Southern Queen

Thomas Ruys Smith is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture in the School of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the author of Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (Continuum, 2011), River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi Before Mark Twain (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) and the editor of Blacklegs, Card Sharps and Confidence Men: Nineteenth-Century Mississippi River Gambling Stories (Louisiana State University Press, 2010). He is currently at work on an exploration of Mark Twain's relationship with the Mississippi River.

Richly appointed with voices of the city's denizens and of those who visited, Southern Queen reveals the myriad ways that the nineteenth century shaped the New Orleans we know today. In this highly readable book, Smith offers a welcome synthesis of the scholarship on this important epoch in the history of the Crescent City

• Introduction: A Bend in the River / 1: A very difficult people to manage - The Battles for New Orleans / 2: Eternal Bustle - The Making of an American City / 3: Prima Donna - The Queen of the South / 4: Oh, weep for New Orleans! - Civil War and Reconstruction / 5: A colossal white elephant - New Orleans, the New South, and the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition / 6: Par excellence a city of fun - Segregation and Sex at the End of a Century.