In The Flow of Time – July 9, 2024 Gee, Beryl just went by here. Why am I thinking of hurricanes? As I research, I build a timeline spreadsheet. Sometimes I only know a year, or a season (there was drought one summer, endless rain another). Oftentimes I know precise… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – July 7, 2024 One of today’s rabbit holes is the history of funeral parades, music, and the Second Line in New Orleans. This idea came from somewhere, it’s a tradition. I don’t know when that tradition was born. Most sources I’ve found take it… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – July 6, 2024 Research. Poking around the Library of Congress, I found the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of New Orleans. Without leaving my desk I can travel back to St. Ann Street in 1885 and see the Laveau residence as it stood at the… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – July 5, 2024 There are so many threads… cholera and yellow fever. I had no idea what yellow fever was. Think Ebola. 19th century architecture. Street names, then and now. African music, Congo square, the birth of jazz, the synthesis of African and catholic… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – July 2, 2024 Research sometimes goes into dark places. I have stumbled across the journal of Benjamin Latrobe. He’s an architect, working in New Orleans circa 1819, on the city’s water works. Latrobe was architect for the US Capitol. This is a highly accomplished,… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – June 30, 2024 Around 1800 in New Orleans, white men seriously outnumbered white women. Conversely, free women of color seriously outnumbered free men of color. There were also more women as slaves (household workers in the city) than men. White men absolutely used slave… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – June 29, 2024 I just finished Property, a novel by Valerie Martin. This isn’t note taking research, it’s gestalt gathering.The story is set in 1828 told from the point of view of a “monstrously self-absorbed” wife of a plantation owner. I read it because… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – June 24, 2024 Reading goes on about life in New Orleans in the first half of the 1800s. I run across this, along with other references to the yellows. “Numerous accounts praised the astounding beauty of the “high yellow”-skinned mulatto and quadroon women acting… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – June 20, 2024 Research into history continues. I am now deep into New Orleans, from about 1800-1870. Not sure where it will start and end yet. I’m tentatively calling this Currents because◊ it’s on the Mississippi◊ It is joie-de-vivre, the flow of music and… Continue reading
In The Flow of Time – June 16, 2024 I’ve been having a blast researching my idea that Jean-Baptiste Truteau, voyageur, drinks the night away in a tavern with Meriwether Lewis, on March 10, 1804. This is a good story. From the writer’s perspective, it would be a challenge to… Continue reading
