Historian Mary P. Ryan traces the fate of public life and the emergence of ethnic, class, and gender conflict in the 19th-century city. Using as examples New Yo

"The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation night-mare, with the city's many slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into neig

Strategically situated at the gateway to the Mississippi River yet standing atop a former swamp, New Orleans was from the first what geographer Peirce Lewis cal