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.
Thomas Aiello is associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana and The Kings of Casino Park: Race and Race Baseball in the Lost Season of 1932.
“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 Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy is a collection of thirteen diverse chapters linked by an attempt to explain the unique sporting culture and the broader history of New Orleans from the nineteenth century to the recent past.This work is part of the excellent University of Arkansas Press series Sport, Culture, and Society, which uses the study of sport to illuminate diverse aspects of history, including race, economics, gender, urbanization, and much more. New Orleans Sports is an excellent book overall. It is well written and well researched, and it provides easily digestible insights from several leading scholars of sport history. It will appeal to anyone interested in sport history,urban history, or the history of Louisiana.”
—Christopher Thrasher, Journal of Southern History, May 2020
Sport, Culture, and Society is 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.
I. Victorian Sensibilities
1. A City on Wheels: The Bicycle Era in New Orleans by Dale A. Somers
2. “He’s a good rider because of where he comes from”: Horseracing, Slavery, and Haunting by Katherine C. Mooney
3. Fighting to the Finish: The Ill-Fated Andy Bowen and the Longest Boxing Match in History by Randy Roberts
4. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams: Tennis and the Nexus of Class and Race in New Orleans, 1876–1976 by Thomas Aiello
II. Institutions of the City
5. The New Orleans Athletic Club: Pantheon of Sport and Society on Rampart Street by Richard V. McGehee
6. The Development of Tulane Stadium: From Rise to Raze by Chad S. Seifried, Kasey Britt, Samantha Gonzales, and Alexa Webb
7. New Orleans Becomes a Big League City: The NFL-AFL Merger and the Creation of the New Orleans Saints by Michael S. Martin
8. Professional Sports, Hurricane Katrina, and the Economic Redevelopment of New Orleans: Revisited by Robert A. Baade, Victor A. Matheson, and Callan N. Hendershott
III. Race and Respectability
9. The Sugar Bowl: Manhood, Race, and Southern Womanhood in New Orleans, 1935–1965 by Stephen H. Norwood
10. “No Room for Such a Club in Our Organization”: The Southern Association of the Amateur Athletic Union’s Long Fight for White Supremacy in New Orleans and the South by Mark Dyreson
11. Called Off, On Account of Darkness: The AAU, the AFL, and Civic Development in Jim Crow New Orleans by Gregory L. Richard and Thomas Aiello
12. ‘In Spite of Ourselves’ They Were the Pride of New Orleans: The Role of Race, Gender, and the Media in the Demise of the Crescent City’s Women’s Professional Basketball Franchise,
1979–1981 by Stacy Lynn Tanner
13. When the Saints Went Marching In: Social Identity in the World Champion New Orleans Saints Football Team and Its Impact on Their Host City by Elizabeth Booksh Burns
Notes
Contributors
Index
