American Indians of Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake
When Captain John Smith sailed up the Potomac River in 1608, he found 13 American Indian villages along its banks. Spanish incursions beginning in 1521 brought diseases, land grabs, resource destruction, military assaults, and slave raids. Nonetheless, there were several large villages and fortified towns by the time of John Smith’s 1608 visit. At that time, three major political groups vied for power in the region: the Susquehannock in Pennsylvania; the Piscataway Chiefdom in southern Maryland; and the Powhatan Chiefdom in Virginia and farther south.
Every place in the Western Hemisphere has an ongoing American Indian story, and the Washington, D.C., area is no exception. People had settled on the shores of Washington’s Anacostia and Potomac rivers as early as 9,500 BCE. Their descendants still reside here. The Nacotchtank Indians of what is now D.C. were part of the Piscataway Chiefdom, with settlements stretching along the Potomac River. Anacostia, a rendering of the word “Nacotchtank” by the English Jesuits who came with Leonard Calvert in 1634, was the home of their most important leader.
Captain John Smith’s map (1612) showing Nacotchtank details (Library of Congress)
Indians of the Chesapeake Bay would form early and lasting impressions on the newly-arriving European settlers. This is where Pocahontas met Captain John Smith, after all, setting up one of the great legends of early American settlement. But the presence of Indians also played a role in racial segregation laws that were only recently changed.
Chesapeake Indians were riverine communities, drawing sustenance from the waterways for as much as 10 months of the year. The Powhatan confederacy of Indians that greeted the Jamestown settlers included tribes from the Carolinas to Maryland. The Piscataway often sided with the Powhatan Chiefdom against the English, and when the Powhatan were defeated in 1646, English settlements quickly expanded. King Charles deeded Piscataway territories to Lord Baltimore in 1632, and European settlements reached what is now Washington, D.C., by 1675.
British settlement during the 17th century followed the usual pattern of expansion. Indians were pushed off their lands. Treaties and alliances were made, then promises broken. Frontiersman pushed into Indian land at the expense of the communities. Epidemics of introduced diseases decimated the Indigenous population, down to perhaps a tenth of its former number.
“There is petition after petition, speech after speech, on record by the chiefs to Maryland Council, asking them to respect treaty rights,” says Gabrielle Tayac, niece of Piscataway Chief Billy Tayac. “Treaty rights were being ignored, and the Indians were getting physically harassed. The first moved over to Virginia, then signed an agreement to move up to join the Haudenosaunee [Iroquoise Confederacy]. They had moved there by 1710. But a conglomeration stayed in the traditional area, around St. Ignacious Church. They’ve been centered there since 1710. Families mostly still live within the old reservation boundaries.”
Map of the American Indian Tribes of the Chesapeake region (courtesy Doug Herman)
“By 1700, the English had settled and established plantation economies along the waterways, because they are shipping to England,” says anthropologist Danielle Moretti-Langholtz at the College of William and Mary. “Claiming those pathways pushed the Indians back, and the back-country Indians become more prominent. Some Natives were removed and sold into slavery in the Caribbean. This whole area was kind of cleaned out. But there are some Indians that remain, and they are right in the face of the English colonies. We can celebrate the fact that they’ve held on.”
But it was racial laws and policies that pushed for the near “disappearance” of Indians from the region. In Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, white indentured servants united with black slaves in an uprising against the Virginia governor in an attempt to drive Indians out of Virginia. They attacked the friendly Pamunkey and Mattaponi tribes, driving them and their queen Cockacoeske into a swamp. Bacon’s Rebellion is said to have led to the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which effectively embedded white supremacy into law, driving a wedge between whites and blacks that came to dominate American social dynamics.
Perhaps most damaging of all was the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, pushed forward by the white supremacist and eugenicist Walter Ashby Plecker, the first registrar of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. This Act made it unsafe—and, in fact, illegal—to be Indian. Plecker decreed that Virginia Indians had so intermarried—mostly with blacks—that they no longer existed. He instructed registrars around the state to go through birth certificates and to cross out “Indian” and write in “Colored.” Further, the law also expanded Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage.
While many Indians simply left, the Mattaponi and Pamukey stayed isolated, which protected them. They kept mostly to themselves, not even connecting with the other Virginia tribes. But they continue today to honor their 340-year-old treaty with the Governor of Virginia by bringing tribute every year.
On the Eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay, the Nanticoke mostly fled into Delaware, while a small band called the Nause-Waiwash moved into the waters of the Blackwater Marsh. “We settled on every lump,” said the late chief Sewell Fitzhugh. “Well, a lump is just a piece of land that is higher, that doesn’t flood most of the time.”
The remnant Maryland tribes consolidated under the name of Piscataways, and around 1700 removed to southern Pennsylvania. There they came under the protection of the Iroquois, where they became known as the Conoy. By the end of the 18th century their official numbers had been reduced to 320 persons. Their lands and political autonomy were completely destabilized, and reservation boundaries were not respected past 1700.
Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage would not be overturned until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia. Mildred Loving is often identified as black. She was also Rappahannock Indian. But consequent to Plecker’s actions, Virginia Indians faced considerable challenges proving their unbroken lineage—a requirement necessary for achieving status as a Federally Recognized Tribe. The Pamunkey received Federal recognition in 2015, and six other Virginia tribes in January 2018—500 years after Pocahontas.
The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian located on the National Mall, welcomes you to visit and learn more about the Piscataway and other Indigenous peoples of the Americas during your visit to Washington, D.C., for the 2019 AAG Annual Meeting.
Recommended readings:
The Aborigines of the District of Columbia and the Lower Potomac – A Symposium, under the Direction of the Vice President of Section D. Otis T. Mason; W J McGee; Thomas Wilson; S. V. Proudfit; W. H. Holmes; Elmer R. Reynolds; James Mooney. American Anthropologist, Vol. 2, No. 3. (Jul., 1889), pp. 225-268. https://www.jstor.org/stable/658373?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Mid Atlantic Division Team Takes 2018 World Geography Bowl Title
Mid Atlantic Division Team Takes 2018 World Geography Bowl Title. AAG President Derek Alderman (far left) presented the new championship award.
The Mid Atlantic Team won first place in the 2018 World Geography Bowl, an annual quiz competition for teams of college-level geography students representing the AAG’s regional divisions. The 2018 event was a milestone, marking the 25th year for hosting the event during the AAG Annual Meeting.
On April 11, while the International Reception was pumping away upstairs, the World Geography Bowl was underway on the third floor of the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans. Ten teams representing eight of the regional divisions as well as two ad hoc spoiler teams competed in the 9 round preliminary match up. The eight divisions represented were: Mid Atlantic, East Lakes, West Lakes, Southwest, Southeast, Great Plains/Rocky Mountain, New England-St. Lawrence Valley, and Middle States Divisions. The two spoiler teams were aptly named Longitude and Latitude.
The championship round challenged the top two teams from the round-robin preliminaries: Southeast and Mid Atlantic. After a neck and neck round of toss-up questions, Mid Atlantic pulled out the victory in the team question portion of the final. AAG President Derek Alderman was on hand during the final round to serve as the guest judge and grantor of the prize atlases courtesy of National Geographic Society to the winning team.
Most of the students who participate on the regional teams are chosen during their respective regional division Geography Bowl competition held during their regional division annual meeting each fall. All students who participate receive funding from their regional division as well as the AAG in order to help offset the costs of attending the AAG Annual Meeting.
The winning Mid Atlantic Division team’s roster was:
Matthew Cooper, University of Maryland
Christine MacKrell, George Washington University
Brian Slobotsky, University of Maryland
Zachery Radziewicz, Salisbury University
Daniel Milbrath, Salisbury University
The first runner-up Southwest Division team’s roster was:
Jesse Andrews, Appalachian State University
William Canup, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Jacob Cecil, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Darby Libka, University of Mary Washington
Randi Robinson, Mississippi State University
Jared White, University of West Florida
The second runner-up Great Plains/Rocky Mountain team’s roster was:
Tristan Boyd, University of Colorado, Denver
Karl Bauer, Kansas State University
Sara Newman, University of Colorado, Denver
Peter Brandt, North Dakota State University
Lindy Westenhoff, University of Wyoming
Jonathon Preece, University of Wyoming
Sujan Parajuli, South Dakota State University
In addition to team prizes, the top individual scorers are also acknowledged. The Most Valuable Player of the 2018 World Geography Bowl was Jesse Andrews from Appalachian State University (SEDAAG) who was presented with an atlas courtesy of Gamma Theta Upsilon.
