TY - JOUR
AU - Hoganson,, Kristin
AB - I began this talk fully expecting that we would meet face-to-face in June, that we would shake hands and embrace, sit side by side in tight-packed rooms; ride elevators together, and maybe poke around the city at odd hours, jostling with the crowds of tourists who had come to New Orleans strictly for fun. I did not know this talk would end up as a requiem for the conference we lost; the words never spoken, the colleagues never applauded, and those we will never see again. This requiem took shape in a time of collective insecurity, as microscopic virions traveled by air and touch, revealing in their rapid spread the planetary felting of human interconnection. Yet if this talk is an artifact of a traumatic time, it is equally an artifact of place. It took form in a noisy house teeming with displaced children, everyone squabbling over bandwidth, fretting about toilet paper, padding around in the pre-dawn hours, and listening to the sirens outside. If my remarks seem out of place, recall that this talk came together in the middle of a globe-spanning crisis that played out spatially in my life and indeed, in the daily lives of the countless millions of people around the world affected by travel bans, social distancing guidelines, quarantines, orders to shelter in place, unemployment, protests, curfews, and immobilizing illness. If you have a hard time locating this talk in the larger landscape of U.S. foreign relations history, recall this scene: a networked globe struggling to go local to break the circuits of contagion. If this talk is a requiem and artifact, it is also an escape. People in lock-down have ached for the outside world, connecting virtually in many cases to distant relatives and friends and imagining the journeys they will take on the other side. I hope in this talk to respond to the need for community and unfamiliar lines of sight by taking you to New Orleans after all, if only imaginatively. But be forewarned: this is not a typical touristic tour. As a SHAFR-sponsored tour, it is a journey across time as well as space. And be assured: as a SHAFR-sponsored tour, the ultimate destination is the foreign relations field, with New Orleans illustrating the idea of an inpost of empire. To embark, picture yourself in a hotel ballroom, sitting elbow to elbow with your neighbors, the forced air cooling taking the edge off a sticky June day, the tinkle of dishes being cleared; the A.V. activated, an introduction, a clearing of the throat, a small cough. In this virtual world, no one flinches. Can you hear me in the back? Land Acknowledgement I would like to begin by acknowledging the Indigenous history of New Orleans, and more broadly, Louisiana, recognizing the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Jena Band of Choctaw Indians, and the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe of Louisiana. I would also like to acknowledge the state-recognized tribes of Louisiana, which include the Addai Caddo Tribe, the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogee, Choctaw-Apache Community of Ebarb, Clifton Choctaw, Four Winds Tribe Louisiana Cherokee Confederacy, Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, Isle de Jean Charles Band, Louisiana Choctaw Tribe, Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe, and the United Houma Nation.1 As this acknowledgement reminds us, the Indigenous presence where we now gather predates the city of New Orleans. Indeed, it predates the land on which this city rests. A mere five thousand years ago, the place where we are gathered lay under the waters of the Gulf.2 Five hundred years ago, the surrounding area was largely swamp: an ever-changing mix of solid and fluid, water, spongy stuff, and land. The Indigenous nations of this area have been water people as well as land people; their claims to place and space encompassing both the solid and the aqueous. The land on which we gather has been utterly transformed by settler colonialism: shot through with girders, dried out by drainage ditches and canals, solidified by tons of oyster shells in the absence of other paving materials, and walled in by levees.3 One-time marshes in Louisiana have spontaneously ignited in the summer heat, as escaping methane has exited through the cracks in what is now parched ground, the hellish fires an unforeseen consequence of draining the swamp.4 As settler colonists ramped up older efforts to transform muck into firmament, they also transformed water on an unprecedented scale, altering salinity, particulate matter, levels of toxins, and biota.5 The South American water hyacinth introduced in the 1880s for ornament has run renegade, crowding out native plant and animal species. The nutria, a gnawing muskrat introduced from South America to control the hyacinth, has exacerbated the damage to cypress forests caused by flooding and saltwater intrusion. The fire ants (also from South America) that have decimated ground-nesting species float atop the rising waters in writhing rafts, their venom intensified by stress.6 The waters are definitely rising. