The first full-length book of drone photography of the Crescent City, Above New Orleans offers readers perspectives never before captured by a camera. Overhead scenes cover the entire metropolis, from the French Quarter to Uptown, from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, from Westwego to New Orleans East, and from Gentilly to Gretna. A detailed description accompanies each image, providing insight into the history, geography, and architecture of this dazzling municipality. As this volume demonstrates, the vantage points afforded by the drone-mounted camera reveal fascinating views otherwise unobtainable in the often compact environment of New Orleans. “To me a roofscape is the tout ensemble of urban elements,” writes Richard Campanella in the book’s preface, “particularly in dense neighborhoods, visible from a perch that is high enough to be synoptical, yet low enough to be intimate. Roofscapes are the intermediary between the more familiar concepts of streetscapes and landscapes; they are the oblique, three-dimensional renderings of cityscapes.” Capturing these views of New Orleans required the specialized equipment and expertise of retired Italian engineer Marco Rasi, who has mastered the new technology of drone photography in his adopted hometown. His adept piloting and keen eye made for, in Rasi’s words, “the perfect platform to capture those rooftop perspectives I had always savored, as no aircraft or helicopter could ever do.” Above New Orleans: Roofscapes of the Crescent City beautifully documents the aesthetic wonder of the city’s singular urban landscape.

New Orleans on Parade tells the story of the Big Easy in the twentieth century. In this urban biography, J. Mark Souther explores the Crescent City's architecture, music, food and alcohol, folklore and spiritualism, Mardi Gras festivities, and illicit sex commerce in revealing how New Orleans became a city that parades itself to visitors and residents alike. Stagnant between the Civil War and World War II -- a period of great expansion nationally -- New Orleans unintentionally preserved its distinctive physical appearance and culture. Though business, civic, and government leaders tried to pursue conventional modernization in the 1940s, competition from other Sunbelt cities as well as a national economic shift from production to consumption gradually led them to seize on tourism as the growth engine for future prosperity, giving rise to a veritable gumbo of sensory attractions. A trend in historic preservation and the influence of outsiders helped fan this newfound identity, and the city's residents learned to embrace rather than disdain their past. A growing reliance on the tourist trade fundamentally affected social relations in New Orleans. African Americans were cast as actors who shaped the culture that made tourism possible while at the same time they were exploited by the local power structure. As black leaders' influence increased, the white elite attempted to keep its traditions -- including racial inequality -- intact, and race and class issues often lay at the heart of controversies over progress. Once the most tolerant diverse city in the South and the nation, New Orleans came to lag behind the rest of the country in pursuing racial equity. Souther traces the ascendancy of tourism in New Orleans through the final decades of the twentieth century and beyond, examining the 1984 World's Fair, the collapse of Louisiana's oil industry in the eighties, and the devastating blow dealt by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Narrated in a lively style and resting on a bedrock of research, New Orleans on Parade is a landmark book that allows readers to fully understand the image-making of the Big Easy.

Exploring the Crescent City from the ground up, Richard Campanella takes us on a winding journey toward explaining the city’s distinct urbanism and eccentricities. In Cityscapes of New Orleans, Campanella—a historical geographer and professor at Tulane University—reveals the why behind the where, delving into the historical and cultural forces that have shaped the spaces of New Orleans for over three centuries. For Campanella, every bewildering street grid and linguistic quirk has a story to tell about the landscape of Louisiana and the geography of its bestknown city. Cityscapes of New Orleans starts with an examination of neighborhoods, from the origins of faubourgs and wards to the impact of the slave trade on patterns of residence. Campanella explains how fragments of New Orleans streets continue to elude Google Maps and why humble Creole cottages sit alongside massive Greek Revival mansions. He considers the roles of modern urban planning, environmentalism, and preservation, all of which continue to influence the layout of the city and its suburbs. In the book’s final section, Campanella explores the impact of natural disasters as well-known as Hurricane Katrina and as unfamiliar as “Sauvé’s Crevasse,” an 1849 levee break that flooded over two hundred city blocks. Cityscapes of New Orleans offers a wealth of perspectives for uninitiated visitors and transplanted citizens still confounded by terms like “neutral ground,” as well as native-born New Orleanians trying to understand the Canal Street Sinkhole. Campanella shows us a vibrant metropolis with stories around every corner.

