city.
I feel like I understand the pulse of the city and its uniqueness much better after learning about the history and culture that influenced it. As the author declares, it is a city where people come to reinvent themselves, where it tries to be governed by the Catholic rule and laws of Enlightenment, but somehow maintains this hierarchy through a society where everyone is equal through raucousness.
Can't wait to learn more about this city.
August 12, 2013
An extremely fact-dense but interesting read about New Orleans from the city's founding until roughly the Battle of New Orleans. For all the time lovingly spent on the city's origins, the chapter(s) after the American acquisition seemed comparatively rushed. Over the course of the book, I felt the narrative structure left some few things to be desired - my kingdom for a timeline! - but I learned so much that I decided to give it a four anyway.
December 1, 2016
This is a book I didn't want to put down, and now that I've finished it, I find myself returning to it. Powell is a good storyteller, and through all the muddy history of early New Orleans and the colony it was supposed to center, he keeps the reader firmly located in time and place. That is a difficult task, since understanding New Orleans in its colonial period requires situating it in the contexts of French and Spanish colonial aspirations, Anglo-European rivalries, the Caribbean world of trade, African and Indian slavery, the rivalry between the French Canadian establishment (e.g., the Lemoyne brothers Bienville and Iberville) and the natives of France who make up the military, the Church, government bureaucracy, and the entrepreneurs. Yet Powell makes the job seem easy. His comprehension of the city along with his graceful writing style and lucid organization makes this book one of the best histories I've read in a long time. Devoid of the dreary academic jargon that impedes understanding, it is nevertheless the work of a scholar. of I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand how New Orleans became the city it is today and, to a large extent, how Louisiana became the state it is.
"The Accidental City" is not a simple linear history of the founding of New Orleans. In it, Powell seeks to identify the qualities that distinguish the city and to account for these in an interwoven complex history of geography, ethnicity, colonialism, class, geography, and the West Indian world of slavery. He does it both with flair and clarity.
He begins with the iconic legend of English Turn, 15 miles downriver from the current French Quarter. Scouting possible sites for the city, nineteen-year-old Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, a lieutenant in the French Navy, encountered an armed British ship headed upriver to deposit a group of French Huguenots on the banks of the lower Mississippi. The teenaged Bienville, accompanied by five men in two canoes, apprised the British they were trespassing on French territory. Assuring a French force capable of compelling his departure was near at hand, Bienville ordered the captain to leave at once. The British ship turned and headed back into the Gulf of Mexico.
Bienville's audacity alone would have marked him for leadership in a colony whose mother country would prove so inept in providing for it. But he was also a Canadian, a man of the New World, clever and pragmatic. He and his brother Iberville were among the French Canadians---trappers, traders, merchants---drawn to New Orleans by the prospect of making their fortunes in a city through which all commerce west of the Appalachians would have to pass and whose not-so-secret raison d'etre included giving France an edge in the smuggling trade that was part of the Caribbean and West Indian experience. A natural tension would always exist between the Canadians and the Europeans. That the Canadians had the upper hand in the beginning may be inferred from the fact that the site selected for the new port city was land Bienville owned, when a more logical site existed. Through their own and their children's marriages with Europeans, the Canadians developed more common cause in creating at least some semblance of order in the city, though in the end, their independence brought half a dozen to the gallows when Spain acquired the colony.
The problem that both France and Spain found most troubling about New Orleans, however, was its lack of what they called order. And by order, they did not refer simply to the procedures of government or even to the shantytowns that often plagued New Orleans. The intermingling of people from different classes and races and the disregard for traditional status that had underpinned European civilization for centuries disturbed the mother countries. And unlike the British, the French had not anticipated the need to assure the presence of sufficient women in the colony from its early days, so that sexual liasons between Europeans and native American and black Caribbean slave women had created what amounted to new categories, each with its own status, further confusing things in an already confused city. The number of free people of color and the city's dependence on the produce and game supplied by slaves from their own gardens on the river plantations gave the enslaved immense power. Nothing like Louisiana existed in Europe, and neither the monarchs nor their functionaries knew exactly what to do about it.