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that Southeast Louisiana will be inundated by four to five feet of rising seawater by the end of the century, more than any other part of the U.S. coastline and indeed the highest rate of sea-level rise on the planet, because the sediment-starved delta is sinking.7 Predictive maps show that Louisiana will no longer look like a boot. Within a century the coastline will run east to west on a line to the north of New Orleans that will cut across the state near Baton Rouge.8 If predictions are borne out, by 2050 one percent of the world’s climate refugees will hail from Louisiana.9 The swelling seas are already eating away at the Louisiana coast, pushing residents such as the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe into active retreat.10 Tribal citizen Chantel Comardelle described the unfolding crisis to a reporter from The Guardian: “There used to be land on either side of the road and now it’s just open water. Everyone used to have gardens and now they don’t, the salt water kills everything.”11 The Isle de Jean Charles villagers are not the only Indigenous people suffering from this latest assault on Indigenous territory. Members of Louisiana’s United Houma Nation can no longer recognize the shoreline upon returning from fishing trips.12 Of the acre of land that coastal Louisiana loses to the Gulf each hour, at least a half comes from the Barataria-Terrebonne estuary, where the majority of the Houma people live.13 Land losses stemming from settler colonialism are not just an artifact of the past—they continue today, in new ways. If the precarious nature of land in present-day Louisiana is a reminder of the ways that global affairs have literally and profoundly constituted place, acknowledging the Indigenous people of Louisiana reminds us that global affairs have been of existential importance for the peoples of this place since before the emergence of the United States. We have gathered in a corner of what historians of the early modern world have labeled “the shatter zone”—a place where long histories of cross-group Indigenous encounters that pre-date the arrival of European and African peoples turned magnitudes more deadly in the sixteenth century, leading to the collapse of chiefdoms such as the Chicaza and the coalescence of new polities, such as the Choctaw and the Chickasaw.14 Taking a long-view perspective makes visible what shorter-term local histories often overlook: foreign relations is not just something that has happened out there, beyond current U.S. borders. Foreign relations have made these borders. And, as histories of colonialism and empire have demonstrated, histories of foreign relations can be found in New Orleans, as well as in other places regarded by U.S. Americans as home. The lesson of such histories is clear: to understand the exercise of U.S. power, we need to consider inposts of empire as well as outposts.15 That is, we need to temper our tendency to understand the shape of U.S. power as a matter of exterior bases, colonies, carriers, compounds, client states, territories, and so forth and to better flag how seemingly interior and domestic spaces have functioned in the production and exercise of power.16 Yet turning our gaze inward can do more than provide a broader base for stories about U.S. hegemony, superpower status, power projection, and overweening might. By recognizing that all outposts are inposts and vice versa, depending on the point of view, we can better position U.S. history in global history, thereby bringing hitherto hidden stories to light. Labeling inposts in the United States as inposts of empire can help us understand the United States as an imperial formation as well as a self-proclaimed nation and to flag the role of empire in producing inequity and vulnerability from at least the time of the shatter zone onward.17 This move can help us understand the limits of U.S. power, the costs of empire, the geography of human insecurity, and the struggle to achieve collective security—even on a global scale—outside the state-to-state relations of nations. The Place Where It Happens As scholarship on colonialism and empire has demonstrated, international relations histories—some of them histories of horrific violence—have played out across the present-day United States.18 Places such as Fallen Timbers, the Alamo, and Sand Creek may be labeled national historic landmarks and sites, but they are not just national sites: they are imperial battlegrounds and the crime scenes of colonial massacres.19 The seemingly national landscape of the United States is riddled with places that ought to be marked as loci of foreign relations, from the broken-windowed factories of the deindustrialized Midwest to the missile silos of the Great Plains, superfund sites of the plutonium production complex, suburban drop sites of the CIA, classrooms of the School of the