Louisiana's unique social and cultural history with its three-tiered racial system (rather than the biracial system that governed much of the United States) left the region and the history of its black inhabitants, outside of familiar narratives of United States black history. Marcus B. Christian, the self-trained intellectual, sought to research, and make public, the history of blacks in Louisiana. His career demonstrates the importance of training, economic status, and geographical focus in the production of African American history. Many of the stories he told, through writing and research, retrieved the largely forgotten history of Creoles of color. In fact, his own story was an extension of the black intellectual traditions of that Creole population. Even as his work revealed black Louisiana's unique culture, it also served as the foundation for Christian's own intellectual legacy, one with both material and intellectual dimensions.

This thesis serves as documentation of my efforts to explore and define my creative process as an actor in creating the role of Beatrice in William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. This includes research, character analysis, rehearsal journal and an evaluation of my performance. Much Ado About Nothing was produced by the University of New Orleans Department of Film, Theatre and Communication Arts. The play was performed in the Robert E. Nims Thrust Theatre of the Performing Arts Center at 7:30 pm on the evenings of April 23 through 25 and April 30 through May 2. There was a student matinee the morning of Friday, May 1 at 9:30 am as well as one public matinee at 2:30 pm on Sunday, May 3, 2009.

The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program was created in 2000 to incentivize commercial investment in low-income communities that have traditionally lacked access to capital. In addition to its use to foster community development, after Hurricane Katrina it was put to use as a disaster recovery resource as part of the Gulf Opportunity Zone Act. The program has successfully attracted investors, but gauging the community impact of NMTC projects is difficult to assess because of the diversity of allowable project types and their wide dispersion across the country. New Orleans affords a unique opportunity to examine how NMTCs have contributed to a specific community because of its pre-disaster economic and post-disaster recovery needs, and because 40 businesses in the city have received NMTC financing through 2008. At present, a disproportionate share of projects and dollars invested have gone to the Central Business District and other lightly flooded or unflooded areas.

Albert Baldwin Wood and his screw pumps modernized New Orleans by bringing flood-free streets and cleaner water to the city while providing the potential for growth by pumping swamp lands dry. While Wood was never part of the local Progressive movement, his work with the pumps fit with Progressive initiatives for modernization. At first, the screw pumps removed rain water from the streets. Then New Orleans expanded the drainage to include sewerage removal and water purification. The pumps successfully drained thousands of acres of land once considered uninhabitable swamp land. This additional land extended New Orleans city limits but also aided in the acceleration of residential segregation. Cities from around the world used the designs for the screw pump and consulted Wood for advice on drainage systems.

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.