In the years since Hurricane Katrina, the modern-day bohemians of New Orleans have found themselves forced to the edges of poverty by the new tourist economy. Modeling his work after George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, the sociologist and ethnographer Peter J. Marina explores this unfamiliar side of the gentrifying “new” New Orleans. In 1920s Paris, Orwell witnessed an influx of locals and outsiders seeking authenticity while struggling to live with bourgeois society. Marina finds a similar ambivalence in New Orleans: a tourism-dependent city whose commerce caters largely to well-heeled natives and upper-class travelers, where many creative locals and wanderers have remained outsiders, willingly or otherwise. Marina does not merely interview these spirited urban misfits—he lives among them. Down and Out in New Orleans follows their journeys, depicting the lives of those on the social fringes of a resilient city. Marina finds work as a bartender, street mime, and poet. Along the way, he visits homeless shelters, squats in abandoned buildings, attends rituals in cemeteries, and befriends writers, musicians, occultists, and artists as they look for creative solutions to the contradictory demands of late capitalism. Marina does for New Orleans what Orwell did for Paris a century earlier, providing a rigorous, unrelenting, and original glimpse into the subcultures of a city in rapid change.

New York Times bestselling author Stephanie McAfee delivers another irreverent, laugh-out-loud page-turner about the (mis)adventures of plus-size spitfire Graciela “Ace” Jones. With her fiancé now her ex-fiancé, Ace has hightailed it back to Bugtussle, Mississippi, and back to her Gramma Jones’s house. Her best friends, Lilly and Chloe, are delighted she’s back, but Ace still has some challenges ahead of her. For one thing, her replacement as Bugtussle High School’s art teacher, Cameron Becker, refuses to vacate the position. So Ace is stuck working as a substitute teacher while harboring fantasies of running Miss Becker out of town. On top of that, Lilly and Chloe are obsessed with setting her up on less-than-romantic blind dates—even though all she wants is a break from her pitiful love life. To ease her troubled mind, Ace resolves to restore her grandmother’s gardens to their former glory. But in the well-worn gardening book she’s dug out of her grandmother’s attic there are a series of suspicious notes that indicate her grandmother may have had a special someone in her past. Now, with her faithful chiweenie, Buster Loo, by her side, Ace is determined to get to the bottom of her grandmother’s secret life, all the while hoping her own life isn’t about to implode....

Much controversy exists concerning Major General Benjamin F. ButlerOCOs administration in New Orleans during the second year of the Civil War. Some historians have extolled the general as a great humanitarian, while others have vilified him as a brazen opportunist, agreeing with the wealthy of occupied New Orleans who labeled him OC BeastOCO Butler. In this thorough examination of ButlerOCOs career in the Crescent City, Chester G. Hearn reveals that both assessments are right.As a criminal lawyer prior to entering politics, Butler learned two great lessonsOCohow to beat the rich and powerful at their own game, and how to succeed as a felon without being caught. In New Orleans, Butler drew on these lessons, visibly enjoying power, removing those who questioned his authority, and delighting in defeating his opponents. Because of his remoteness from Washington, he was able to make up his own rules as he went along, surrounding himself with trusted friends and family members who had no choice but to keep his secrets lest they incriminate themselves.Butler made every effort to humble the rich, who abhorred him and whose sordid characterizations of his regimeOCosome true, some notOCobecame legendary. As Hearn explains, ButlerOCOs legacy of corruption clouded many admirable aspects of his administration. He championed the poor, many of whom would have starved had he not fed and employed them. He also established sanitation policies that helped rid the city of disease and saved the lives of thousands of New OrleansOCO less-fortunate.Vividly describing ButlerOCOs childhood and his political career before and after the war, Hearn deftly places ButlerOCOs New Orleans reign in the context of his life. He also offers new information on Butler, including the first investigation of his suspicious accumulation of great wealth late in life.In a fast-paced, colorful narrative, Hearn shows Butler to be a fascinating case study of contradictions, a remarkable man with a politicianOCOs appetite for wealth and power as well as a sincere empathy for the poor. All Civil War historians and buffs will savor this riveting, insightful portrait of the man behind OC the Beast.OCO"

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisiana’s most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching. Today Fry is among the senior generation of “River Rats” living in a vestigial colony of twelve “camps” on New Orleans’s river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.