The remaining top five individual scorers listed in order of points received were:
Matthew Cooper, University of Maryland Graduate Student (MAD)
Kate Rigot, University of Colorado, Denver Graduate Student (Team Latitude)
Deondre Smiles, Ohio State University Graduate Student (East Lakes)
Tristan Boyd, University of Colorado, Denver Undergraduate Student (Great Plains/Rocky Mountain)
Thanks to the 2018 WGB prize donors and volunteers
Organizers of the World Geography Bowl would like to express thanks to the countless volunteer question writers, team sponsors/coaches, moderators, judges, and scorekeepers who make the competition possible, and to the many students who competed across the country. We would like to recognize the volunteers this year as: Paul McDaniel (Kennesaw State University), Wesley Reisser (US Department of State & George Washington University), Rob Edsall (Idaho State University), Dawn Drake (Missouri Western State University), Richard Deal (Edinboro University of Pennsylvania), Zia Salim (California State University at Fullerton), Ronnie Schumann (University of North Texas), Liz Lowe (GIS Technician, New Orleans City Park), Jim Baker (University of Nebraska-Omaha) Patrick May (Plymouth State University), Jase Bernhardt (Hofstra University), Mel Johnson (University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc), Olumide Olufowobi (University of Lagos), Megan Heckert (West Chester University), Tom Bell (University of Tennessee) Peggy Gripshover (Western Kentucky University), Amber Williams (West Virginia University), Lee Ann Nolan (Pennsylvania State University), Jeff Neff (Western Carolina University), Casey Allen (University of Colorado, Denver).
World Geography Bowl organizers thank its supporters, who generously donated atlases, books, gift certificates, software, plaques, and clothing – Texas State University, National Geographic Society, Pearson, Gamma Theta Upsilon, University of Georgia Press, Clark Labs, Esri, Guilford Press, Syracuse University Press, Penguin Random House, American Geosciences Institution, and Expedia – who recognize the important role the competition plays in building a sense of community and generating excitement around geographic learning. Your continued support is truly appreciated.
A special thank you goes out to the World Geography Bowl executive director, Jamison Conley (West Virginia University) for his volunteer efforts at organizing the bowl since 2015.
2019 World Geography Bowl – Washington, D.C.
The 2019 World Geography Bowl competition will be held in Washington, D.C. in April 2019. Regional competition typically occur during the fall at respective AAG regional meetings, where regional teams for the national competition are usually formed. For more information on organizing a team or volunteering at the national event, contact the World Geography Bowl executive director, Jamison Conley at West Virginia University at Jamison [dot] Conley [at] mail [dot] wvu [dot] edu or the AAG Geography Bowl coordinator, Emily Fekete at efekete [at] aag [dot] org. To learn more about the 2019 World Geography Bowl, follow updates posted here.
In addition, a photo album of the event will be shared soon.
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Annual Meeting
AAG 2018 New Orleans Annual Meeting PDF Program
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Annual Meeting
2018 Annual Meeting Program: New Orleans, LA
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Southwest Louisiana’s Creole Trail Riding Clubs
By Alexandra Giancarlo Photos by Jeremiah Ariaz
Jeanerette Trail Ride, Jeanerette, LA, 2015, Photo by Jeremiah Ariaz
You could say trail riding and horse culture is in Acynthia Villery’s blood. “I was going to rodeos in my mother’s womb,” she explained to me. A Texas transplant, Acynthia hails from a long line of Creoles in south Louisiana. Her heritage has such mixed origins that, when asked about her background, she jokes that she’s “a Heinz 57,” referring to the alleged fifty-seven varieties of the famed sauce.
Trail riding—recreational horseback rides featuring anywhere from a few dozen to thousands of participants, held on a weekly basis by a rotation of dozens of trail riding clubs—occurs throughout southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana, even spreading into Mississippi in recent years. Despite the practice’s present-day geographic breadth, it is most closely associated with the Creoles of rural Southwestern Louisiana who descended from some of the region’s earliest settlers, many of them landowning gens de couleurlibres (free people of color) in antebellum times. Others were enslaved and played a crucial role on the farm and the ranch. All had multiracial origins, owing to the multi-generational mixing of people of European (usually French), Native American, and African ancestry.
To learn more about Creole culture, check out this field trip:
Zydeco, Gumbo, and Black Innovators: A Day Trip to Southwestern Louisiana Creole Country
This field trip is a day trip to the southwestern part of Louisiana, home to the mixed-race French heritage Creoles. In collaboration with community members, we will be treated to a traditional Creole lunch and listen to a private music demo by renowned zydeco artist Keith Frank (and have a Q&A with the artist). The Black History Month exhibit at Opelousas Museum (“African American Business Owners and Innovators”) has been extended to accommodate our group and the exhibit’s curator, a Creole community historian, will be guiding our tour. Over the course of the day, we will learn about Creoles’ little-acknowledged history—such as Creole cowboys, predating much of the white settlement of the area—and their often-obscured contributions to the region’s cultural offerings. En route, we will watch a classic documentary film on Creole lifeways by ethnomusicologist Nicholas Spitzer (Tulane) to set the scene.
Much has been said and written about the recent removal of four New Orleanian monuments to Confederate leaders and an 1874 white supremacist uprising[1][2]. More will be said at the Annual Meeting. The wide-ranging struggle over New Orleanian monuments includes how those memorials (re)defined New Orleans’ place in American space and time around Lost Cause ideology, variously comforting, threatening, affirming and negating certain historical/geographical narratives about the city, the American South, and the United States as a whole. They rendered the Confederate cause noble, the South distinctive yet within an American nationalist imaginary of post-bellum reconciliation and “redemption,” and simultaneously championed white supremacy while obscuring and/or glorifying the violence necessary to secure and maintain it. [3]
What New Orleans’ Confederate monument boosters wanted to do to and through monumentalized public spaces is important, as are the efforts of Take ‘Em Down NOLA to redefine those spaces, this city, and the American national story through monument removal. Geographers have written about the broader questions of historical memory and memorialization in the American South[4]. In considering the meaning-making done by and against Confederate monuments in the Crescent City, we should not forget what unmonumentalized places, events, and people do to historical memory, what I call the political geography of forgetting inconvenient history in New Orleans. What historical events unheralded in public spaces do to collective memory and the political definition of place can be as important as those monumentalized. Think of those numerous small plaques, sidewalk markers, and “stumbling stones” in Paris, Berlin, and other European cities to the deported and murdered in the Holocaust; Before their installation, the fact of Nazi extermination of Jewish life was largely invisible in contemporary urban landscapes, or confined to museums and monuments instead of distributed through quotidian spaces where those absent lives were lived and ended. Think also of how few, and recent, are Parisian memorials to Algerians killed in that city during France’s dirty war against Algerian independence. The relative visibility of memorializations of German (and Vichy French) state violence against Jews and the Resistance in the 1940s and near-invisibility in public space of French state violence against Algerians and Leftists in the 1950s and ‘60s both reflects and reinforces France’s belated historical reckoning with collaboration in World War Two and ongoing historical amnesia of crimes by “good” Republican, Gaullist France twenty years later.
New Orleans’ passage through black slavery and slave resistance, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction and its counter-revolutionary rollback are the historical backdrop upon which Confederate monumentalization rested. Here, I wish to address a few historical sites within an easy walk from the AAG Annual Meeting that have remained unmemorialized, which are foundational to not just this city’s past and its reality today, but are constitutive of major aspects of America’s present reality. Check them out while you’re visiting New Orleans for the Annual Meeting. And if you do, consider what it means for our past, our present and our future these places aren’t part of the stories we tell ourselves about where we came from and how that shapes the prefigurative politics of who we are and can imagine ourselves becoming.
Historical sites mentioned here: [1] Jackson Square, where Jean St. Malo was executed in 1784; [2] The Omni Hotel, formerly the site of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, New Orleans’ most opulent slave auction site; [3] The corner of O’Keefe and Common Streets, scene of the 1866 New Orleans Massacre; [4] Lower Canal Street, site of the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place; [5] Former site of Orleans Parish Prison, currently inside Armstrong Park. Where 11 Italians were lynched in 1891. Conference hotels: [A] The New Orleans Sheraton; [B] The New Orleans Marriott; [C] The Crowne Plaza Hotel. (Courtesy, Brian Marks)
Start in Jackson Square at the heart of the French Quarter. During the Spanish colonial period, this was the Plaza de Armas at the foot of the seat of the colonial government and Catholic cathedral. As a slave society initiated by French colonists in 1719 and expanded by the Spanish, Louisiana was home to maroon communities of African people who emancipated themselves from bondage by retreating into wetlands behind the high ground near the Mississippi River from which plantations were cut out of the forests and cane brakes of South Louisiana. One of those people history has recorded was Jean Saint Malo, who led a community of Maroons east of New Orleans in present-day Saint Bernard Parish before his capture by Spanish slave-catchers in 1784. He was executed in today’s Jackson Square on June 19, 1784. There’s no historical marker of this event, or St. Malo’s life, in the Square. The hugely important role of African people in building colonial New Orleans and making a Revolutionary Atlantic, from the Louisiana maroons, the Haitian Revolution forcing France to sell Louisiana to the United States, the Haitian refugees who came to New Orleans in the 1790s and greatly shaped the city, to the Haitian-inspired 1811 slave uprising in St. John the Baptist parish not far from the city, are largely a constitutive absence in New Orleans’ public memory.[5]From Jackson Square, head down Chartres Street (it’s pronounced ‘Charters’ by locals) two blocks to the Omni Hotel on the corner of St. Louis and Chartres. This hotel sits on the former location of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel[6], built in the 1830s and the site of the most prominent slave market in the city, a city which in the 1850s had at least 50 different businesses buying and selling enslaved people. Five different slave auctioneers, buyers, and holding pens were located on this street corner alone; another cluster was around Esplanade and Decatur on the other side of the Quarter, a third in the modern CBD just west of Canal Street along Baronne Street. In a very material way, these innocuous New Orleans intersections were the beating heart, the nerve center, the financial nexus of that enormous engine of human suffering, forced migration, and economic valorization we call the American domestic slave trade. And it was that trade that pushed black slavery, Native American land dispossession, and the pernicious circuit of slave/land/cash crop accumulation westward through the South. The domestic trade centered upon New Orleans revived, through that territorial expansion, what might have been a stagnant institution, augmenting the tremendous political and economic power of the Slave South the United States of America, and later the Confederate States of America, fought so hard to sustain, expand, and defend from any challenge. And while the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge now has a permanent exhibit on the New Orleans’ role in the slave trade, and the Historic New Orleans Collection put on an important exhibition on the city in the domestic slave trade in 2015[7], consider what it says not about New Orleans’, but about America’s, blindness to its history there exists today but one humble brass plaque acknowledging any of this in those New Orleanian neighborhoods through which so many thousands of enslaved people were bought and sold, through which the destiny of 19th Century North America was cast, making first the Mexican-American War and later the American Civil War inevitable.
