Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2019
The location of New Orleans constitutes a paradox, for a city on this site is both inevitable and impossible, the boundaries between land and water ever changeful, and human settlement always understood as unsettled – that is, provisional and an ongoing project of problem solving. The settlers’ attitudes toward swamps in general determined their understanding of the particular city that sprang up among them. The swamps, they thought, were a source of deadly disease, an endless hiding place for smugglers and runaway slaves, and it thus carried moral, political and even racial overtones, as reflected in the writing of the first historian of New Orleans, Charles Gayarré and in other early commentary on the city.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.