On the Road: Cuisine & Culture in Acadiana Louisiana

The past sixty years have shaped and reshaped the group of French-speaking Louisiana people known as the Cajuns. During this period, they have become much like other Americans and yet have remained strikingly distinct. The Cajuns: Americanization of a People explores these six decades and analyzes the forces that had an impact on Louisiana's Acadiana.

With a long and colorful family history of defying storms, the seafaring Robin cousins of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care. In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them.

This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community.

A comprehensive assessment of the development of the Afro-Creole culture in colonial Louisianna. Created by slaves before 1731, the Afro-Creole culture encombensates it's own folkloric, musical, religious, and historical traditions that still survies today as a cultural heritage of tens of thousands of people of all races in the southern part of Louisianna. In this book, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall studies the overall history of Louisiana's creol slave community during the eighteenth century utilizing a variety of archival sources from Louisiana, France, and Spain across the disciplines of history, anthropology, linguistics, and folklore. She touches upon topics such as French slave trade from Africa to Louisiana, the ethnic origins of the slaves, and relations between African slaves and Native Americans. She gives special consideration to race mixture between Africans, Indians, and whites; to the role of slaves in the Natchez Uprising of 1729; to slave unrest and conspiracies, including the Pointe Coupee conspiracies of 1791 and 1795; and to the development of communities of runaway slaves in the cypress swamps around New Orleans.

The Cajun coast of Louisiana is home to a way of life as unique, complex, and beautiful as the terrain itself. As award-winning travel writer Mike Tidwell journeys through the bayou, he introduces us to the food and the language, the shrimp fisherman, the Houma Indians, and the rich cultural history that makes it unlike any other place in the world. But seeing the skeletons of oak trees killed by the salinity of the groundwater, and whole cemeteries sinking into swampland and out of sight, Tidwell also explains why each introduction may be a farewell—as the storied Louisiana coast steadily erodes into the Gulf of Mexico. Part travelogue, part environmental exposé, Bayou Farewell is the richly evocative chronicle of the author's travels through a world that is vanishing before our eyes.

Nine Lives is a biography voiced through the lives of nine characters spaning over forty years who tell their stories of living in this complex and facinating city. From outsider artists and Mardi Gras Kings to jazz-playing coroners and transsexual barkeeps, these characters are challenged to rise to acts of heroism or sink to the bottom as they face the devistation of two of Louisiana's most epic storms: Hurrican Betsy, which transformed the city in the 1960's, and Katrina, which nearly destroyed it. Dan Baum brings the kaleidoscopic portrait to life, showing us what was lost in the storm and what remains to be saved.