Americas, polyglot floors of packing plants, laden shelves of box stores and Amazon warehouses, footprint of the one-time Twin Towers, and quarantine stations of the CDC.20 It is not only in wartime that homes have been fronts: they have been sites of foreign relations encounters even in times of ostensible peace. Domesticity has had colonial, imperial, global, and other political dimensions well before hundreds of millions of anxious Americans sheltered in place to slow the spread of COVID-19. Historians have developed a broad conceptual vocabulary for thinking spatially about foreign relations history. Joining terms such as outposts in our toolkit for spatial analysis are terms such as middle grounds, native grounds, borderlands, frontiers, contact zones, enclaves, gateways, bases, entrepots, nodes, rims, worlds, centers, peripheries, and ecosystems.21 There is a vast literature on global cities, much of it emphasizing capitalist development and control and the production of inequality, and a growing literature on the global countryside that pushes back against the urbanist assumption that cities should occupy privileged positions in our geographies of global interconnection.22 In parallel with the work of environmental historians, who have long recognized that everything is connected to everything else, historians of globalization have mapped links and webs, networks, chains, ebbs, flows, crossings, diasporas, and mobilities.23 This spatial analysis has made it clear that foreign relations unfold everywhere; that to better understand the history of the United States in the world, we must, paradoxically, widen our scope to encompass local history. Local histories with global dimensions can help us grasp this paradox.24 To be sure, not all local histories open out. There are plenty of local histories that start with assumed boundaries and direct attention relentlessly inward. Many local histories start and end small. At its best, this vein of local history can help us see the world in its fine grains; at its worst, this approach has drawn lines between insiders and outsiders, us and them, hiding the extent to which cross-border and other connections have shaped the fabric of daily life. Local histories have always afforded evidence of connection—in their references to newcomers, military service, mission endeavors, epidemics, native sons in national office, and the like—but foreign relations historians have had good reason not to loiter too long by the mustiest local history shelves in the library, for their antiquarian-leaning volumes seem a world away from the headier stuff of diplomacy, statecraft, and global affairs. These shelves deserve a second look, however, and not just because of current obstacles to visiting distant archives. In recent years, following the turn away from adamantly national histories to more global, transnational, imperial, and transimperial approaches, local histories have increasingly opened out, stitching histories of specific places into the wider fabric of space.25 Rather than treating inter-Indigenous relations, colonial violence, and other encounters as precursors to the real story, they have recognized these topics as central to our understanding of the past.26 Boundary-crossing local histories are contributing to wider efforts to debunk local/global binaries by illuminating the dynamic relations and tension lines between these seeming poles.27 In addition to providing a vantage point for understanding globalization, unfettered local histories are grappling with a wide array of other foreign relations issues, stretching from migration to military capacity, production, consumption, trade, cultural exchanges, security, and sovereignty. Like the state and regional histories that they blur into and inform, they show the making of foreign policy politics and publics. In so doing, these histories contribute to the larger spatial turn in foreign relations history, advancing the effort to map different units, scales of analysis, and nodes. Just as significantly, these histories are also bringing the field of U.S. foreign relations history home to new audiences. Those most attuned to disparate power relationships are providing empirical grounding for theories of the local as subject to larger forces such as global capitalism as well as understandings of the local as a site of resistance to global capital and a wellspring for the exercise of power. Taken collectively, such studies are enabling us to comprehend seemingly domestic places such as New Orleans as inposts of empire.28 Time Travel Historians of the pre-Columbian and early modern eras have illuminated inter-Indigenous relations, Spanish and French exploration and colonialism, alliances between African-origin escapees from slave labor camps and Indigenous peoples, and the importance of New Orleans as a trading post linking the continental interior to the wider history of the Caribbean World, in turn embedded in the Atlantic World and global history.29 They