Destination: New Orleans

In New Orleans, A Streetcar Returns

A piece of pre-Katrina New Orleans staged a quiet return last month, to the thrill of storm-weary residents and tourists. The St. Charles Avenue streetcar is once again ferrying passengers from the French Quarter to the Garden District. Reports the New York Times: “The streetcar has represented something else besides the connections through time and space: the city’s living room, a privileged spot for tentative social encounters across lines of race, class and nationality, in a place not otherwise given to them.”

Related on World Hum:
* The Critics: ‘Chasing the Rising Sun’
* Rolf Potts in New Orleans: A Visit to the Lower Ninth Ward

Photo by dbking via Flickr, (Creative Commons).


The Critics: ‘Chasing the Rising Sun’

The Los Angeles Times has a review of Chasing the Rising Sun, writer Ted Anthony’s account of his quest to find the origins of the classic folk song, “House of the Rising Sun.” It’s a quest, in part, to learn where and what The House in question was: Brothel? Gambling house? Prison? In addition to being a book about music and history, it’s also about travel.

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The New Yorker’s ‘New Orleans Journal’

Dan Baum has been covering New Orleans for The New Yorker since the Katrina disaster, and for the next few months he’s writing a blog of sorts—“scenes from his reporter’s notebook,” according to the intro—about his experiences in the city. His most recent post: A terrific chronicle of a gumbo dinner and a trip to the Ray Avenue Baptist Church with a mechanic he wanted to cultivate as a source.

Related on World Hum:
* Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?
* Rolf Potts in New Orleans: A Visit to the Lower Ninth Ward
* Tim Cahill and the Blues


The Places We Find Ourselves

Her official title was faculty sponsor. But in the confusion of post-Katrina New Orleans, Kristin Van Tassel realized the slippery nature of the roles we all play.

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Rolf Potts in New Orleans: A Visit to the Lower Ninth Ward

Crass as it might seem, Potts writes in his latest Yahoo! column, “disaster tourism” is a time-honored travel tradition. “Thomas Cook started taking British travelers on tours of American Civil War battlefields in 1865; a couple years later, Mark Twain and his cohorts famously toured the war-torn city of Sevastopol (where Twain chided his travel companions for carrying off armfuls of shrapnel as souvenirs),” Potts writes. And a lot of travelers are now heading to the Lower Ninth Ward, the district in New Orleans that took the brunt of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina last year.

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Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?

Kate Hahn shares her only souvenir of The Big Easy: the memory of a city that showed her how to let go

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