How well do we know our country? Whom do we include when we use the word "American"? These are not just contemporary issues but recurring and seemingly permanent questions Americans have asked themselves throughout their history-and questions that were ad

Folklorist, writer, editor, regionalist, cultural activist—Benjamin Albert Botkin (1901–1975) was an American intellectual who made a mark on the twentieth century, even though most people may be unaware of it. This book, the first to reevaluate the legacy of Botkin in the history of American culture, celebrates his centenary through a collection of writings that assess his influence on scholarship and the American scene. Through his work with the Federal Writers' Project during the New Deal, the Writers' Unit of the Library of Congress Project, and the Archive of American Folksong, Botkin did more to collect and disseminate the nation's folk-cultural heritage than any other individual in the twentieth century. This volume focuses on Botkin's eclectic but interrelated concerns, work, and vision and offers a detailed sense of his life, milieu, influences, and long-term contributions. Just as Botkin boldly cut across the boundaries between high and low, popular and folk, this book brings together reflections that range from the historical to the philosophical to the disarmingly personal. One group of articles looks at his career and includes the first extended analysis of Botkin's poetry; another probes the fruitful relationships Botkin had with leading musicologists, composers, poets, and intellectuals of his day. This is also the first book to bring together a collection of Botkin's best-known writings, giving readers an opportunity to appreciate his wide-ranging mind and clear, often memorable prose. For Botkin, the blurring of art and science, literature and folklore was not just a philosophy but a way of life. This book reflects that life and invites fans and those new to Botkin to appraise his lasting contributions.

When Judge Ernest N. "Dutch" Modal was elected "the first black mayor" of this South Coast city November 13,1977, political observers all around the country sat up to take notice. New Orleans is the nation's fourth blackest city (relative to percent of total population), and the largest and most powerful city in the third blackest state in the country. When he took over the reins of the nation's second largest port — the Southern terminus of the mid continent grain export/oil import traffic carried by the Mississippi River — Dutch Morial became perhaps the country's most powerful elected black official. The true significance of Morial's November victory can really be understood only in the context of the history of Afro-American involvement in the city's political and cultural life. African slaves were first imported into the state of Louisiana, then a French colony, after Indian slavery was abolished in 1719. By 1724, colonial administrators had finished compiling the Code Noir, a document outlining the mutual rights and obligations of Louisiana's masters and slaves. By Bill Rushton's first book, on the French speaking Cajuns of South Louisiana, will be issued this fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. comparison to conditions in Anglo- American colonial areas, the results of the Code Noir were relatively progressive. All slaves were required to be baptized in the Catholic Church, establishing common cultural ties between blacks and whites in Louisiana that were closer than those anywhere else in the South — ties that were preserved through the Civil War until separate, black Catholic parishes began to be formed with the consent of the Archbishop of New Orleans in 1897. Colonial-era slaves were permitted to retain a good many of their own cultural traditions as well, and in New Orleans they were allowed Sunday afternoons off to gather in what was then called Congo Square to dance the bamboula to their own music, forming a unique milieu which helps explain why jazz originated here rather than in, say, Savannah or Charleston.