have characterized the city as a diplomatic hub, where representatives from the Alabama, Attakapa, Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Creek, Natchitoches, Opelousa, and Pascagoula nations negotiated with French officials.30 Historians have likewise brought to light the competition between the French, Spanish, and British Empires to control the mouth of the Mississippi, the transfer of land taken from Attakapa Indians to Acadian refugees, the emergence of French resistance against Spanish rule, and cooperation across colonial lines to return self-liberated people to their putative owners.31 Recent scholarship has revealed how colonial incursions escalated warfare among Indigenous nations, leading to a massive increase in captive taking as intertribal captivity became commercialized and French colonizers sold Indigenous captives into lives of toil as enslaved workers on Caribbean plantations and Mediterranean galleys.32 They have reported scenes such as this 1682 description of a Tangipahoa village: “carcasses of men and women, ruined huts, and others full of dead bodies, a coating of blood on the ground, and all their canoes broken and cut up with axes.” Long before New Orleans came to seem foreign to East Coast and Midwestern visitors, Choctaws called this North American inpost a “place of foreign languages.”33 Many of the languages spoken in New Orleans were African languages. Enslaved people of African origin constituted a majority of the colony’s population during the so-called French period.34 The rice that came to figure so prominently in the Louisiana economy came from Africa, as did the expertise and labor to cultivate it. Captive Senegambians sold into American slavery built southern ports, including New Orleans. The relentless demand for enslaved African workers in places such as Louisiana led to unfathomable violence on both sides of the Atlantic: in the Bight of Biafra, for example, escalating raiding and kidnapping fueled warfare among Ibo states.35 Moving into the revolutionary era and early years of U.S. independence, historians have brought to life the political ferment along the Gulf Coast and Spain’s attempt to use its foothold on the Mississippi to claim territory stretching north to the Ohio River and east to the Appalachians.36 Historians have also explored the secret negotiations between Spain and France to swap Louisiana for an Italian principality, U.S. efforts to purchase New Orleans to ensure access to the mouth of the Mississippi, and the U.S. acquisition of all of Louisiana (or more accurately, the European-recognized title to the same), thanks to revolutionaries in Haiti.37 Recent scholarship has illuminated the exodus of free people of color and white slaveholders from revolutionary Haiti to New Orleans. Some of these migrants obtained state and federal aid, but the enslaved workers forced to accompany them found no relief from their bondage.38 Inspired by the Haitian Revolution and French Declaration of the Rights of Man, more than 500 enslaved people rose up in Louisiana in 1811, hoping to establish their own state. The leaders of this uprising, Kook and Quamana, were probably from the Asante Kingdom. Other freedom seekers came from Congo, the Bight of Benin, and the Gold Coast; some of the insurgents drew on military experience from fighting in Ghana and Angola. After crushing this revolt, U.S. officials used it as a pretext to expand U.S. holdings and power in the region.39 Subsequent chapters in the city’s story focus on the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, during which U.S. forces and their Choctaw and French pirate allies thwarted a British invasion.40 Historians of the antebellum era have stressed the entanglement of New Orleans in the fabric of Caribbean plantation society, including through the cross-border trafficking of enslaved people. Histories of this time have placed New Orleans at the center of the slaveholding empire of cotton.41 They have characterized this inpost of empire as a polyglot, multiracial, multiethnic port city, ranked the fourth port in the world in 1849, after London, Liverpool, and New York; a place peppered with “freight forwarders, commission houses, banks, and agents for both ships and cargo.”42 The city was such a powerful commercial magnet in the antebellum era that it helped draw Tejanos away from Veracruz and Mexico City and towards affiliation with the United States.43 In the 1850s, the future president of Mexico, Benito Juárez, plotted against the dictatorial regime in Mexico from exile in the Crescent City.44 Antebellum Americans knew New Orleans as a launchpad for filibusters, as the place from which the proslavery De Bow’s Review issued its calls for Southern expansion.45 In 1851, rioters in the city attacked Spanish residents, following news that Spanish authorities in Cuba had executed members of a filibustering expedition. As later digests of international law noted, the mob forced its way into the Spanish consulate and “without