CHANGE. Architectural remnant of the St. Louis Exchange Hotel, home to one of New Orleans’ dozens of slave markets, built into the existent Omni Hotel. 400th block of Chartres Street, French Quarter. (Courtesy, Brian Marks)
In the St. Louis, people were auctioned under a grand dome in an auditorium ringed with decorative columns. In this city where slave markets and holding pens were ubiquitous, only two historical markers exist; in Algiers, across the river from the French Quarter, a marker attests to the landing site where thousands of enslaved people arrived from the Middle Passage. Across the street from the Omni is a marker on The Original Pierre Maspero’s Restaurant (440 Chartres) acknowledging that building was once the site of a slave auction. One architectural detail on Chartres hints at the former occupant of that block, part of the word ‘[EX]CHANGE’ preserved on an arch of the former St. Louis Exchange that was incorporated into the Omni, built on the site in 1960. It’s a poignant reminder of what this place was and how the materiality of New Orleans’ central role in the domestic slave trade survives in spite of the erasure of this memory from the city’s sidewalks and buildings.
O’Keefe Street looking towards Canal Street, overlooking the site of the 1866 New Orleans massacre. (Courtesy Brian Marks, March 2018)
Keep walking down Chartres to Canal Street and turn right. Go up Canal four blocks and cross Canal to Roosevelt Way, then one more block to the corner of O’Keefe and Common. At this location a year after the end of the Civil War, on July 30, 1866, a meeting was held in the de facto State Capitol, the New Orleans Mechanic’s Institute, to amend the 1864 Louisiana Constitution, which did not guarantee equal voting rights to all men over 21, to include universal male suffrage. While slavery had been abolished through the 13th Amendment the year prior, black voting rights and civil rights more generally were flagrantly suppressed throughout the South, including Louisiana. The state’s Republican legislators and freedmen, many Union Army veterans, wanted to put into the state Constitution what would eventually become the 15th Amendment. That late July afternoon in 1866, around 1:30pm, a pro-voting rights march of black army veterans and others, marching from the Treme neighborhood just north of the French Quarter to the Mechanic’s Institute was met at O’Keefe and Common by an armed crowd of ex-Confederates and off-duty New Orleans Police and Firemen who attacked the march and subsequently the convention delegates inside the Capitol; at least 37 people were killed and more than 100 injured on this street and in the building, long since demolished.[8]
The same street view (as previous photo) during the massacre, from the perspective of the police/civilian assailants’ skirmish line. From Harper’s Magazine, August 1866. (Courtesy Brian Marks)
The 1866 New Orleans Massacre wasn’t just a local story; outrage over the killings nationwide was one of the precipitating events in the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the Republican sweep of Congress in 1866 and 1868, the implementation of Military Reconstruction in the South and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution. And yet, there’s no public memorialization of where it happened in New Orleans. Why is that? And what does it do to how Americans think about how their country came to be what it is today, or how New Orleanians imagine their city in American history, that it remains unacknowledged in public space?
Head back to Canal Street, towards the river and the conference hotels for the Annual Meeting. Right where you’ll be crossing Canal Street many times with your fellow tote-bag toting AAG’ers between the Marriott and the Sheraton, this was a battlefield in an uprising against the United States on September 14, 1874. And the rebels won that day. Here along Canal Street down to Decatur near the river front, the Battle of Liberty Place saw the White League, a white supremacist paramilitary insurgency who sought to overthrow the Reconstruction state government of Louisiana, attack, defeat, and besiege the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, the State Militia, and the city and state government. Three dozen people were shot and killed in the battle. One block down from the Marriott at the Customs House, now the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium (423 Canal Street), Louisiana’s Governor, Republican loyalists, and U.S. Army troops were besieged for three days by 5,000 White Leaguers before military reinforcements arrived.[9] Even though Reconstruction in Louisiana survived until 1877, Liberty Place and many other related episodes of anti-Reconstruction violence around Louisiana and across the region between 1873 and 1876 affected a counter-revolution in the American South, known by its participants as “Redemption.” This counter-revolution ended black voting and civil rights, removed black elected officials from office, and cancelled the limited economic and public educational reforms that were attempted during Reconstruction.[10]
Canal Street looking towards the Mississippi with the two main conference hotels in view (the Marriott on the left, the Sheraton on the right). (Courtesy Brian Marks, March 2018)
New Orleans was, again, central to these processes. The two 1870s U.S. Supreme Court cases that gutted the 14th Amendment’s civil rights protections for nearly a century implicated this city. The Slaughterhouse cases[11] (1873) – ostensibly about New Orleans’ municipal government power to regulate water pollution from dumping offal from abattoirs upriver from the city’s drinking water intakes – were hijacked into a broad constitutional judgment voiding federal power to enforce citizens’ civil rights violated by state governments. A short drive from the conference to the corner of Harmony Street and Tchoupitoulas (it’s pronounced CHOP-it-TOOL-us) takes you to as close as you can get to that former river batture dumping site, now occupied by the Port of New Orleans. And you guessed it, there’s no public memorial or signage or acknowledgment of this place’s historic role in undermining the enforcement of the 14th Amendment until the mid-1960s.
Illustration of the White League routing the New Orleans Metropolitan Police in the Battle of Liberty Place, September 14th 1874. This view from the middle of Canal Street roughly between the two main conference hotels. The view is facing east towards the Customs House, currently the Audubon Insectarium. Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 1874. (Courtesy Brian Marks)
The case U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), tried in New Orleans district court before heading to Washington, destroyed the last vestige of federal enforcement power against constitutional civil rights violations.[12] Cruikshank was among the few indicted by federal agents for the infamous April 13, 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which more than 100 African-Americans were slaughtered at the Grant Parish courthouse by a white mob in the course of overthrowing the local, pro-Reconstruction, government.[13] (In that tiny North Louisiana town of Colfax, the official State of Louisiana historical marker emplaced in 1950 reads – today, in 2018 – the “Colfax Riot” … “marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” A private memorial, dating to 1921, in that town’s graveyard to the three white rioters who died in the violence acknowledges they fell “fighting for white supremacy.” Following his initial trial in New Orleans, Cruikshank was acquitted by the U.S. Supreme Court who ruled the federal government overstepped its powers to enforce federal constitutional guarantees violated by state and local governments. This confirmed black people could be massacred with impunity and the national government would not intervene to hold them criminally responsible.
New Orleans did not fail to memorialize the Battle of Liberty Place. The problem is the city, soon after the insurrection, decided to honor and glorify the insurgents with a stone obelisk erected on Canal Street in 1891, relocated a short distance in 1993, and finally removed in 2017. This column is not about whether that monument or others in New Orleans should have been removed, but I do note that today there’s nothing in the area that tells the story of what really happened there in 1874, how it led directly to the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, impunity for anti-black violence, and disenfranchisement for 90 years, or what America would be like if history had gone another way, if equal voting rights had been enforced, if Reconstruction had not been subverted and different people with a different agenda had served in that pivotal Southern Congressional bloc in the following century. My opinion is we’d have had the legislation passed in the New Deal and Great Society about 50 years sooner, and a very different regional and racial distribution of wealth and power in this country. To not teach the historical/geographical hinge a site like the Battle of Liberty Place pivots between diverging paths in the making of America, the one taken that led us to this moment and another forsaken, is to rob us of our collective imagination to make a different future. In that sense, it’s not enough to just take down the monument.[14]
A last stop, assuming your feet don’t hurt too much already, is back up Canal Street, once more past the throngs of geographers, all the way to Rampart Street at the northern boundary of the Quarter. Turn right and follow Rampart to Armstrong Park, just past Congo Square, and go through the main, archway entrance opposite St. Ann Street. Inside the park, near where the Mahalia Jackson Theatre for the Performing Arts now stands, was the old Orleans Parish Prison. At this location the lynching of 11 Italian immigrants took place on March 14, 1891, an event that resonated widely to catalyze nativist, anti-immigrant sentiment in American public opinion.[15] The New Orleans of the 1880s and 1890s attracted thousands of Italian immigrants, many of them Sicilians, who worked on the docks, ran small shops, and did truck farming.[a] So many Sicilians crowded into the French Quarter, back then a decaying slum, that it earned the nickname ‘Little Palermo.’ When in October 1890 the New Orleans Police Chief was shot dead by unknown assailants, the Mayor and Police decided the guilty were Sicilians and rounded up 19 men for trial. Nine were actually tried and were acquitted of all charges. The next day a huge crowd, led by prominent New Orleanian legal and political figures, was agitated to action and led to the prison where they forced entry to the building and killed eleven of the 19 Italians held inside, eight managing to hide. The grand jury empaneled to investigate the murders made no indictments, even agreeing in writing with the lynch mob’s charge the jury had been bribed to acquit the Italians, so no one was held accountable.
