This is a study of the change in property values over a ten year period, from 1993 to 2003, in New Orleans, Louisiana. Sales prices for the entire city are compared to sales prices in two locally designated historic districts and one control neighborhood. The intent of the paper is to identify the effect that local historic protections have on real property values.

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.

The proposed public history project, La Fièvre Jaune, will be one component of a larger exhibit sponsored by the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Office of Archives and Records entitled Song of Farewell: Catholic Cemeteries of New Orleans, focusing on New Orleans’s historic Catholic cemeteries, funeral chapels, relics, and burial rights. Using cemetery and death records, La Fièvre Jaune documents many of the Catholic, largely Irish immigrants struck by yellow fever in 1853 and the role of St. Patrick’s cemetery as the burial site for this population. The epidemic took the lives of some 8,000 people. This project will provide insight into the ways that the Catholic Church in New Orleans responded to the 1853 yellow fever epidemic using photographs, official correspondence, as well as cemetery and death records. The entire exhibit will be housed at the Old Ursuline Convent Museum in the French Quarter.

Thesis (M.U.R.P.)--University of New Orleans, 2004. / Title from electronic submission form. "A thesis ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Urban and Regional Planning in the College of Urban and Public Affairs."--Thesis t.p. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.