This thesis serves as documentation of my efforts to define accurately my creative process as an actor in creating the role of Doc Gibbs in Our Town by Thornton Wilder. This includes research, rehearsal journal, character analysis and evaluation of my performance. Our Town was produced by the University of New Orleans Department of Film, Theatre and Communication Arts in New Orleans, Louisiana. The play was performed in the Robert E. Nims Theatre of the Performing Arts Center at 7:30 pm on the evenings of April 22 through April 24, 2010 and April 29 through May 1, 2010 as well as one matinee at 2:30 pm on Sunday, May 2, 2010.

For various reasons, the city of New Orleans has often been ignored in discussions of the New South movement. New Orleans politicians joined the movement during the Progressive Era, much later than other Southern municipal leaders. In becoming a New South city, the Crescent City was launched onto the international trade scene. By an examination of city leaders' efforts to gain federal rights to host an exposition in celebration of the Panama Canal, this study argues New Orleans not only became a New South city, but an international trade entrepôt. Though the exposition efforts failed, the efforts of the city to cultivate its business and hospitality potential served the city well.

Since Hurricane Katrina, targeting redevelopment has become the dominant municipal strategy for neighborhood and city-wide revitalization. Since 2009, this strategy has been adopted and is currently being implemented by the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority in several New Orleans neighborhoods. One such area includes the commercial corridor of the Central City neighborhood, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard (OC Haley). This thesis describes and assesses NORA‘s strategy for revitalizing OC Haley with regards to impacts on Central City‘s economic development and affordable housing—two of the area‘s greatest challenges. Although NORA‘s targeting strategy is proving effective in many respects, it is not without its limitations including creating a gentrifying environment. To address this foreseeable impact, this thesis recommends the incorporation of a Community Land Trust (CLT) into NORA‘s Central City Strategy to aid in effectively revitalizing the neighborhood without compromising affordability.

In December of 1915, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported on the death of the patriarch of four generations of Mexican wax figure artists whose artworks demonstrated a century of change in the city of New Orleans. The family's artworks included religious sculptures, representations of indigenous and peasant populations of Mexico, and the merchant populations of the French Quarter. Francisco's artworks represented Louisiana's agriculture at two World's Fairs in New Orleans and Buffalo. Francisco received a contract from Mississippi Commissioner R. H. Henry to produce the 30-foot King Cotton for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase International Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. Though the family's success continued after Francisco's death, an examination into the family's business, artworks, travels, and personal connections during Francisco's lifetime provides a new avenue for exploring the relationship between New Orleans and Mexico in the nineteenth century

This thesis seeks to show the pattern of red-baiting used in the United States to counter various forms of "subversive" social change. The paper illustrates how the issue of anti-communism was used as a political tool on the national level, and this tactic would trickle down to the state and local level, specifically into the public school systems. Focusing on Orleans Parish public schools, the narrative of red-baiting and anti-communist rhetoric is brought to life through the trials of Fortier High School. This study will chronicle how teachers became the tools of nation-building through state-sponsored "Americanism" programs. Students of Fortier and other high schools in the region were taught that to be American means specifically not to be Communist. This then is a contribution to the continuity of the politics of anti-communism in the United States from the New Deal to the Cold War eras.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the history of New Orleans’s Irish Channel and, through the use of archaeological evidence from two household privies, to trace the social processes involved in the formation of ethnicity and social identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Despite its name and the annual St. Patrick's Day celebrations that take place in its streets, the Irish Channel was never an ethnic enclave of Irish identity. With an equal number of Germans, along with some English and French immigrants, and certain streets comprised fully of African-Americans, the Irish Channel was home to a diverse assortment of people all with unique and fluid conceptions of "identity." This paper attempts to flesh out the changing social, cultural, and institutional boundaries surrounding the formation of ethnic and cultural identities in the Irish Channel at the turn of twentieth century. By combining contemporary anthropological theory on ethnicity and cultural change with an analysis of the archaeological data and the historical and social contexts in which material culture was used, I challenge the usefulness of assimilationist approaches to understanding culture and the archaeological record. Using the archaeology of two Irish Channel families, I demonstrate the need for studying the complex, multidimensional relationship between material culture and identity in order to gain a deeper understanding of the past.

Despite the popularity of free people of color in New Orleans as a research topic, the history of free people of color remains misunderstood. The prevailing view of free people of color is that of people who: engaged in plaçage, attended quadroon balls, were desperately dependent upon the dominant population, and were uninterested or afraid to garner rights for themselves. Contemporary historians have endeavored to amend this stereotypical perception; this study aims to be a part of the trend of revisionist history through an in-depth analysis of the co-plaintiffs in Boisdoré and Goulé, f.p.c., v. Citizens Bank and their case. Because Boisdoré and Goulé sue at critical time in New Orleans history, three decades after the Louisiana Purchase during the American transformation of New Orleans, their case epitomizes the era in which it occurs. In bringing suit, Boisdoré and Goulé attempted to thwart some of those forth coming changes.

This research compared the expenditure patterns, profiles, and trip characteristics of volunteer and leisure tourists in New Orleans. Survey research methods were used to obtain a sample of voluntourists that was compared to a leisure tourist sample obtained from secondary data. Visitors’ expenditures across six types of spending, demographics, and travel information were collected. Data analysis included eight t-tests that revealed that voluntourists’ spending was lower in five out of six categories, total daily expenditures, and total trip spending. Voluntourists spent more on local transportation but preferred cheaper accommodations and dining, seldom gambled, shopped little at the destination, and rarely visited tourist attractions. Frequency analysis used to profile tourists discovered that voluntourists traveled greater distances to the destination than leisure tourists and came from northern states. While most leisure tourists were aged between 35-64 years, married, and neither students nor retired, most voluntourists were younger, single, and still in college.

This thesis examines the spatial variation in bicycle commuting across New Orleans. It identifies where in the city bicycle commuting is most and least prevalent. It also explores factors that are promoting and discouraging utilitarian bicycling. A review of existing literature on variables found to influence transportation bicycling is conducted, and a survey is disseminated to residents across the city to determine some of the motivations for and obstacles to transportation bicycling locally. Additionally, case studies are compiled pertaining to two neighborhoods falling on opposite ends of the bike-commute spectrum. These include analysis of socio-economic and demographic data; an evaluation of the built environment using maps and field observation; and interviews to assess residents’ attitudes about and experiences with transportation bicycling. In the end, this thesis should be helpful in pinpointing variables influencing bicycle commute rates and in determining the types of policies and investments that may be most effective in encouraging more bicycling in New Orleans and across the country.

The period of Reconstruction following the American Civil War, and its legacy, have been the subjects of long debate among historians. Scholars, though, have yet to fully explore important connections between American Reconstruction, the New South that followed, and the period of U.S. imperialism in Central America in the late nineteenth century. The storied career of Major Edward Austin Burke—a Kentucky-born Louisiana Democrat who went on to become a proponent of expansionism and imperialism in Honduras—illuminates the transnational implications of Reconstruction and its aftermath. Through careful examination of personal papers, news accounts, promotional materials, Congressional testimonies and other government records, this thesis finds the roots of Burke’s involvement in Central America in postbellum New Orleans. It demonstrates the importance of participation in Reconstruction and New South politics to the long political career of one of the most prominent U.S. imperialists in Central America in the late nineteenth century.