National press coverage of the police chief’s murder, the trial, and lynching was extensive. Leading American newspapers like the Boston Globe and New York Times editorialized in favor of the lynching, while the Italian government and Italian-Americans widely decried the violence and lack of punishment for the murderers. Through these sensational press stories, Americans were acquainted for the first time with terms like “Mafia,” “stiletto,” and “vendetta” in service of the criminalization/racialization of southern Italians as undesirable persons to be discouraged or barred from the United States. So while mass immigration by southern and eastern Europeans to America would continue for another three decades, the 1891 New Orleans Italian lynchings were a critical, foundational moment normalizing hostility against these new immigrants[16], building towards the National Origins immigrant quota system that heavily restricted south and east European migration, and all but eliminated immigration from Africa or Asia, from 1924-65. We should all know about this, every child should learn it in American history class. In a New Orleans so proud of its Italian/Sicilian heritage — its St. Joseph’s altars, the Monument to the Immigrant showing an Italian family, knapsack and kerchiefs and caps and chubby baby and all, arriving from the river in Woldenberg Park with an angel harkening behind them to the Old Country, Irish and Italian parades on St. Patrick’s Day (don’t ask, it’s too complicated) – it’s inconceivable to me this event in this city is unmarked, unmemorialized, invisible in the middle of a public park. Because the events of 1891 silently shout every time a sitting Cabinet member praises America’s 1924 restrictionist immigration law[17]. And we don’t hear. And we could use those memories these days.
There’s numerous self-guided tours on the internet you can use to experientially learn more critical New Orleans history (and geography). I like the excellent collection of tours online at New Orleans Historical. And you can hire a tour guide to tell and show you more than I’ve done here; Hidden History Tours does excellent walking and bus tours of African-American New Orleans history from people who know the struggle to make this history visible because they’ve waged that struggle themselves. On the Annual Meeting agenda, consider the April 9th Black Geographies Past and Present field trip to Whitney Plantation, the daily 4/10, 4/11, 4/12 and 4/13 African Life in the French Quarter Walking Tours, the Thursday 4/12 A People’s Guide to New Orleans: Resistance in the Treme Walking Tour, or the Friday 4/13 Interpreting Slavery at River Road Plantations field trip. For those inside the meeting, consider hearing the President’s Plenary and subsequent discussion by five panelists on 4/10, the themed sessions on black geographies like Mike Crutcher’s 4/11 address on the Treme neighborhood and the 4/14 session on Clyde Woods’ Development Drowned and Reborn. See you in New Orleans.
— Brian Marks, Louisiana State University and A&M College
[a] In my family’s story, one of my great-great grandparents was a Sicilian immigrant who stowed away on a ship bound for New Orleans, then jumped into the Mississippi and swam ashore just below New Orleans to arrive clandestinely.
[4] Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman, eds. 2008. Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
[5] Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, 1992. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
[7] John Pope, “Slavery in New Orleans is the subject of a harrowing exhibit at the Historic New Orleans Collection.” New Orleans Times-Picayune, March 27, 2015.
[8] James Hollandsworth, 2004. An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
[9] Lawrence Powell, 2013. “Reinventing Tradition: Liberty Place, Historical Memory, and Silk-Stocking Vigilantism in New Orleans Politics.” In Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, eds. From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World. London: Routledge. pp. 127-49.
[10] Nicholas Lemann, 2006. Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War. New York: Macmillan.
[12] Robert Goldman, 2001. Reconstruction and Black Suffrage: Losing the vote in Reese and Cruikshank. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
[13] LeeAnna Keith, 2008. The Colfax Massacre. New York: Oxford University Press.
[14] Scott Marler, “Removing the Confederate Monuments In New Orleans Was Only a First Step Toward Righting the Wrongs of History.” The Nation, June 14, 2017.
[15] Alan Gauthreaux, 2010. “An Inhospitable Land: Anti-Italian Sentiment and Violence in Louisiana, 1891-1924. Louisiana History 51(1): 41-68.
[16] Christopher Woolf, “A brief history of America’s hostility to a previous generation of Mediterranean migrants – Italians.” Public Radio International, November 26, 2015.
[17] Adam Serwer, “Jeff Sessions’s Unqualified Praise for a 1924 Immigration Law.” The Nation, January 10, 2017.
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Annual Meeting
Flood Control Infrastructure and ‘Political Hydrology’ along the LA-TX Gulf Coast
An intact portion of the 17th Street Canal (flooded after Hurricane Katrina). Concrete flood walls top the levees. CC by 2.5 Wikimedia Commons, by Infrogmation
The nation’s costliest natural disasters continue to be caused by flooding. Every year, with enormous personal and financial cost to U.S. citizens, floods damage crops, infrastructure, businesses, personal property and, most unfortunately, cost American lives.1 Americans are quick to forget such disasters, however, in part because they’re frequently popping up in other places. Remember the devastating flooding in south Louisiana in August 2016? It cost $10.0 billion. Other than Texans and Oklahomans, most Americans probably do not recall their floods way back in May 2015. It cost a mere $2.6 billion.1 And these are just a couple of examples. The single event we have not forgotten, thankfully, is the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina-Rita flooding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It cost $153.0 billion, the most expensive flood disaster in the U.S. Of course, this was until Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. Cost are still being tallied, but unofficial estimates of flood damage cost associated with Hurricane Harvey range from $150 to $240 billion.
A sure way to reduce annual flood cost and protect the financial and personal livelihoods of Americans residing in flood prone regions is to strengthen America’s levees, an enormous system of flood control infrastructure.2 This means fortifying, heightening, and/or moving levees away from the river. These options, especially the latter, are in accord with “integrated flood management,” which has become the status quo in Europe.3, 4 In the Netherlands this approach is known as making “Room for the River.”4
Flood control in the U.S. is long entrenched in the paradigm of the “100-year” flood (i.e., 1 percent event), a strict probabilistic approach rooted in a decades old practice from the late 1960s that was advocated by insurance agencies and based on shaky assumptions regarding statistics, climate, and land use.5 A 100- year flood event may seem unlikely to occur during any given year, but it has a 26 percent chance of occurring in the life of a typical 30-year home mortgage. These are not favorable odds, and they’re even less favorable in view of documented historic (recorded) climate change, land use change, and land subsidence that has occurred since the 1950s.
Change had come to America, at least it seemed. With an inability of Congress to pass climate proof flood policy, action occurred at the executive branch. President Obama’s Executive Order 13690 (Establishing a Federal Flood Risk Management Standard and a Process for Further Soliciting and Considering Stakeholder Input) (6), anchored with an extensive synthesis of floodplain science research, included many tenants of “integrated flood management” with similarities to those already practiced in Europe.3, 4 In particular, EO 13690 explicitly required up to date scientific climate change projections to be included in the design of flood control infrastructure as well as embracing a modern “flood risk” approach that takes into account human safety and the value of human activities (e.g., industry, property values, agriculture, etc…). This is broadly in agreement with the direction advocated by the nation’s highest body of science, the National Academies of Science. Specifically, EO 13690 provided three options for redesigning federal flood control levees, including i) utilizing the best “actionable” climate change science, ii) construct levees two or three feet higher than the elevation of the standard 100-year recurrence interval flood, or iii) design levees to the standard of a 500-year flood recurrence interval (in the Netherlands federal levees are designed to withstand flood events having a flood recurrence interval of 1,250 to 10,000 years). An additional key component of EO 13690 is that it recognizes the value of “working with nature” to reduce flood risks, which supports environmental conservation and restoration of valuable floodplain wetlands and associated ecosystem services. This is especially important along the Gulf Coast and the lower Mississippi River because the storage of flood waters on the floodplain increases nutrient sequestration, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which are associated with the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, an enormous seasonally occurring area of hypoxic (oxygen poor) water off the coast of Louisiana and Texas detrimental to the shallow marine ecosystem. Thus, EO 13690 in essence represented a change from flood control to flood management. The intended move towards this “integrative” approach to flood management was not just substantial, it represented a paradigm change in the vision and mechanics of U.S. flood control that was also environmentally friendly. And, as levees are the embodiment of flood control infrastructure, implementation of EO 13690 is squarely in accord with President Trump’s stated intentions to improve the nation’s infrastructure.
