For two hundred years the history of the Battle of New Orleans has suffered from the neglected state of the historiography on the War of 1812 and the static state of the Battle's orthodox narrative. This dissertation identifies and deconstructs the central themes of the Battle's orthodox narrative. It reveals how these long standing presumptions surfaced through the Battle's public commemoration in the nineteenth century and have fostered misleading perceptions about Louisiana’s involvement in the war, the defense preparations undertaken in New Orleans prior to Andrew Jackson's arrival, and the so-called unity that was achieved through the victory. By incorporating the actions and experiences of women and the enslaved into the Battle's history, this dissertation exposes the traditional marginalization of these groups in accounts of the Battle and its subsequent memorialization. It shows that the absence of women and the enslaved in the cultivation of the Battle's public memory was a deliberate measure taken by white slaveholding elites to preserve racial and social divisions that were blurred by the Battle's symbolic message of the power of unity. The actions of a third group, free men of color, are examined to illustrate how critical they were to the victory and how dangerous the memory of their service was to white slaveholding elites, especially in the 1850s. These new perspectives on the Battle and its public commemoration challenge the unchanging nature of the Battle's history and indicate that there is far more to the Battle's story than has ever been told. / acase@tulane.edu
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_27806 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Contributors | Roumillat, Shelene C. (Author), Sparks, Randy (Thesis advisor) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | 274 |
| Rights | Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law |
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