Second edition offers a look into the soulful homes and gardens of 1990s NOLA creatives, updated with a new layout, larger photos, and a narrative that includes the city's recent history For everyone who fantasizes about interiors that evoke an artistic world of color, myth, and romance The first edition sold more copies (90,000-plus) than any other photographic book about New Orleans in the city’s history

Twelve essays written by university-affiliated geographers, historians, anthropologists, and ecologists explore the local transformations of physical landforms, fish life, humans, and the Mississippi River that created and continue to modify the city of New Orleans. Among the topics: Native Americans and the geography of New Orleans; subduing nature through engineering; and industrial pollution in the lower Mississippi. c. Book News Inc.

In Over New Orleans, photographer David King Gleason creates a breathtaking aerial mosaic of the Crescent City—a composite portrait that is at once panoramic and intimate, dramatic and subtle. Working from the skies, Gleason reveals every aspect of the city from the familiar streetcars and wrought-iron balconies to less celebrated views of the Faubourg Marigny, the Dixie Brewery on Tulane Avenue, and the palatial residences that overlook Lake Pontchartrain. From high overhead, Gleason's camera captures the dynamism of the Central Business District and the broad sweep of the docks that lie along the great bend of the Mississippi. Closing in, he reveals the lush courtyards of the French Quarter and the great mansions of the Garden District. Mapping the city's environs, Gleason shows the turbid Mississippi where it meets the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway leading off into the morning mist, and the cluster of chemical plants that have found their place on the river amid the swampland and graceful antebellum plantation homes. These photographs reveal the diverse urban fabric of New Orleans with a drama that can seldom be approached at street level. The narrow streets of the French Quarter give way to the bustle of Canal Street and the bluntly modern towers of Poydras Street; the Iberville Housing Project is revealed wedged in a netherworld between the Saint Louis No. 2 Cemetery and the sculptured terrain of Louis Armstrong Park; the Superdome sits at the hub of a network of highways; and the Mississippi, girded with shipping, is seen as the city's backbone—its presence felt in nearly every image. Cities are usually seen from above only fleetingly, from airplane windows, or partially, from the upper floors of tall buildings. In Over New Orleans, David King Gleason offers us the opportunity to linger above one of the world's most fascinating cities, to contrast its charms and raw vigor, to see it whole in all its complexity.

In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

The exquisite antebellum mansions of the Garden District. Giant oaks stretching across boulevards and back in time to before the Civil War. The decadence of Bourbon Street. The vibrant sounds of jazz, blues, and Cajun music coming from every doorway or right from the street. Lacy iron balconies that wrap around the historic buildings of the French Quarter. A leisurely meal under a canopy of wisteria. In vibrant watercolors and detailed sketches, artist Diana Gessler captures the unique charm that makes New Orleans alluring: Mardi Gras, the Cabildo, Jackson Square, the Court of the Two Sisters, St. Louis Cemetery, the Jazz Festival, the River Road Plantations, the Cajun country, sumptuous Creole cuisine, and Audubon’s Aquarium of the Americas. In fascinating detail—on everything from the making of Mardi Gras, Napolean’s death mask, the city’s inspired architectural and garden designs, and favorite author hangouts to famous New Orleanians and Aunt Sally’s Creole pralines—Very New Orleans celebrates the city, the Cajun country, the people, and our history

Landscape architect Lake Douglas employs written accounts, archival data, historic photographs, lithographs, maps, and city planning documents -- many of which have never been published until now -- to explore public and private outdoor spaces in New Orleans and those who shaped them. Public Spaces, Private Gardens, an informative stroll through the last two hundred years of the designed landscapes and horticultural past of New Orleans, offers a fresh look at the cultural landscape of one of America's most interesting and historic cities.