Implementation of EO 13690 required stakeholders, such as states and levee boards, to develop a plan based on one of the three above approaches in coordination with federal agencies (e.g., FEMA, Federal Interagency Floodplain Management Task Force, Water Resources Council, etc.). Thus, local and state governmental institutions had several options that enabled them to alter the placement of levee systems in accord with their own priorities, such as nature preservation, agriculture, cultural heritage preservation, and urbanization.7 Implementation of EO 13690 would have seen the U.S. finally moving forward with adaptation of a modern “integrated” risk based approach to flood management that enhanced floodplain ecosystems as well as respecting up-to-date climate change that impacts flooding in America.
Predictably, EO 13690 was abruptly challenged by some stakeholders, including those who are arguably in most need of reduced flood risk. The Association of Louisiana Levee Boards (representing all levee boards within the state of Louisiana) was opposed to implementation of EO 13690. Louisiana contends that EO 13690 would adversely impact the Louisiana economy, and that it represented “social engineering.” Louisiana levee boards were also resistant to EO 13690 because it recognizes modern climate change science, to which there is skepticism. Louisiana was also concerned with EO 13690 because it could result in significant disruption of industry and populations residing within the wetlands and floodplains of the Mississippi delta. But in the Netherlands, the Dutch were able to efficiently implement their “Room for the River” plan within the Rhine delta, which has one of the densest populations in the world with exceptionally high economic activities and property values.
Nationally, the new standards of EO 13690 were welcomed by a larger swath of stakeholders, including the Association of State Floodplain Managers.8 And fortification of the nation’s levee system was also in accord with Congressional action following the 2005 flooding of New Orleans.9 Alarmingly, it was revealed that U.S. federal agencies have scant information regarding the overall integrity of America’s ~165,000 km system of flood control levees.2, 5
The new White House administration rescinded EO 13690 in a Presidential Executive Order on 15 August 2017, about two weeks prior to the devastating flooding by Hurricane Harvey of the Houston metropolitan and coastal southeast Texas and southwest Louisiana. The precipitation totals from Hurricane Harvey event had perhaps a 500-yr recurrence interval, and the cost of the flood disaster is on scale with the Hurricanes Katrina-Rita flooding along the Gulf Coast.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 2016. U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
National Committee on Levee Safety, 2009. Recommendations for a National Levee Safety Program: A Report to Congress from the National Committee on Levee Safety.
European Council (EC), 2007. Directive 2007/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2007 on the Assessment and Management of Flood Risks.
Delta Commission, 2016. National Water Plan 2016-2021. Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, Rijkswaterstaat, the Hague, the Netherlands.
National Research Council (NRC), 2013. Levees and the National Flood Insurance Program: Improving Policies and Practices. Water Science and Technology Board, Division on Earth and Life Studies, National Academies Press, Washington D.C.
Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), 2015. Executive Order 13690 and the New Federal Flood Risk Management Standard Explained. ASFPM News & Views, 28 (1), February 2015.
National Levee Safety Act, 2007. 121 Stat. 1288, Public Law 110-114-Nov. 8, 2007, 110th
Part 2: Rhythms, Blues, and the Infinite Potential of Congo Square
What comes after jazz? How does a city reprise its collective creation of the Americas’ most original and distinctive art form? Part 2 of this essay surveys happenings in New Orleans music since the emergence of jazz around the turn of the twentieth century. For a take on earlier developments, check out Part 1 before working your way back here. Each of these essays, it is important to note, are highly personal accounts, framed and embellished by my own encounters and experiences in the Crescent City and points south. In this second part, I work to demonstrate how New Orleans drew from its fundamental links with the African Diaspora and Atlantic Worlds to influence many of the major shifts in American popular music over the twentieth century. I hope these brief discussions help set the mood for geographers attending the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting held in New Orleans as the city fêtes its tricentennial. These accounts also provide context for many of the musical acts and styles on display at the French Quarter Fest, the city’s gratis outdoor music festival that coincides with the AAG meeting.
Jazz is not an only child. On the contrary, the birth of jazz as a musical and economic form and force was but one flare-up in a long and gradual process of musical innovation and exchange in New Orleans. As myriad musical forms collected under a broad jazz umbrella, those various styles steadily evolved and expanded in a never-ending flow of accumulation and origination. Sustaining its status as a globally eminent cultural hearth, New Orleans continues to avail its strategic situation at the confluence of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico to churn out innovative and influential music.[i]
As the jazz sound bubbled up from the streets around the turn of the century, the city’s (in)famous red-light district, Storyville, provided steady gigs for the growing class of New Orleans musicians. And it was during the district’s twenty-year existence (1897-1917) that two of the city’s stalwart musical institutions assumed their distinctive styles. Brass bands typically played rowdy gin mills, restaurants, and saloons, while solo piano players worked the parlor houses of the district’s many brothels and cabarets. Beginning with legendary forebears Tony Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton, piano “professors” remain an iconic leitmotif in the city’s musical culture. Moreover, a sampling of the city’s more prominent pianists helps trace a particular evolution of New Orleans’ musical innovations over the twentieth century, from Jelly Roll Morton to Tuts Washington to Fats Domino to Allen Toussaint; and from Professor Longhair to Art Neville to James Booker to Dr. John.[ii]
As jazz became an international phenomenon in the early twentieth century, New Orleans maintained its outsized influence by simultaneously nurturing its jazz scene and fomenting new innovative expressions. Emanating from Congo Square in the centuries prior, the syncopated rhythms that became essential in early jazz remained the city’s backbeat, and toward the mid-twentieth century provided the foundation for New Orleans rhythm and blues, and in turn, rock and roll. The diasporic habanera rhythms underlying jazz, what Jelly Roll called “the Spanish tinge,” along with the derivatives rumba and mambo, went on to become key elements in the forerunning rhythm and blues of Professor Longhair. First showcased in his 1949 debut, “Blues Rhumba,” the Fess’s rollicking two-hand piano style melded many of the musical innovations that had traveled down the river or across the Gulf to New Orleans. An admirer of both Hank Williams and the Cuban “Mambo King” Pérez Prado, Longhair kept time with Afro-Cuban clave polyrhythms on his left hand, while riffing barrelhouse blues from the upland South on his right. The Fess thus integrated and indeed embodied the far-flung musical traditions that coalesced in New Orleans, uniting the call-and-response blues of the Mississippi Delta with the Afro-Caribbean rhythms circulating in the broader Atlantic World.[iii]
Figure 1: Fats Domino’s home and office on Caffin Avenue in the Lower Ninth Ward (Credit: Kent Kanouse, 2009).
Those rhythms and blues later became fundamental in the early development of yet another popular musical form: rock and roll. In retrospect, writers continue to disagree on the exact origins of what became rock music; however, New Orleans looms large in nearly every interpretation. For his part, Elvis Presley famously insisted in 1956 that New Orleans’ ownFats Domino was “the real king of rock and roll” (see Figure 1). Many writers now look back on Domino’s “The Fat Man,” recorded in 1949, along with Roy Brown’s “Good Rocking Tonight” (1947) and Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (1955), as preeminent contenders for the first unequivocally rock and roll track. Amazingly, each of those records were among the many milestone works recorded and engineered at Cosimo Matassa’slegendary J&M Recording Studio (see Figure 2). Backed by versatile bandleader Dave Bartholomew and drummer Earl Palmer—an early and prolific progenitor of rock and roll’s signature backbeat, the likes of Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Dr. John, Jerry Lee Lewis, Professor Longhair, Irma Thomas, and Allen Toussaint all cut sides with Matassa at J&M. Housed in his father’s appliance store at the corner of Rampart and Dumaine Streets, J&M sat just one block down from the site now commemorating Congo Square. In 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame designated the studio one of just eleven nationwide Historic Rock and Roll Landmarks.[iv]
Before co-founding the influential groups the Meters and the Neville Brothers, Art Neville began his recording career at J&M, laying down “Mardi Gras Mambo” with the Hawketts in 1954. The Carnival classic celebrates New Orleans’ enduring camaraderie with the Caribbean and remains a popular seasonal standard. A decade later Neville helped form The Meters, a powerhouse electric rhythm section that drew on syncopated second line rhythms and call-and-response Mardi Gras Indian chants to become an early architect of the style later known as funk (see Figure 2). The Meters became a sturdy foundation of the mid-century New Orleans sound, serving as the house band for Allen Toussaint’s Sansu label and backing renowned New Orleans soul and R&B artists Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas, and Dr. John, among many others. As independent recording artists the band released several hits that remain New Orleans classics, including Hey Pocky Way, based on Mardi Gras Indian chants, and Cissy Strut, a gritty funk standard now considered an early milestone in the genre.[v]
Figure 2: The original location of Cosimo Matassa’s J&M Recording Studio at the corner of Rampart and Dumaine Streets in New Orleans (Credit: Jason Riedy, 2012).
The street culture of Mardi Gras Indians came of age with the city’s popular music, from second line to jazz to R&B to funk. Jelly Roll Morton discussed Indian culture with Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1938, even rapping the traditional patois chant “T’ouwais, bas q’ouwais [tu es pas coller or two way pocky way]” on which the Meters based their mid-century hit. Later groups of Mardi Gras Indians combined their oral traditions with syncopated electric funk to create a popular and enduring sub-genre. A group led by big chiefs Bo Dollis and Monk Boudreaux joined bandleader Willie Tee and blues guitarist Snooks Eaglin to record as the Wild Magnolias in 1970 (see Figure 3). Now an acclaimed New Orleans institution, the Wild Mags continue to perform both as a traditional Indian gang and a funk band on the streets and in venues throughout the city.[vi]
Figure 3: Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indians leads his gang through Central City near A.L. Davis Park on “Super Sunday.” (Credit: Mike Connor, 2015).