Unorthodox and often unorganized as it was, however, Powell shows a city getting a grip on itself under Spanish rule when a new development completely changed the rules. With the development of the cotton gin, cotton replaced indigo and tobacco as economic staples and greatly increased the number of agricultural workers needed. New Orleans became one of the biggest slave markets in America, and the mass importation of African Negroes led to the diminishment of the power native enslaved blacks had enjoyed and offended traditions that regulated interactions between people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds almost so old as the city. The advent of Etienne de Boré's method of making sugar from the juice of cane increased the demand for even more slaves and created the most brutal working in America. The insurrections and terror that grew out of this new slavery changed Louisiana. In a world where slaves far outnumbered free whites, one had to question whether anyone had freedom.
But perhaps what surprised me most in this book was the Mississippi River, which made New Orleans necessary to the French imperialists. Locating a city on the River was not simply a matter of finding a dry piece of land south of Baton Rouge, where original planners had sited the city, and near enough to the mouth of the river to fortify it against other claims. Europeans had never seen a delta such as that created by the Mississippi, one that spread out over such a vast area and that had numerous inlets that led to lakes or creeks or boggy bayous. LaSalle, who had discovered the Mississippi by coming down it, returned to France, where he was outfitted with men and materials to lay a human claim to it, could not locate the mouth of the river on his return trip and followed so many dead-end streams that his men, hungry and hopeless, put a bullet in his head in Texas. Powell captures perfectly the ways of the old river, the conditions it created which men must learn to navigate, from the everlasting moisture to the floods and hurricanes and mosquito-borne pestilences and the swamps which hid runaway slaves as well as well as the snakes and rats and insects with which residents of New Orleans would learn to live with considerable style.
I grew up in Louisiana and have lived in the state all my life except for college and graduate school. In those years, I missed its extravagance and audacity, its odd democracy and proud sense of exotic singularity. Only thirty miles from my home in the late 1980s a black woman donned Native American head gear and declared herself an empress, laid legal claim to most of Louisiana and a lot of Arkansas, ordered a fleet of Rolls Royce limos from a Florida dealer, and called a world peace conference in what amounted to her office in a neighborhood of Monroe, Louisiana. The U.N. sent a delegate, from Togo.
A former governor once told a reporter "The feds will never find a jury that will convict me unless they find me in bed with a live boy or dead girl." (He was wrong about that). Voters in the congressional district where I grew up elected one of the Longs to congress after he had been declared mentally deranged and proved it in an extraordinary campaign. His older brother, Huey Long, had run roughshod over state law and the old South Louisiana aristocracy during the Depression in a way unmatched elsewhere and had brought public education, highways, and free school books to Louisiana north of Baton Rouge by sharing the state's money he took for himself with the population. His motto: "Every man a king."
Reading Powell's fine book, I wondered if we might have been just like other states had New Orleans and environs been settled in a more rational, planned way and by a nation that provisioned its earliest settlers when they sailed off to a land with such monumental natural problems. Almost certainly we would have been. To those who want to know why, I heartily recommend "The Accidental City."
"The Accidental City" is not a simple linear history of the founding of New Orleans. In it, Powell seeks to identify the qualities that distinguish the city and to account for these in an interwoven complex history of geography, ethnicity, colonialism, class, geography, and the West Indian world of slavery. He does it both with flair and clarity.
He begins with the iconic legend of English Turn, 15 miles downriver from the current French Quarter. Scouting possible sites for the city, nineteen-year-old Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville, a lieutenant in the French Navy, encountered an armed British ship headed upriver to deposit a group of French Huguenots on the banks of the lower Mississippi. The teenaged Bienville, accompanied by five men in two canoes, apprised the British they were trespassing on French territory. Assuring a French force capable of compelling his departure was near at hand, Bienville ordered the captain to leave at once. The British ship turned and headed back into the Gulf of Mexico.
