Into the Big League - Conventions, Football, and the Color Line in New Orleans

This article examines the relationship between the struggle for African American civil rights and efforts to expand tourism, conventions, and spectator sports in New Orleans, Louisiana, between 1954 and 1969. Drawing on previously neglected archival sources and personal interviews, it considers how the pressure to maintain New Orleans\u27s progressive image as an urbane tourist destination required abandoning Jim Crow customs and embracing the growing national commitment to racial progress. It argues that an unlikely coalition of civil rights activists, tourism interests, municipal officials, and a small segment of New Orleans\u27s old-line social establishment adopted a tourism-related rhetoric to counter the city\u27s dominant discourses of racist resistance to change. By the late 1960s, New Orleans\u27s white leaders agreed that they could no longer countenance overt racial discrimination if New Orleans was to maintain a favorable tourist image

Keynote

J. Mark Souther, Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at Cleveland State UniversityFrom Exhibition to Conversation: Digital Storytelling and the Elusive Community

Review of Landscapes of Leisure: Building an Urban History of Tourism

Review of MANSEL BLACKFORD, Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959-2000. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001; CATHERINE COCKS, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, and HARVEY K. NEWMAN, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999

Making “The Garden City of the South”: Beautification, Preservation, and Downtown Planning in Augusta, Georgia

This article illuminates how a smaller southern city engaged broader planning approaches. Civic leaders, especially women, pushed and partnered with municipal administrations to beautify Augusta, Georgia, a city with extraordinarily wide streets and a long tradition of urban horticulture. Their efforts in the 1900s to 1950s, often in concert with close by planners, led to a confluence of urban beautification, historic preservation, and downtown revitalization in the 1960s. This coordinated activity reshaped Augusta’s cityscape, exacerbated racial tensions, and enshrined principles of the City Beautiful, Garden City, and parks movements long after they receded in large cities, influencing the work of nationally prominent planners commissioned in the 1970s and 1980s

Review of Landscapes of Leisure: Building an Urban History of Tourism

Review of MANSEL BLACKFORD, Fragile Paradise: The Impact of Tourism on Maui, 1959-2000. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001; CATHERINE COCKS, Doing the Town: The Rise of Urban Tourism in the United States, 1850-1915. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, and HARVEY K. NEWMAN, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999

The Disneyfication of New Orleans: The French Quarter as Facade in a Divided City

The article discusses the development of New Orleans, Louisiana as a tourist attraction. The author suggests that Hurricane Katrina allowed the public to perceive racial and economic divisions in New Orleans. He suggests the French Quarter of New Orleans was developed for tourism due to its historic architecture. An attempt to attract military bases to the region during World War II failed due to the labor market and competition, leading to a focus on tourism. The author compares the city\u27s appearance to that of Disneyland and suggests urban renewal relocated African Americans to ensure the development of the French Quarter

Acropolis of the Middle-West: Decay, Renewal, and Boosterism in Cleveland’s University Circle

In the mid-twentieth century, Cleveland, Ohio’s University Circle exemplified an emerging trend in which urban universities and other private institutions engaged in urban renewal. Situating the story of University Circle within the context of contemporary concerns about urban decay, deindustrialization, and suburbanization, the author argues that University Circle institutions were not simply trying to facilitate their own expansion. Rather, they were equally determined to create a setting appropriate to their regional, national, and even international reputations, as well as to advance the idea that an educational, medical, and cultural district could help reposition and rebrand a sagging industrial city. To do so, institutional leaders sought to make University Circle a bulwark against urban problems, which endeared them to suburbanites while constraining their relations with surrounding urban neighborhoods