As New Orleans rhythm and blues morphed into rock and roll and later funk, other influential offshoots were materializing in the city, elevating two queens to global eminence. “New Orleans Soul Queen” Irma Thomas recorded many of her early soul classics at J&M, and continues to perform as a leading figure in the genre. Civil Rights activist and iconMahalia Jackson got her start singing in the full gospel congregations of Plymouth Rock and Mount Moriah Baptist Churches in Uptown New Orleans (see Figure 4). From there she went on to inspire millions as the “Queen of Gospel,” combining the soulful Black spirituals of the plantation South with syncopated rhythms she learned to tap out on the wood floors of her New Orleans churches.[viii]
In both the background and the forefront of the rich diversity and complexity of twentieth century New Orleans music, piano players remained iconic. There is perhaps no better single example of the multiplicity and centrality of piano players in the city than the irrepressible Mac Rebennack, known worldwide as Dr. John. A celebrated composer and performer from the 1950s to the present, Dr. John remains distinguished as a standard bearer and keeper of the flame for the storied New Orleans piano professor tradition. As a teenager Dr. John drew early inspiration from Fats Domino, Little Richard, and especially Professor Longhair in the clubs and studios around town. His range as a player, however, transcends R&B to traverse a wide array of styles including rock, jazz, funk, and the haunting voodoo-inspired psychedelia for which he became most distinctive.[ix]
Figure 4: Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church where Mahalia Jackson sang in the choir, 147 Millaudon Street, New Orleans (Google Street View, 2016).
After trouble found him in New Orleans, Mac fled to Los Angeles where the libertine spirit of late-60s California gave him license to experiment with New Orleans music in new and profound ways. There Mac serendipitously came under the wing of New Orleans patriarch Harold Battiste who managed to finagle some free studio time between Sonny and Cher takes in 1967. The duo put together a group of veteran New Orleans musicians to explore a visionary musical concept and stage persona based on nineteenth-century voodoo conjurer and man about town, Dr. John Montaigne (or Jean Montanet). A formerly enslaved native of Senegal, Dr. John the elder regained his freedom in Cuba before rising to prominence as a trusted root doctor in antebellum New Orleans. His 1885 obituary in Harper’s Weekly deemed him “the last of the Voudoos,” that is “the last really important figure of a long line of wizards or witches whose African titles were recognized,” and “the most extraordinary African character that ever obtained celebrity” in New Orleans. Studying the legend of Dr. John, Mac discovered a reference to one Pauline Rebennack, arrested along with Montaigne in the 1840s for her involvement in voodoo and other illicit acts. Realizing a likely familial connection, Mac assumed the stage persona Dr. John the Night Tripper, and with fellow New Orleans musicians in exile cut the classic LP Gris-Gris. That album amounted to a profoundly New Orleanian tribute to the Black Atlantic, melding the syncopated rhythms and bamboula dances of Congo Square with the power and grace of Afro-Caribbean spirituality and the lavish costumes, chants, and performance art of the Mardi Gras Indians. The result was a fantastic if somewhat cryptic masterpiece that conjured a range of New Orleans traditions to stake out the eeriest edges of the psychedelic zeitgeist of the 1960s.[x]
After beginning his career as a guitar player and session musician for J&M, a gunshot to the finger forced Dr. John to switch to the piano. His teacher was the brilliant and irrepressible James Booker, whom Mac later called “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.” Judging from the testimonies of his peers and scattered live recordingsBooker left behind, it is clear that he was among the most talented and original piano players the city ever gave us, notwithstanding Dr. John’s tongue-in-cheek qualifiers. Booker was an undisputed piano genius who brought classical heft to New Orleans rhythm and blues while sacrificing none of its soul. Booker could play it all: R&B, jazz, rock, classical, soul, gospel—often in a single performance, while making it feel deliberate and cohesive. In a town distinguished by a long and storied history of world-class piano players, Booker may have been its most versatile and proficient. Tormented by addiction and inner turmoil, the tragic genius and epicure died in the waiting room of Charity Hospital in 1983, far before his time.[xi]
Note: Click at your own risk! The links in the following section contain content some may consider not safe for work (NSFW).
Bounce and related forms of New Orleans hip hop arose from roots in the city’s public housing developments, especially the (former) Calliope and Magnolia projects. No Limit brothers Master P, Silkk the Shocker, and C Murder grew up in the former, while Juvenile, Soulja Slim, and “the queen of bounce” Magnolia Shorty, all hail from the latter. Before its demolition and redevelopment in 2014, the Magnolia projects were an important cultural crossroads in the city. Its A.L. Davis Park (formerly known as Shakespeare Park) has served as a historic training ground for second lines and brass bands, and remains an important gathering site for Mardi Gras Indians on Super Sunday. Just across LaSalle Street sits the Dew Drop Inn, a legendary lounge, barbershop, restaurant, hotel, and 24-hour performance venue that hosted a who’s who of soul and R&B acts, including Roy Brown, Dave Bartholomew, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, James Brown, Otis Redding, Little Richard, and so many others in the 1950s and 60s (see Figure 5). The club was a cornerstone of African American society in mid-century New Orleans, serving as a laboratory where late night sonic experiments led to early advances in rhythm and blues and rock and roll.[xiii]
Figure 5: The Dew Drop Inn, at 2836 LaSalle Street, in New Orleans, 1953 (Credit: Ralston Crawford Collection of Jazz Photography, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.)
In the twenty-first century, as New Orleans continues to innovate new musical forms and styles, the city remains devoted to jazz—its first born. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and other acts based in traditional jazz sounds continue to pack venues in New Orleans and worldwide. So, too, have the Blues continued to travel down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, at times in the form of legendary artists such as Little Freddie King or turning up in distinctive local interpretations like the mystical Acadiana blues of the late Coco Robicheaux. New Orleans R&B Emperor Ernie K-Doe kept the mid-century sound alive with regular performances (musical and otherwise) in his storied Tremé nightclub, The Mother-in-Law Lounge, until his death in 2001. Shuttered in 2010, the New Orleans institution reopened a year later thanks to the efforts of beloved New Orleans trumpeter and bon vivantKermit Ruffins.
New Orleans royal families such as the Andrews, the Battistes, and the Marsalises continue to rear and train world-class musicians in the jazz and rhythm and blues traditions. Harold Battiste founded the collective A.F.O. (All For One) Records in 1961, the city’s first label owned and operated by African-American musicians. Before his death in 2015, he had educated hundreds of New Orleans musicians in New Orleans as a public school teacher and later on the faculty in the jazz studies program at the University of New Orleans. There he mentored an impressive list of twenty-first-century jazz luminaries, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Terence Blanchard, and pianist Jesse McBride. Hailing from the storied Tremé neighborhood, the Andrews familyblurs the boundaries that would otherwise delineate styles of New Orleans music. Cousins James, Glen David, and Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews carry on the traditional sounds of the city from second line to jazz to funk.
In the activist spirit of Mahalia Jackson, Harrison’s nephew Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah “stretches” traditional jazz with hip hop samples and second line rhythms designed to highlight contemporary anti-racist social movements. Local jazz aficionado Irvin Mayfield leads a renowned Latin Jazz group with percussionist Bill Summers. Their Grammy-winning Los Hombres Calientes reaffirms New Orleans’ enduring musical connections to Latin America and the Caribbean. The emerging Tank and the Bangas are among the most exciting groups in New Orleans today. Combing New Orleans jazz, funk, and hip hop with a charismatic slam poetry sensibility, Tank demonstrates, once again, the limitless potential and broad appeal of New Orleans music.
While jazz continues to diversify in infinite directions, brass bands remain essential cultural and economic institutions in the city. Groups such as the Dirty Dozen, the Hot 8, Rebirth, the Soul Rebels, Tremé, and Soul Brass Band perpetually update the tradition with new styles and sounds while maintaining their fundamental connections to the earliest forms of jazz. On any given day in New Orleans, countless brass bands second line through the city’s streets, animating onlookers with a “big noise” that recalls Buddy Bolden at the turn of the twentieth century.
Figure 6: Big Freedia performs at the Congo Square Stage during the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, 2017 (Credit: William Widmer, Billboard)
In the twelve or so decades following the birth of jazz, a delightful multiplicity of styles and sounds emerged in New Orleans. Despite the ever-expanding diversity and complexity of the city’s music, each of its magnificent innovations emerges from roots in the bedrock of syncopated rhythms and call-and-response lyrical forms given life at Congo Square. Fortunately for us, the essence of Congo Square beats on in two important commemorative spaces: its somber historic landmark in Louis Armstrong Park and as a dedicated stage at the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (see Figure 6). On that stage, when Donald Harrison, Jr., masks in Indian regalia to lead his swinging jazz band over syncopated rhythms, and when Big Freedia directs her twerk team with call-and-response lyrics, they all stir a heaping pot of gumbo that first felt the flame in Place Congo, at the back of town, in New Orleans.
