Search results for ""author lawrence n. powell""

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.

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New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction, analyzes the North’s efforts to transform the South, both during and after the war, into a free labor economy and society. In this ground-breaking work, Lawrence N. Powell addresses the role that the twenty to fifty thousand "new masters," or northern planters, had on the post-reconstruction system. Covering evidence of over five hundred northern planters, Powell asserts that northern emigrants provided much of the capital that hard-pressed southern planters used to stave off bankruptcy; showing that these planters became both the catalyst that perpetuated the plantation system of servitude and debt, as well as became the reason behind the revitalization of the South. New Masters deals with a variety of issues, including race relations, Northern planters’ motivations, work habits, capital investment patterns, and the planters’ gradual disillusionment as problems mounted and profits declined.

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