Bienville's audacity alone would have marked him for leadership in a colony whose mother country would prove so inept in providing for it. But he was also a Canadian, a man of the New World, clever and pragmatic. He and his brother Iberville were among the French Canadians---trappers, traders, merchants---drawn to New Orleans by the prospect of making their fortunes in a city through which all commerce west of the Appalachians would have to pass and whose not-so-secret raison d'etre included giving France an edge in the smuggling trade that was part of the Caribbean and West Indian experience. A natural tension would always exist between the Canadians and the Europeans. That the Canadians had the upper hand in the beginning may be inferred from the fact that the site selected for the new port city was land Bienville owned, when a more logical site existed. Through their own and their children's marriages with Europeans, the Canadians developed more common cause in creating at least some semblance of order in the city, though in the end, their independence brought half a dozen to the gallows when Spain acquired the colony.
The problem that both France and Spain found most troubling about New Orleans, however, was its lack of what they called order. And by order, they did not refer simply to the procedures of government or even to the shantytowns that often plagued New Orleans. The intermingling of people from different classes and races and the disregard for traditional status that had underpinned European civilization for centuries disturbed the mother countries. And unlike the British, the French had not anticipated the need to assure the presence of sufficient women in the colony from its early days, so that sexual liasons between Europeans and native American and black Caribbean slave women had created what amounted to new categories, each with its own status, further confusing things in an already confused city. The number of free people of color and the city's dependence on the produce and game supplied by slaves from their own gardens on the river plantations gave the enslaved immense power. Nothing like Louisiana existed in Europe, and neither the monarchs nor their functionaries knew exactly what to do about it.
Unorthodox and often unorganized as it was, however, Powell shows a city getting a grip on itself under Spanish rule when a new development completely changed the rules. With the development of the cotton gin, cotton replaced indigo and tobacco as economic staples and greatly increased the number of agricultural workers needed. New Orleans became one of the biggest slave markets in America, and the mass importation of African Negroes led to the diminishment of the power native enslaved blacks had enjoyed and offended traditions that regulated interactions between people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds almost so old as the city. The advent of Etienne de Boré's method of making sugar from the juice of cane increased the demand for even more slaves and created the most brutal working in America. The insurrections and terror that grew out of this new slavery changed Louisiana. In a world where slaves far outnumbered free whites, one had to question whether anyone had freedom.
But perhaps what surprised me most in this book was the Mississippi River, which made New Orleans necessary to the French imperialists. Locating a city on the River was not simply a matter of finding a dry piece of land south of Baton Rouge, where original planners had sited the city, and near enough to the mouth of the river to fortify it against other claims. Europeans had never seen a delta such as that created by the Mississippi, one that spread out over such a vast area and that had numerous inlets that led to lakes or creeks or boggy bayous. LaSalle, who had discovered the Mississippi by coming down it, returned to France, where he was outfitted with men and materials to lay a human claim to it, could not locate the mouth of the river on his return trip and followed so many dead-end streams that his men, hungry and hopeless, put a bullet in his head in Texas. Powell captures perfectly the ways of the old river, the conditions it created which men must learn to navigate, from the everlasting moisture to the floods and hurricanes and mosquito-borne pestilences and the swamps which hid runaway slaves as well as well as the snakes and rats and insects with which residents of New Orleans would learn to live with considerable style.
I grew up in Louisiana and have lived in the state all my life except for college and graduate school. In those years, I missed its extravagance and audacity, its odd democracy and proud sense of exotic singularity. Only thirty miles from my home in the late 1980s a black woman donned Native American head gear and declared herself an empress, laid legal claim to most of Louisiana and a lot of Arkansas, ordered a fleet of Rolls Royce limos from a Florida dealer, and called a world peace conference in what amounted to her office in a neighborhood of Monroe, Louisiana. The U.N. sent a delegate, from Togo.
A former governor once told a reporter "The feds will never find a jury that will convict me unless they find me in bed with a live boy or dead girl." (He was wrong about that). Voters in the congressional district where I grew up elected one of the Longs to congress after he had been declared mentally deranged and proved it in an extraordinary campaign. His older brother, Huey Long, had run roughshod over state law and the old South Louisiana aristocracy during the Depression in a way unmatched elsewhere and had brought public education, highways, and free school books to Louisiana north of Baton Rouge by sharing the state's money he took for himself with the population. His motto: "Every man a king."