To prepare for your trip to the Crescent City, keep the Guardians of the Groove, New Orleans community radio WWOZ streaming in the background at all times. Take an open online course on New Orleans music from Dr. Matt Sakakeeny, Assistant Professor of Music at Tulane University. Listen to an archive of Mardi Gras Indian performances from 1985 and a more recent writeup hosted by Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. Watch a YouTube playlist of recordings of Mardi Gras Indians compiled by the Alan Lomax archive and a mishmash YouTube playlist curated by the author. Once again, I cannot recommend enough A Closer Walk, an interactive website, map, and series of guided tours of the geographies of New Orleans music, sponsored by WWOZ and others. In the city, visit the Louisiana Music Factory to purchase hard-to-find vinyl, CDs, films, etc. Check out the WWOZ Live Wire page for the most comprehensive listings for live music in the city, and then go find some.
[i] Grace Lichtenstein and Laura Dankner, Musical Gumbo: The Music of New Orleans (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993); Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose, and Tad Jones. Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II, revised ed. (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2009).
[ii] Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1974); Lichtenstein and Dankner, Musical Gumbo. See also Part 1 of this essay for more on Storyville and the emergence of Jazz.
[iii] Quotes in Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Music CD (Cambridge, MA: Rounder Records, 2005): Disc 6, Tracks 8 and 9. Lichtenstein and Dankner, Musical Gumbo; Robert Palmer, “Folk, Popular, Jazz, and Classical Elements in New Orleans,” in Folk Music and Modern Sound, ed. William Ferris and Mary L. Hart (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 194-201.
[iv] John Broven, Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 1988); Rick Coleman, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock “n” Roll (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2006: p. 246); Jim Cogan and William Clark, Temples of Sound: Inside the Great Recording Studios (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003)
[v] John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tínge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Alexander Stewart, “New Orleans, James Brown and the Rhythmic Transformation of American Popular Music,” Popular Music 19, no. 3 (2000): 293-318; Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008). Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004).
[vi] Alan Lomax. Mister Jelly Roll (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1950); Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz.
[vii] Lomax. Mister Jelly Roll; Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz; David Ritz, Charles Neville, Aaron Neville, and Cyril Neville. The Brothers: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 2001).
[viii] Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz; Jules Victor Schwerin. Got to Tell It: Mahalia Jackson, Queen of Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
[ix] Dr. John (Mac Rebennack) with Jack Rummel. Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995).
[x] Quotes in Lafcadio Hearn. “The Last of the Voodoos,” Harper’s Weekly 29 (Nov. 7, 1885): 726–27, reprinted in S. Frederick Starr, ed. Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2001): 77-82; Dr. John, Under a Hoodoo Moon.
[xi] Quote aired in Lily Keber, Bayou Maharajah: The Tragic Genius of James Booker (Film: Mairzy Doats Productions, 2016), available on Netflix. Trailer available on Vimeo.
[xii] Matt Miller, Bounce: Rap Music and Local Identity in New Orleans (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Afropop Worldwide, “Shake It Fo Ya Hood: Bounce, New Orleans Hip-Hop,” (podcast, 2017).
[xiii] Berry et al. Up from the Cradle of Jazz; Coleman, Blue Monday. An illuminative and disturbing documentary (NSFW) of C Murder and the Calliope projects is available here. Super Sunday is a gathering of Indians typically held on the Sunday nearest St. Joseph’s Day. The Calliope and Magnolia are two of the four public housing developments that city and federal authorities demolished and redeveloped following Katrina.
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Annual Meeting
Social Media at #AAG2018
We’re getting closer to the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting! Whether you will be attending the meeting all week, for a few days, or looking to follow the action from afar, there are plenty of ways to get involved using social media. Social media is a great way for seasoned conference goers and newcomers alike to network, report on new research, engage in lively debate with those inside and outside of the discipline, and find out what’s going on during the largest geography conference in the world! Start planning your #AAG2018 social media strategy today with these helpful guidelines!
Twitter
One of the most frequently used social media sites for live events, Twitter is a great place to start scoping out the annual meeting. Twitter is used by geographers to discuss and share research ideas or connect with others, often leading to face to face meet-ups at the annual meeting. As the main social media channel, the AAG annual meeting has had active Twitter users since at least 2011 in Seattle. The hashtag #AAG followed by the year of the event has become the standard AAG Annual Meeting tag – this year the hashtag will be #AAG2018. Start using and following #AAG2018; posts are already being compiled in anticipation of the meeting! If you are new to Twitter, try these tips to benefit most from the network:
Follow @theAAG on Twitter! The official AAG Twitter account will be active throughout the meeting with important announcements, live tweets of events, and fun photos throughout the conference hotels. New this year: the AAG will conduct a Twitter poll once a day for members to choose a session they would like to see live-Tweeted!
Use #AAG2018 on all your meeting related communications. Sometimes it is difficult to fit your thoughts into the (now expanded!) 280 character count, but try to include the hashtag #AAG2018 in each of your tweets. This will ensure that your tweets are being seen by others both at the conference and following along offsite. If you are new to hashtags, a hashtag is a way to organize a specific topic into one feed. Click on the hashtag to see the conversations happening related to that topic.
Whenever possible, try to include Twitter handles. If you are tweeting about a paper, panel, or poster, be sure to attribute the research to the right person by using their Twitter handle. Presenters and panelists should consider including their handles on an opening slide or in a poster corner. Conversely, if you do not want your research to be tweeted, please state that information upfront so the audience is aware of your desires.
Unable to attend the meeting this year? Follow the hashtag and join the conversation!
Facebook
Do you prefer Facebook over Twitter as your social media site of choice? While there will be less live coverage of specific sessions, Facebook is a great way to share photos, videos, and news about the annual meeting with your friends, family, and colleagues.
Make sure you like the AAG Facebook page (www.facebook.com/geographers) and set the page so that you see it first in your News Feed by clicking on the “Following” dropdown menu on the AAG Facebook page itself. This will ensure that you receive the latest meeting related announcements as soon as you open the Facebook app or website.
Be on the lookout for Facebook Live videos from some of the major events like the Exhibition Hall opening and the World Geography Bowl finals!
Check on the page each morning for reminders of the day’s schedule of events.
Instagram
The AAG’s newest social media channel, Instagram is a fun place to share your photos of activities at the annual meeting and your daily life as a geographer!
Follow @theAAG on Instagram for photos of the annual meeting as well as behind the scenes looks at the work that goes into planning the conference on a yearly basis!
Share your photos of the meeting with other attendees using the conference hashtag #AAG2018 and look for an Instagram collage of #AAG2018 photos after the meeting ends.
Want to be featured in our new Instagram Campaign to meet members of the AAG, #MeettheAAG? Look for AAG Staff throughout the meeting who will be taking photos and collecting information about AAG members that will be showcased during the summer.
Snapchat
Have you tried out the latest social media craze? While the AAG does not have an official Snapchat channel, there will be an unveiling of the first ever AAG Annual Meeting Snapchat Filter! This exclusive geofilter is only available in the Marriott by the registration, AAG booth, and Exhibit Hall (or on floors above and below these areas – 3D space!).
Take a snap, use the geofilter, and share it with your friends!
For extra pizzazz, save the snap with the applied geofilter to your memories and share it out over Instagram or Twitter with the #AAG2018 hashtag.
Add a special flourish to your social media profiles by using a geofiltered snap as your profile photo! Get creative and have fun!
General Communications
Because the AAG social media channels will be busy during the annual meeting, AAG staff may not be able to provide a timely reply through these mediums. The AAG Annual Meeting App is a good place to start for conference information with regards to floor plans, session times and locations, and abstracts. If you have questions or concerns and need to contact a staff member, the best option is to find a conference volunteer (wearing a neon yellow t-shirt) or to stop by the AAG Meridian or Registration area on the 3rd Floor of the Marriott Hotel.
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Annual Meeting
Exploring New Orleans and Beyond Using Web Mapping Tools, Maps, and Data
The evolution of geographic information system (GIS) technology to the web presents an excellent opportunity for the geography community to foster spatial thinking among colleagues, students, and administrators. The use of web maps, spatial data, and analysis tools to examine local to global issues has never been so powerful and easy to embrace. It also provides a means for the community to promote geography as an essential twenty-first-century subject to the general public.
With the upcoming 2018 AAG Annual Meeting in New Orleans in April, these web maps and analysis tools can be used by anyone to thoroughly explore the city in order to enhance the time spent there and in the surrounding area.
The following examples illustrate the use of geographic data and tools in an inquiry-driven environment. These maps cultivate the three legs holding a bench that I believe constitutes geographic literacy: content knowledge, skills, and the geographic perspective.
Figure 1: Geoliteracy can be conceptualized as being supported by content knowledge, skills, and the geographic perspective.
Teaching with these tools can foster students’ knowledge of core content, including concepts (scale, diffusion, patterns, relationships, systems), regions, and themes (geomorphology, watersheds, demographics, ecoregions). Skills include the use of maps, analyzing data, assessing data quality, charting, collecting and analyzing field data, symbolizing maps, and communicating geographic content. Through use of these tools, the geographic perspective—in which geographers see the world working through a series of interwoven, changing spatial relationships operating at a wide variety of scales—can be promoted.