any interruption or hinderance” destroyed furniture, threw records into the street, defaced the portraits of the Queen of Spain and the Captain-General of Cuba, and tore the flag of Spain into pieces, all “without any interference on the part of the police.”46 Confederate secession turned New Orleans into a point of strategic contention, its ruling class at war with the United States. After the U.S. Navy blockaded the city, General Benjamin F. Butler and his forces landed, turning it into a base from which to seize Confederate supplies and a testing ground for urban occupation methods.47 In New Orleans v. The Steamship Co. (1874), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that with respect to the powers of the military government over the city of New Orleans after its conquest, it had “the same power and rights in territory held by conquest as if the territory had belonged to a foreign country and had been subjugated in a foreign war.”48 In the aftermath of the Civil War, New Orleans remained a place of encounter. Cuban revolutionaries such as Antonio Maceo and Máximo Gómez traveled to the city to network and raise funds from exiles.49 Wealthy Louisianans sought to recruit “coolies” from Cuba to toil in their cane fields.50 The Sicilians who arrived in the late-nineteenth century established macaroni factories in the French Quarter.51 In 1891, the New Orleans political and commercial elite orchestrated the mass lynching of 11 Italians as part of a power play against the city’s 30,000 ethnic Italian residents. The resulting diplomatic incident escalated into a war scare, leading the Secretary of War to strengthen harbor defenses.52 New Orleans’s role as an imperial center extended beyond the days of proslavery empire-building to the heyday of the banana empire. City boosters put their desire to enhance the city’s role as a Caribbean gateway on full display in the 1884 Cotton Centennial Exposition. The construction of the Panama Canal further magnified the commercial elite’s ambitions. The banana entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century recruited from the city’s waterfront bars, flop houses, and jails; migrants from Honduras traveled in the opposite direction, establishing a Honduran foothold in the city that became more substantial over time.53 The Ukrainian immigrant-turned-banana-baron, Samuel Zemurray, established the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at Tulane in 1912 to advance the United Fruit Company’s corporate interests in Central America.54 As the city became a headquarters of U.S. formal and informal empire in the Caribbean and Central America, it also became a nodal point of black nationalist resistance, including through the Pan-Africanist, Marcus Garvey-led United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).55 Such histories of connection, mobility, and the projection of power carried forward into the twentieth century, as evidenced in histories of wartime. Homefront accounts of World War II report roundups of Japanese, German, and Italian “enemy aliens”; the visible presence of deploying sailors, soldiers, and Marines; a 25,000 man invasion of Audubon Park for training purposes; rampant prostitution, racist draft practices, and shortages.56 The World War II Museum, where we were slated to gather for the conference’s opening event, originated as a museum dedicated to the city’s Higgins boatworks, credited by President Eisenhower with winning the war by building the amphibious craft that landed U.S. troops in Normandy and on beaches across the Pacific.57 The Holocaust survivors who relocated to New Orleans after the war presaged later refugee and exile streams, with one major current emanating from war-torn Vietnam.58 The city now commonly known by the affectionate nickname NOLA deserves its fame as a nerve center in the continent-spanning history of jazz, the launchpad from which Satchmo blew up the world, a global destination for tourists, the embarkation point for thousands of cruise ships; and the home of a Carnival float-making industry that caters to global markets.59 New Orleans’s reputation as a party city owes a great deal to its Caribbean orientation. During Prohibition, it became known as one of the wettest spots in the United States, thanks to the legions of “whiskeros” and “contrabandistas” who smuggled in booze from Havana.60 Yet as the longue durée history of war, trade, diplomacy, occupation, and human trafficking suggests, to merely position the city in the context of pleasurable and commercial globality hides its long enmeshment in histories of empire. Some of these histories are marked on the city walls that contain signs noting the transfer from French to Spanish to U.S. rule. Tourist guides likewise register imperial histories, in entries for the French Quarter, Cabildo, Jackson Square, and other attractions.61 Nevertheless, most of the history that I have just alluded to remains largely hidden. Tourist guides have long depicted NOLA as essentially