Reading Powell's fine book, I wondered if we might have been just like other states had New Orleans and environs been settled in a more rational, planned way and by a nation that provisioned its earliest settlers when they sailed off to a land with such monumental natural problems. Almost certainly we would have been. To those who want to know why, I heartily recommend "The Accidental City."
August 11, 2024
Aaron Burr, Sir makes an appearance in the last chapter!
May 28, 2021
More than a Historical Timeline
Powell's history goes a long way into analyzing why New Orleans is what it is today. It encapsulates the timeline well, but it also builds the sequence of events into an easy to read story. I enjoyed reading this in the hardback edition. I read it as one of the books I bought when I visited New Orleans. I think it does a good job of enriching the historical record of one of the South's primary cities.
I was impressed with the way the author tied into the cultural aspects of the different countries, languages, and cultures that made the bend in the river a city. I recommend this for anyone wanting more than a history, more like a commentary on the existence of the city.
Powell's history goes a long way into analyzing why New Orleans is what it is today. It encapsulates the timeline well, but it also builds the sequence of events into an easy to read story. I enjoyed reading this in the hardback edition. I read it as one of the books I bought when I visited New Orleans. I think it does a good job of enriching the historical record of one of the South's primary cities.
"It became a state of mind, built on the edge of disaster, where the lineages of three continents and countless races and ethnicities were forced to crowd together on slopes of the natural levee and somehow learn to improvise a coexistence, whose legacy may be America’s only original contribution to world culture."
I was impressed with the way the author tied into the cultural aspects of the different countries, languages, and cultures that made the bend in the river a city. I recommend this for anyone wanting more than a history, more like a commentary on the existence of the city.
May 2, 2022
Too much unnecessary odd vocabulary that makes the narration wooden (potation and peculation, just in the few lines I opened to). There's no consistency in units of measurement, or choosing which words are translated or not. Why leave "ville" untranslated for example? To the author's credit the topic itself is not terribly exciting. I found the book a chore to read, though, and that could have been improved through editing.
August 23, 2015
A genuine "hey this looks interesting" grab off the shelf at the library. Again I ask, what are we going to do when everything is online and we only read on devices? How will we make fortuitous finds? The stacks are important! We need the stacks.
I'm really fascinated by urban history, in part because cities tend to have unique, interesting histories, but also because I don't really know what to do with it. How do you work urban history into American History grand scale? It would be really hard to argue that the history of New York, or Chicago, or New Orleans is not important, but cities are weird and they don't fit well into big continental narratives. So how do you teach them?
I really enjoyed Powell's writing here. He has a nice way of being wry and witty while still maintaining an academic air. The book did drag in parts, particularly when he was having to deal with this large French cast of characters in the mid-18th century. One thing I really liked was his willingness to devote time to the history of African-American New Orleans...just as we got the history of the various groups of French, French-Canadian, Spanish, and English people floating around, so we also got some exploration of the various groups of Africans, where in Africa they came from and at what time, and how the French and especially Spanish regimes gave them room to maneuver a bit and carve out a culture. That was another thing I found interesting - I never knew how influential the relatively brief Spanish regime was. Legally, particularly.
This would be a good book for getting students thinking about more complicated parts of the Atlantic World. You could compare a few cities...Boston, English from start to finish, New York, Dutch to English, and then New Orleans, French to Spanish to American, with lots of British trade influence/pressure and tons of African and Afro-Caribbean influence.
I'm really fascinated by urban history, in part because cities tend to have unique, interesting histories, but also because I don't really know what to do with it. How do you work urban history into American History grand scale? It would be really hard to argue that the history of New York, or Chicago, or New Orleans is not important, but cities are weird and they don't fit well into big continental narratives. So how do you teach them?
I really enjoyed Powell's writing here. He has a nice way of being wry and witty while still maintaining an academic air. The book did drag in parts, particularly when he was having to deal with this large French cast of characters in the mid-18th century. One thing I really liked was his willingness to devote time to the history of African-American New Orleans...just as we got the history of the various groups of French, French-Canadian, Spanish, and English people floating around, so we also got some exploration of the various groups of Africans, where in Africa they came from and at what time, and how the French and especially Spanish regimes gave them room to maneuver a bit and carve out a culture. That was another thing I found interesting - I never knew how influential the relatively brief Spanish regime was. Legally, particularly.