Down and Out in the Great Depression is a moving, revealing collection of letters by the forgotten men, women, and children who suffered through one of the greatest periods of hardship in American history. Sifting through some 15,000 letters from government and private sources, Robert McElvaine has culled nearly 200 communications that best show the problems, thoughts, and emotions of ordinary people during this time. Unlike views of Depression life "from the bottom up" that rely on recollections recorded several decades later, this book captures the daily anguish of people during the thirties. It puts the reader in direct contact with Depression victims, evoking a feeling of what it was like to live through this disaster. Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration, both the number of letters received by the White House and the percentage of them coming from the poor were unprecedented. The average number of daily communications jumped to between 5,000 and 8,000, a trend that continued throughout the Rosevelt administration. The White House staff for answering such letters--most of which were directed to FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Harry Hopkins--quickly grew from one person to fifty. Mainly because of his radio talks, many felt they knew the president personally and could confide in him. They viewed the Roosevelts as parent figures, offering solace, help, and protection. Roosevelt himself valued the letters, perceiving them as a way to gauge public sentiment. The writers came from a number of different groups--middle-class people, blacks, rural residents, the elderly, and children. Their letters display emotional reactions to the Depression--despair, cynicism, and anger--and attitudes toward relief. In his extensive introduction, McElvaine sets the stage for the letters, discussing their significance and some of the themes that emerge from them. By preserving their original spelling, syntax, grammar, and capitalization, he conveys their full flavor. The Depression was far more than an economic collapse. It was the major personal event in the lives of tens of millions of Americans. McElvaine shows that, contrary to popular belief, many sufferers were not passive victims of history. Rather, he says, they were "also actors and, to an extent, playwrights, producers, and directors as well," taking an active role in trying to deal with their plight and solve their problems. For this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, McElvaine provides a new foreword recounting the history of the book, its impact on the historiography of the Depression, and its continued importance today.

Relying on intense ethnographic research and extensive experiences teaching human rights policing to police officers, this book teaches law enforcement professionals how to apply human rights to their everyday interactions with community members. The data collected throughout this research process offers the reader first-hand accounts of police officers addressing the most important human rights as they relate to policing, telling stories of using their human agency while on the job, and providing insights into their discussions with community members on human rights, among other important topics. Human rights remain a relatively new concept in human civilization, but one largely unrealized at this point in history. Can police officers serve as the harbingers of human rights in a world that desperately needs it? We say yes. It starts with applying human rights to police work. But this book does more than teach police officers how to apply human rights to their careers. It reimagines the institution of law enforcement as we push toward the later stages of modernity. Refusing to tell readers what to think, this book provides the intellectual tools on how to think about policing in new and creative ways. It seeks to bring out the readers’ full creative potential as law enforcement agents, police officers, and criminal justice professionals and activists. This book advances new ideas throughout each chapter on how to make human rights policing a reality. The ideas in each chapter build on each other, offering a small piece of the puzzle and all the steps necessary to advance the goals of human rights policing. The book (1) analyzes the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and how it applies to policing, (2) develops a three-fold typology called “Human Rights Policing Social Interactions,” (3) discusses the relationship between the use of power and human rights, (4) explains the power of human agency to transcend the ordinary, (5) uncovers the creation of folk devils that threaten human rights, (6) describes how to use the sociological imagination to understand community members, (7) reveals the importance of storytelling to see the world from the actor’s point of view, (8) discusses the double consciousness and the creation of the “other,” (9) describes what we call “soulful policing” and engaging with the community— Chicago style, and (10) provides social policy suggestions at both the national level and local policing level. This book will challenge the reader in fascinating and highly surprising ways to think about, and, further, to reimagine policing as we push toward the future. It will appeal to professionals at all levels of law enforcement, and will be useful in programs offering degrees and/or certificates to students of criminal justice.