foreign, likening sections of the Ninth Ward to “the centre of Africa” and describing the city as a whole as “a Latin city,” “a foreign city,” “more northern Caribbean than Southern U.S.,” charmingly European, “a world in miniature,” a place with a great “confusion of tongues,” and “the least American of all the cities within the bounds of the American states.”62 But these guides have done little to map the workings of power. New Orleans has been far more embedded in empire than inscriptions, tourist guides, and museum displays acknowledge. Though seemingly a tourist-centered capital of pleasure, NOLA has long been an inpost of empire from which force has radiated out. Imperial Precarity New Orleans has also been a place where imperialist politics have rendered residents vulnerable. To recognize NOLA as an imperial inpost is to acknowledge crossing vectors of power; to reject false binaries such as acted vs. acted upon; exporter vs. importer; autonomous vs. dependent; powerful vs. hard pressed. It is also to acknowledge multiple perspectives, for every outpost is simultaneously an inpost to the people who regard that place as home. To label places like NOLA inposts of empire is to recognize that the colonial era did not end with the establishment of the United States and to flag the role of imperialist politics in producing inequity and vulnerability.63 From the killing and enslavement of people of African and Indigenous American descent to our own era, imperial systems have produced injustice at home as well as abroad. To take one timely example, we can see such injustice in the history of disease, starting with the epidemics of smallpox and other diseases spread through colonialism that have devastated Indigenous people. Violence, hunger, overwork, displacement, and other forms of colonial duress have made virulent pathogens more lethal.64 The systems of capitalist accumulation developed by colonial powers have produced additional festering health inequities. Yellow fever, the signal disease of New Orleans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, did not exist in the Americas prior to European colonialism. The disease took hold in Louisiana because of the Atlantic trade in captured people (which also spread the disease in West Africa and the Caribbean) and the expansion of sugar production. From 1837 through the start of the Civil War, New Orleans took second place behind only New York as an entry point for immigrants, who, lacking immunity, became both victims and vectors.65 As the COVID-19 pandemic has made painfully evident, even to previously oblivious publics, systemic inequalities originating in the earliest days of European colonization and racialized systems of enslavement have rendered some people— Native Americans and African Americans among them—far more vulnerable to border-crossing epidemics than others. Even as President Trump denounced China for the cross-border spread of COVID-19, deportation flights embarking from Louisiana—the state with the second-highest number of people in ICE detention facilities, after Texas—were seeding Guatemala with the virus.66 Media accounts that alluded to the hard-hit city’s role in spreading COVID-19 around the United States failed to grasp the full extent to which this inpost of empire had become a vector of precarity. We can also see the imperial production of vulnerability in Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005.67 As with the present pandemic, long histories of systemic racism caused disparate outcomes. The storm disproportionately harmed African-American residents in the lower income and elevation neighborhoods, especially the Lower Ninth Ward.68 But it was not just the uneven impact of the storm that made it more than a natural disaster, it was also its magnitude. Our inability to work collectively to reduce carbon emissions is wreaking its alchemy in the Caribbean, where tropical storms are growing in force.69 Ironically, the oil and gas industries of the Gulf Coast that have literally fueled the U.S. assertion of global power have also exacerbated the threat that hurricanes pose to the Caribbean region, for the energy sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.70 The suffering caused by Katrina was more than an outcome of domestic injustices, it was also a manifestation of imperial blow back; the aerial precursor to the slosh back of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that bumped Katrina down from its position on the list of worst oil spills in history.71 In the aftermath of Katrina, international news media broadcast horrific accounts of racialized poverty, abandonment, and suffering. One history of Katrina asserts that it exposed “America’s dirty laundry of poverty and race … to the world in a way unseen since the civil rights era in the 1960s.”72 Many U.S. observers likewise professed shock that the kinds of systemic breakdown associated with failed states could be found in the United States. Commentators began to refer