This would be a good book for getting students thinking about more complicated parts of the Atlantic World. You could compare a few cities...Boston, English from start to finish, New York, Dutch to English, and then New Orleans, French to Spanish to American, with lots of British trade influence/pressure and tons of African and Afro-Caribbean influence.
December 27, 2021
Easily the best book out there on colonial and early national New Orleans. It's a sophisticated history, yet it's also highly readable, easily understood by intelligent laypersons, not just specialists.This reader continues to hope for a sequel!
December 23, 2021
I have to laugh--every time I picked up this book, I would read a bit and then get distracted into reading something else. Because I am anal and I finish every book I start, even when it isn't a very promising read, I decided that it is ridiculous that I have been "reading" this book for about six months now! I was on a quest to finish, and so I did. It is a fascinating history of a fascinating place, a place that almost defies description for its unlikeliness. It makes no sense by geography, by climate, by culture, by human endeavor, or by its shared inhabitants--but this is what makes it absolutely unique and alluring all the same. Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts--and NOLA is definitely one of those sometimes. Very well stated in this quote from the book referring to one of the ever many legal battles of the city, " The legal brouhaha could probably stand as a summary of the obstacles thrown by a mighty stream in the path of European Americans who had adventitiously raised a city on land better suited for sojourns than settlements. But somehow, people from three continents made a go of it. They even improvised a civilization whose conflicts have been titanic and its pleasures simple---a city where races have blended, coexisted, and built a culture together. Some might call this happenstance of history an unexpected gift that keeps on giving." And this even having endured centuries of corruption, right up to present day. A great read!
June 19, 2023
It's certainly educational and well researched, but for pleasure reading, it's just a whole lot of dry, and unfortunately it focuses on periods of time that I'm just not super interested in. Ah well!
February 9, 2022
I enjoyed reading this detailed history of New Orleans but, as you would expect, there are a lot people and events that I found difficult to keep straight. Many of the names are French and Spanish and quite long. Any fault with this is mine. I did get an excellent overview of the development of this fascinating city and learned quite a bit about slavery that I did not know.
January 28, 2014
I picked this up at a local bookstore during my first visit to New Orleans, hoping to learn about the town’s early settlement. Hoo boy it is detailed! The narrative woven through is that of a city that happened to be in the right place at a lot of right times.
The chapters after the transfer to Spain are written from more of a sociological perspective and explore the tripartite racial system (whites, slaves, free blacks), which lays a good foundation for understanding the cultural makeup and power struggles of modern-day NOLA.
The city’s early history is a series of power transfers between European governments. The book finishes in the early 1800s, just after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and at the start of America’s rise. I might have gotten more out of the book if I knew more about 18th- and 19th-century Spanish, French, British, Southern American and Caribbean colonial history.
The style is dry. This is a dense history book, one extremely well-researched and footnoted. I think one could read this without ever having been to New Orleans without missing much. For those that have been, it is really fun to understand the history behind some of the street and place names, geographical layout of the faubourgs (neighborhoods), and of course the Vieux Carre itself.
I’ll have to find another book that picks up where this one left off, to learn about NOLA's 19th and 20th century. I’m glad I read it even though parts were tedious. It’s a fascinating history with drama and empire building and adventure.
The chapters after the transfer to Spain are written from more of a sociological perspective and explore the tripartite racial system (whites, slaves, free blacks), which lays a good foundation for understanding the cultural makeup and power struggles of modern-day NOLA.
The city’s early history is a series of power transfers between European governments. The book finishes in the early 1800s, just after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase and at the start of America’s rise. I might have gotten more out of the book if I knew more about 18th- and 19th-century Spanish, French, British, Southern American and Caribbean colonial history.
The style is dry. This is a dense history book, one extremely well-researched and footnoted. I think one could read this without ever having been to New Orleans without missing much. For those that have been, it is really fun to understand the history behind some of the street and place names, geographical layout of the faubourgs (neighborhoods), and of course the Vieux Carre itself.
