“Taken as a whole, [these essays] make an important contribution to the historiography of sport in New Orleans and to the broader history of the urban South. … New Orleans is unique, but, as this collection shows, it is also closely tied to the larger South and the entire nation. As a commercial center of the vast cotton empire, a segregated city in the postbellum New South, and a sunbelt metropolis in recent decades, the city and its sports both reflected and illuminated larger historical forces at work in the region and across the nation. By engaging these larger issues, Aiello accomplishes his goal of providing ‘an expanded, modern examination of sports in the city’ (xii). Scholars of sport, the South, and urban America—along with lovers of New Orleans—will enjoy the result.
—Christopher R. Davis, Journal of Sport History, Volume 47, Number 3, Fall 2020
New Orleans has long been a city fixated on its own history and culture. Founded in 1718 by the French, transferred to the Spanish in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and sold to the United States in 1803, the city’s culture, law, architecture, food, music, and language share the influence of all three countries. This cultural mélange also manifests in the city’s approach to sport, where each game is steeped in the city’s history.
Tracing that history from the early nineteenth century to the present, while also surveying the state of the city’s sports historiography, New Orleans Sports places sport in the context of race relations, politics, and civic and business development to expand that historiography—currently dominated by a text that stops at 1900—into the twentieth century, offering a modern examination of sports in the city.
New Orleans Sports is part of the Sport, Culture, and Society Series, a series from the University of Arkansas Press that publishes monographs and collections for academics and general readers in the humanities and social sciences. Its focus is the role of sport in the development of community and the forging of individual, local, regional, and national identities.