Creating the Big Easy : New Orleans and the emergence of modern tourism, 1918-1945 / Anthony J. Stanonis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stanonis, Anthony J. (Anthony Joseph)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Tourism--Louisiana--New Orleans--History.

Tourism.

New Orleans (La.)--Description and travel.

New Orleans (La.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (342 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Athens [Ga.] : University of Georgia Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Between the World Wars, New Orleans transformed its image from that of a corrupt and sullied port of call into that of a national tourist destination. Anthony J. Stanonis tells how boosters and politicians reinvented the city to build a modern mass tourism industry and, along the way, fundamentally changed the city's cultural, economic, racial, and gender structure. Stanonis looks at the importance of urban development, historic preservation, taxation strategies, and convention marketing to New Orleans' makeover and chronicles the city's efforts to domesticate its jazz scene, "democratize" Mardi Gras, and stereotype local blacks into docile, servile roles. He also looks at depictions of the city in literature and film and gauges the impact on New Orleans of white middle-class America's growing prosperity, mobility, leisure time, and tolerance of women in public spaces once considered off-limits. Visitors go to New Orleans with expectations rooted in the city's "past": to revel with Mardi Gras maskers, soak up the romance of the French Quarter, and indulge in rich cuisine and hot music. Such a past has a basis in history, says Stanonis, but it has been carefully excised from its gritty context and scrubbed clean for mass consumption.

Contents:

Introduction : the city of myths

A city of destiny : New Orleans businessmen and modern tourism

New era New Orleans : the Great Depression, taxation, and Robert Maestri

A new Babylon : vice and gender in New Orleans

French town : the reconstruction of the Vieux Carré

A city that care forgot : the reinvention of New Orleans Mardi Gras

Old New Orleans : race and tourism

Epilogue : boomtown.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. 283-301) and index.

ISBN:

9786613110572

9781283110570

1283110571

9780820341583

0820341584

OCLC:

712060056