I’ll have to find another book that picks up where this one left off, to learn about NOLA's 19th and 20th century. I’m glad I read it even though parts were tedious. It’s a fascinating history with drama and empire building and adventure.
July 20, 2016
I really wanted to love this book now that we have family in New Orleans. And there is a lot to like. It provides some fascinating details into how New Orleans became the freewheeling place it is today. (It has been that way from the beginning.) Powell traces some of the strange characters and stranger dealings that built New Orleans from a fetid swamp into a French backwater, then a Spanish backwater, then a French boomerang and finally an American city with its own set of rules. But the tracing can be as hard for a reader to follow as it was for explorers to find the mouth of the Mississippi. The history loops around and around the 18th century. As it winds, it pulls in important insights about the culture's ebb and flow into a slave society. But the narrative gets clogged with family trees and second marriages and political machinations that would have been more accessible in a cleaner chronological telling. If you're not already well-informed about the key characters you are likely to have trouble keeping everybody straight. I plan to keep it for reference and so I can look up key historic figures in digestible pieces, as you would a text book. I would not recommend reading it straight through as regular nonfiction.
June 30, 2015
2015 Reading Challenge: A Nonfiction Book
"The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans" is a very well-researched history of the first few centuries of New Orleans' founding. As a NOLA lover, this was an invaluable work that answers so many questions about the hows and whys of New Orleans.
I particularly enjoyed learning about the rampant contraband culture that was part of N.O. from the start, as well as the very complex slave society and racial caste system every person of every hue helped to create. What the book illustrated so comprehensively is that New Orleans, a city in a ridiculous location shaped by the policies of four very distinct nations, has always done and continues to do its own thing.
While in some stretches a bit dry and dense, this history is nonetheless a fascinating study of one of the most interesting and unique places on Earth. If you've ever asked yourself how New Orleans came to be so distinct, read this book.
"The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans" is a very well-researched history of the first few centuries of New Orleans' founding. As a NOLA lover, this was an invaluable work that answers so many questions about the hows and whys of New Orleans.
I particularly enjoyed learning about the rampant contraband culture that was part of N.O. from the start, as well as the very complex slave society and racial caste system every person of every hue helped to create. What the book illustrated so comprehensively is that New Orleans, a city in a ridiculous location shaped by the policies of four very distinct nations, has always done and continues to do its own thing.
While in some stretches a bit dry and dense, this history is nonetheless a fascinating study of one of the most interesting and unique places on Earth. If you've ever asked yourself how New Orleans came to be so distinct, read this book.
July 22, 2013
Sigh. I read an article about this book and loved the premise - it was written by a Tulane professor in response to the post-Katrina question of, "Why are you even bothering to rebuild this city when it was so poorly placed?" The product, though, is the absolute worst of academic writing. It is dry, he uses big words when small ones would be better. He makes good points about the three-part racial system in the city, but in doing so he seems to really minimize the effects of slavery.
June 10, 2015
I haven't read a book this dense since college history classes, but it was fascinating. I never thought much about the early history of New Orleans beyond it being a French city that America eventually picked up during the Louisiana Purchase. There's (obviously) so much more to it than that. This book is full of easily mixed up French names and dates, but it's extremely interesting and makes me love New Orleans so much more.
April 27, 2013
Great Book on the founding of New Orleans. I had been told that this would to boring and that I would give up after a few chapters, boy were they wrong.
Happily I found two more books on the subject that I want to read. I'm sorry that I can only give this five stars.
Happily I found two more books on the subject that I want to read. I'm sorry that I can only give this five stars.
January 18, 2013
The best one-volume historical synthesis of the founding of the city and its development through statehood. This is the first volume in a planned trilogy.
November 2, 2020
Powell is a very dedicated scholar of the minutae of intercontinental political intrigue, cultural conflict, and the shifting pedigree of New Orleans' landscape. Even accounting for the more tedious tics in his writing - worst of all: a non-sense of chronology that has details and scenes looping in and in again, often not sticking - The Accidental City is a fruitful book for watching the two major transitions of the modern period. One, the move from feudal, monarchic principals to capitalist, bourgeois principals. Two, the real-time development and deployment of race as a justification for slavery (as embodied in the difference between Spanish and Anglo-French policies).
