Overview

2022 PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning 2022 Summerlee Book Prize in Nonfiction, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast 2022 Best Book Prize, Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians 2022 On the Brinck Book Award, University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning A significant and deeply researched examination of the free nineteenth-century Black developers who transformed the cultural and architectural legacy of New Orleans. The Creole architecture of New Orleans is one of the city's most-recognized features, but studies of it largely have focused on architectural typology. In Building Antebellum New Orleans, Tara A. Dudley examines the architectural activities and influence of gens de couleur libres-free people of color-in a city where the mixed-race descendants of whites and other free Blacks could own property. Between 1820 and 1850 New Orleans became an urban metropolis and industrialized shipping center with a growing population. Amidst dramatic economic and cultural change in the mid-antebellum period, the gens de couleur libres thrived as property owners, developers, building artisans, and patrons. Dudley writes an intimate microhistory of two prominent families of Black developers, the Dollioles and Soulies, to explore how gens de couleur libres used ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship to construct individual and group identity and stability. With deep archival research, Dudley re-creates in fine detail the material culture, business and social history, and politics of the built environment for free people of color and adds new, revelatory information to the canon on New Orleans architecture.

Full Product Details

9781477328552

Table of Contents

Reviews

Building Antebellum New Orleans is a meticulous account of the architectural contributions of free people of color to the city, and of the cultural landscape they worked within and acted on. * ANTIGRAVITY Magazine * Rendering life in serene prose from an arrangement of discrete data points is part of Tara A. Dudley's art in Building Antebellum New Orleans. It is a consummate work of social, genealogical, and architectural history...This is a book of impeccable calculation and comprehensive accounting...Dudley's investment in the 'significance of African Americans' place' in the American landscape documents the untold and telling efforts of both free and unfree people of African descent to bear the long-contested dispossession built into the fabric of the colonial American experiment. * ARRIS: The Journal of the Southeast Chapter of Architectural Historians *

Building Antebellum New Orleans is a meticulous account of the architectural contributions of free people of color to the city, and of the cultural landscape they worked within and acted on. * ANTIGRAVITY Magazine * Rendering life in serene prose from an arrangement of discrete data points is part of Tara A. Dudley’s art in Building Antebellum New Orleans. It is a consummate work of social, genealogical, and architectural history...This is a book of impeccable calculation and comprehensive accounting...Dudley’s investment in the 'significance of African Americans’ place' in the American landscape documents the untold and telling efforts of both free and unfree people of African descent to bear the long-contested dispossession built into the fabric of the colonial American experiment. * ARRIS: The Journal of the Southeast Chapter of Architectural Historians *

Author Information

Tara A. Dudley is a lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available