These tools can also promote the idea that big data exists at our fingertips, but it is of varying quality. Mapped data is distorted due to its map projection and may have gaps in attributes or resolution and scale. Inquiring about the data’s origins, date, scale, and other characteristics and examining metadata are key to data’s effective use. Discussions about copyright, location privacy, data aggregation, interpretation, dissemination, and communication can be interwoven with the following maps and activities. Through each, students can see that every issue in our world and communities has a geographic component.
To start, let us focus on a few easy-to-use yet powerful tools, modeling how to use these resources in instruction. As an example, we will explore New Orleans and the surrounding region, but these tools can be used to study other regions as well.
Examining Change over Time Using Photographs and Satellite Imagery
The Esri ChangeMatters Viewer
Historical and current satellite images can be compared via the Esri ChangeMatters viewer. Its Landsat images are recorded in infrared wavelengths, providing a springboard for discussion about the electromagnetic spectrum and what different wavelengths reveal. Because the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have been operating the Landsat satellites since 1972, over 45 years of earth changes are viewable with this single tool. These images can be interacted with in a three-panel view with time period one on the left, time period two in the center, and the change detection image on the right.
Figure 2: Shown above is New Orleans, from Landsat imagery in 1975 (left), in 2010 (center), and as a change detection image from 1975 to 2010.
What has changed, and why has it changed? What will this area look like in 10 years? Is it changing more quickly or more slowly than other parts of the world? Why? How does the land use here compare to elsewhere in the world? What influence does population, climate, or coastlines have on land use? Can you estimate the population in the area shown? What type of dwellings exist, and how do these dwellings compare in size and density to other regions?
As an example, the intersection of such issues as irrigation, politics, climate, and internal drainage can be discussed by examining the shrinking Aral Sea in Central Asia over the past 40 years. The physical characteristics of the eruption of Mount St. Helens, the regrowth of some surrounding vegetation, and the volcano’s proximity to Portland and other regional volcanoes can be examined with the same tool. The urban growth of Las Vegas or São Paulo, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and other dams, the expansion of center-pivot irrigation in the United States and Saudi Arabia, agricultural and mining expansion and reclamation, and changes in coastlines and glaciers are just a few of the themes that can also be examined using the ChangeMatters viewer.
The USGS Esri Historical Topographic Map Explorer
Physical and human-induced land-use and land-cover changes can be examined at a variety of scales using tens of thousands of USGS maps stretching back 100 years with the USGS Esri Historical Topographic Map Explorer. Enter a US-based location, click on the map, and choose from the historical maps covering that area, comparing them to the present-day topographic basemap. Each map’s transparency can be adjusted, allowing changes to be investigated. In New Orleans, the construction of levees, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, and draining of wetlands can be seen, along with below-sea-level contour lines that allow the physical setting of the city to be studied.
Supplementing the topographic map viewer with historical ground photographs can be instructive. Ground photographs taken in the same location during two different time periods can be used to analyze changes in land use, land cover, transportation, styles of clothing, the things that society values, and much more. Sources and maps include SepiaTown, WhatWasThere, and Historypin. Some historical street images are embedded in Google Street View scenes via a slider.
Figure 3: Changes in New Orleans can be examined using the USGS Esri Historical Topographic Map Explorer, comparing the 1891 topographic maps (left) with the 2018 topographic basemap (right).
Urban Observatory
The Urban Observatory is a web-mapping application that allows 100 cities to be examined on dozens of variables. Created by Richard Saul Wurman, RadicalMedia, and Esri, the Urban Observatory provides a synchronized set of up to three maps, all showing the same theme and at the same scale. With this tool, you can analyze senior population, land use, current traffic, current weather, parks, and more. Up to three city maps can be viewed at once, and the maps are synchronized, making comparisons easy.
Figure 4: Users can compare city park scores (developed by The Trust for Public Land) using the Urban Observatory for New York, New Orleans, and Denver. ParkScore maps show which areas of a city lie within a short walk of a park, and areas that are not served by a park.
Demographic Analysis of New Orleans and Beyond
ArcGIS Online is a web-based mapping platform from Esri containing analytical tools, maps, data services, and databases, which are behind most of the mapping tools described in this article. Start with ArcGIS Online > Map > Modify Map, then search for and add data on median age and median income. In the resultant interactive web map, shown below, examine the spatial pattern at the city level, such as New Orleans, or at a regional or state level—with no login required. The transparency of any map can be adjusted; the basemap can be changed from the topographic map pictured to a satellite image, OpenStreetMap, or others. Layers such as hydrography, ecoregions, or land cover can also be added. The classification method, variable, number of classes, and symbology can all be changed to help students understand the relationships among various datasets. What patterns are evident, and why do they exist? How do the New Orleans patterns compare to those of other cities? How do the patterns change as the level of geography changes between block group, census tract, county, and state?
Figure 5: ArcGIS Online can be used to examine median age (left) and median income (right) for New Orleans. For more census maps in ArcGIS Online, see this gallery.
Migration touches the themes of physical geography (such as climate and landforms), cultural geography (political systems, political instability, boundaries, demographic trends), sociology (perception, push-pull factors), and change. Migration causes deep and long-lasting changes in culture, language, urban forms, food, land use, social policy, and politics. Migration is a global issue that affects our everyday lives. It is also a personal issue, because we all have a migration story to tell about our own ancestors and families. Part of the Esri Cool Maps gallery, the Migration Trends map is an interactive 2D and 3D web mapping application running in a browser.International Migration
Using data from the United Nations (UN) Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Migration Trends displays out-migration and in-migration data for every country from the 1990s, 2000s, 2010, and 2013. Line thicknesses indicate the number of migrants, and the line endpoints indicate the countries sending people out or receiving people. The raw number and percentage of out- and in-migration for each country are indicated. After viewing the animation, you can select individual countries and time periods. Compelling cartography and the ability to switch between 2D and 3D make this a useful teaching and research tool.
Is climate-induced sea level rise the reason why a high percentage of Reunion Island’s population is moving to the United States? Why so much flow between Russia and the UK? Why does Australia have a high percentage of migrants, and how has in-migration to Australia changed recently? See my video for more questions to pose using this map. Explore the other maps in the Esri Cool Maps gallery; they change periodically, so check back often.
Figure 6: The Migration Trends 2D and 3D mapping and visualization tool.
Combining Fieldwork with Web Mapping
Survey123 for ArcGIS can be used on a mobile device to collect data quickly and easily in the field via a form that can be created using a web browser or an Excel spreadsheet. Students can collect information on tree height and species, water quality, pedestrian or vehicle counts, weather, graffiti, or anything else in the field. The results are immediately captured and displayed on interactive web maps, which can be symbolized, classified, and spatially analyzed. The maps can be crowdsourced so the public can add to the content.
Figure 7: Using ArcGIS Online and the Survey123 for ArcGIS app, citizen scientists can collaborate and use their smartphones to map trees. The interactive map is visible here.
Using and Creating Story Maps
People have told stories through maps for thousands of years, and the Esri Story Maps web mapping applications allow multimedia to be easily incorporated into mapping. A gallery of story maps includes New Orleans topics ranging from Hurricane Katrina, gauging US population change, sea level rise and storm surge effects on energy assets, and Alan Lomax’s video archive of the Deep South. Students can create their own story maps to present their own research through interactive maps, text, video, audio, and photographs. Story maps can be shared online and used on any device. Story maps can serve as assessment pieces in student portfolios; provide an alternative to PowerPoint or Prezi for students’ oral presentations; and be embedded in web pages, Sway presentations, or other types of media.
Figure 8: This story map shows one aspect of change in New Orleans more than 10 years after Hurricane Katrina.
Synthesis
Students who use web mapping in geography develop critical thinking skills and understand how to use and evaluate data. This is particularly important with geographic data due to its increasing volume and diversity and its often sensitive and politically charged nature. Students who are well-grounded in the spatial perspective through web mapping have the ability to use data at a variety of scales and contexts, think systematically and holistically, and use quantitative and qualitative approaches to solve problems and become better decision-makers. Students can use these tools to understand that the earth is changing and begin to think analytically about why it is changing. After using these web maps, students ask and grapple with value-based questions. Should the earth be changing in these ways? Is there anything I can and should do about it?
Joseph J. Kerski, PhD, Instructor, University of Denver, and Education Manager, Esri
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When Captain John Smith sailed up the Potomac River in 1608, he found 13 American Indian villages along its banks. Spanish incursions beginning in 1521 brought diseases, land grabs, resource destruction, military assaults, and slave raids. Nonetheless, there were several large villages and fortified towns by the time of John Smith’s 1608 visit. At that time, three major political groups vied for power in the region: the Susquehannock in Pennsylvania; the Piscataway Chiefdom in southern Maryland; and the Powhatan Chiefdom in Virginia and farther south.
We’re getting closer to the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting! Whether you will be attending the meeting all week, for a few days, or looking to follow the action from afar, there are plenty of ways to get involved using social media. Social media is a great way for seasoned conference goers and newcomers alike to network, report on new research, engage in lively debate with those inside and outside of the discipline, and find out what’s going on during the largest geography conference in the world! Start planning your #AAG2018 social media strategy today with these helpful guidelines!
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