Unfortunately, ironically, these are accidental. For, overall, Powell has far more interest in halls of power than in how these communities developed. You can feel it even in the comparative vagueness his three chapters on the African communities has (and the absence of any chapter on the indigenous communities surrounding New Orleans). Maybe this is for a lack of documentation. Powell is very hot-and-cold with talking directly at his sources though, leaving the book to fall somewhere uncomfortably between too specific for an idly curious New Orleanian and too casual for academia. Even his main thesis, summed up in the last paragraph of the book, feels disastrous in its peculiarity:
For all the thesis' generally silly myopia (European Americans didn't "raise a city" so much as relied on indigenous people and African slaves to preserve their imperial presence; strange to say that the land is "better suited for sojourns than settlements" when there were active communities already living on the land; it seems tonally dumb to describe international imperial cultures all built on slavery struggling to conquer the same territory as "blend[ing], coexist[ing], and buil[ding] a culture together"), this seems the most patently absurd: New Orleans, by Powell's declaration, was a city actively established and in defiance of the French crown by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to serve his own economic, social, and political ends. This is not a "happenstance of history" how the word "accidental" implies, and it hints at the unseriousness of Powell's thesis.
As a thesis about history, it's an excessive guidebook. As a guidebook, it's a decent genealogy of early New Orleans development as seen through international political conflict and domestic intrigue up to the cooling of relations between the native New Orleanians and the new American owners after the Louisiana Purchase with a half-coda about Andrew Jackson after the Battle of New Orleans. I'm not even sure I'd say it's worth the 359 pages, despite feeling like I personally gained something from it. Caveat Emptor.
Unfortunately, ironically, these are accidental. For, overall, Powell has far more interest in halls of power than in how these communities developed. You can feel it even in the comparative vagueness his three chapters on the African communities has (and the absence of any chapter on the indigenous communities surrounding New Orleans). Maybe this is for a lack of documentation. Powell is very hot-and-cold with talking directly at his sources though, leaving the book to fall somewhere uncomfortably between too specific for an idly curious New Orleanian and too casual for academia. Even his main thesis, summed up in the last paragraph of the book, feels disastrous in its peculiarity:
The legal brouhaha could probably stand as a summary of the obstacles thrown by a mighty stream in the path of European Americans who had adventitiously raised a city on land better suited for sojourns than settlements. But somehow, people from three continents made a go of it. They even improvised a civilization whose conflicts have been titanic and its pleasures simple—a city where races have blended, coexisted, and built a culture together. Some might call this happenstance of history an unexpected gift that keeps on giving.
For all the thesis' generally silly myopia (European Americans didn't "raise a city" so much as relied on indigenous people and African slaves to preserve their imperial presence; strange to say that the land is "better suited for sojourns than settlements" when there were active communities already living on the land; it seems tonally dumb to describe international imperial cultures all built on slavery struggling to conquer the same territory as "blend[ing], coexist[ing], and buil[ding] a culture together"), this seems the most patently absurd: New Orleans, by Powell's declaration, was a city actively established and in defiance of the French crown by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to serve his own economic, social, and political ends. This is not a "happenstance of history" how the word "accidental" implies, and it hints at the unseriousness of Powell's thesis.
As a thesis about history, it's an excessive guidebook. As a guidebook, it's a decent genealogy of early New Orleans development as seen through international political conflict and domestic intrigue up to the cooling of relations between the native New Orleanians and the new American owners after the Louisiana Purchase with a half-coda about Andrew Jackson after the Battle of New Orleans. I'm not even sure I'd say it's worth the 359 pages, despite feeling like I personally gained something from it. Caveat Emptor.
October 16, 2018
It is just a bit slow in the beginning, and the organization is not entirely chronological (focusing instead on different aspects of New Orleans' development), but this is surely the quintessential history of the Crescent City as a colony. Full disclosure: I love New Orleans like a person, and this title may not hold as much fascination for those who have never fallen under its spell. If you do love NOLA, it's easy to find yourself immersed in this history of the pirates, the ne'er-do-wells, the manufactured aristocrats, the soldiers, the enslaved, the scavengers, the gens de couleur libre, and the faithful, all who played instrumental roles in improvising the city that would become one of America's true melting pots.
December 10, 2024
So I've learned that New Orleans hasn't really changed, that New Orleans has always followed the beat of it's own drum, regardless of what the people who lay claim to it wish. It really is a city that by all laws of nature shouldn't exist, but somehow has created a culture and form that rivals NYC, San Francisco, and the other great American cities. It was also interesting to see how the city's initial foundings affected issues of slavery and segregation from when the city initially formed 400 years ago, and how different they were to the American Southern colonies.
June 29, 2017
More like 2 1/2 stars. This was something of a slog, with more detail (the many power marriages) than I really wanted, but it does provide insight to the city's unique birth and early development, including its unusual-for-North America relationship to slaves and slavery and how that aspect developed and changed through the first century. The last chapter or so, approaching the Louisiana Purchase, territorial days and statehood were more engaging. (The Battle of New Orleans is in the epilogue.)
March 5, 2018
Well written history of the founding of New Orleans from the early explorers, the Bienville leadership, and the various political and cultural events through the war of 1812. The book captures the personalities, conflicts, and challenges of leadership. It is very detailed in describing the issues regarding race, slavery, social status, and political favoritism (corruption). A good read for the 300th anniversary celebration of New Orleans
January 25, 2021
A truly fascinating look at the early history of New Orleans.
From the geological accidents responsible for the dynamic course of the river, to the complicated interplay between late-enlightenment ideals and practical realities, to the even more complicated race relations that all went into defining the city.
Packed with facts and lesser known historical tidbits (most egregiously, that spain owned the city for about 50 years) this was a thoroughly interesting read.
From the geological accidents responsible for the dynamic course of the river, to the complicated interplay between late-enlightenment ideals and practical realities, to the even more complicated race relations that all went into defining the city.
Packed with facts and lesser known historical tidbits (most egregiously, that spain owned the city for about 50 years) this was a thoroughly interesting read.
August 16, 2023
This deeply researched history of New Orleans manages to describe how a French fever dream hooked Canadian explorers, Native Americans, European prisoners and migrants, and enslaved Africans into creating a unique society at a bend in the Mississippi River. It’s a fascinating story, full of rogues and bandits as well as the woefully mistreated, and Powell keeps interest high with easy to read language in a scholarly tome.
December 28, 2024
A thorough exploration of New Orleans’ emergence as a French colonial city enabling control of the mouth of the Mississippi River, cession into Spain, and eventual joining of the US after the Louisiana purchase. Sensitive analysis of a city teetering between a society of slaves and a slave society, as well as the emerging Creole and libre (free black) identities. Only downside is that the broad narrative structure is occasionally lost, especially towards the end.
January 8, 2018
Early settlers thought about establishing a bison husbandry empire on Dauphin Island, but the bison kept swimming away. At one point, the city had 54,000 card decks and only 8,000 residents; there were twice as many bartenders as there were merchants. James Madison wanted the entire city permanently subjected to Baltimore. This book is just *full* of fun facts.
December 12, 2021
This is an interesting and thorough look at the history and development of New Orleans. It took me forever to finish, primarily because the author will always use the ten dollar word when the opportunity presents itself. In spite of this, it is a worthwhile read for those wanting to better understand the complexity of New Orleans’ social, economic, and political history.
March 30, 2022
Much like the swamps and bogs that circle the town of New Orleans, this book took much more trudging and slogging than I anticipated. Too much bouncing between characters and points in time, it only kept my attention at brief moments. With such a fascinating topic, it is too bad this wasn’t a better book.
May 5, 2024
I learned a lot about the development of New Orleans and how it was shaped through different political regimes. It also focused on how the slave and “libre” society functioned and navigated through these power exchanges. I enjoyed learning about the history but it’s quite dense, not always chronological and frequently drones on about marriages and family ties.
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