to New Orleans as Third World and its evacuees as refugees, leading African American community leaders to point out that the latter label was not applied to white residents who fled the city and that the tendency to regard New Orleans as Third World revealed both domestic racism and misperceptions of the Global South.73 Horrified Americans made sense of the disaster through references to overseas military operations. As rapper B.J. Willis described the stricken city: “We wasn’t in a war but every day was Iraq/Made you ride through my city in a boat/like a third world country that ain’t got no hope.”74 Many of the National Guard members deployed to New Orleans brought their experience in search-and-destroy missions in Afghanistan and Iraq to bear on search-and-rescue efforts, in some cases treating the beleaguered people of New Orleans as a menacing threat.75 The Army Times extended the talk of New Orleans as “Bagdad South” to another imperial reference point in its statement that “combat operations are now underway on the streets … This place is going to look like little Somalia.”76 The Coast Guard drew a different parallel, labeling its evacuation plan “Operation Dunkirk.”77 The city planner appointed to head the post-storm reconstruction efforts also hearkened back to World War II, saying: “I was too young to help resurrect Dresden or Berlin after the war… . But that’s what we’re talking about here.” Since neither Dresden nor Berlin had been destroyed by flood, this comment reveals the perception that only examples drawn from overseas military engagements could capture the magnitude of the disaster.78 When President Obama spoke in New Orleans a decade after Katrina, he echoed the common perception that it was somehow un-American for a nation capable of wreaking such damage to suffer it at home. “This was something that was supposed to never happen here,” he said. “Maybe somewhere else. But not here, not in America.”79 Calls for a Marshall Plan for the Gulf added to the sense that the damage was so un-American that a foreign aid plan was in order.80 The city did receive foreign aid, albeit on a selective basis. The wealthy residents of one gated community hired Israeli mercenaries as guards.81 The U.S. government accepted the assistance of Canadian Mounties and the Mexican military but refused the aid offered by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez.82 When it turned to the task of rebuilding, the city sought advice from Dutch flood mitigation experts.83 Guatemalan and other Latino immigrants—many without documentation—performed much of the clean-up work, at subpar wages, despite the dangerous, sewer-like condition of the city.84 Lines formed outside the Mexican consulate in the central business district as emergency workers sought services from their home government.85 Katrina flew in the face of understandings of the United States as the aid-providing superpower; the premier nation builder; the secure home referenced by homeland security.86 Katrina amplified post 9/11 sentiments of national vulnerability. Even as the George W. Bush administration charged U.S. occupation forces with bringing neoconservative enlightenment to Iraq, Katrina demonstrated the failure of the United States to meet basic needs at home. This was no coincidence: members of the National Guard called to New Orleans complained that their best equipment was unavailable, having been shipped to the Gulf—the Persian Gulf, that is, not the Gulf of Mexico.87 Among those hardest-hit by the storm in this inpost of empire: homeless veterans.88 Local History as Vantage Point and Subject I thought I would feel like an apostate making a case to SHAFR for local history. But everyone who has been pinned to place in the last few months ought to get the significance of global affairs in producing locality. The ongoing pandemic serves as a reminder that even those who seek safety by walling themselves off from the world depend on collective community action, extending from our immediate face-to-face communities to state, federal, international, and global cooperative efforts. Everyone who has sheltered in place in hopes of breaking the chain of transmission understands that what we do locally can quickly radiate far beyond our own walls. A virus that can be seen only through microscopes has made globe-spanning chains of connection starkly visible. In 2016, Donald Trump ran and won on the vulnerability ticket. However rambling and incoherent, his campaign speeches were litanies of victimization. In his rally in New Orleans, candidate Trump denounced bad trade deals for destroying “our country” and asserted that “We are not going to allow other countries to control us for any longer.”89 Trump lost the city but won the state, riding to office on the idea of vulnerable inposts, dominated by powerful outside forces. His speeches can be seen as prime examples of imperial denial in their refusal to acknowledge the U.S. exercise of global power. Diplomatic historians have ample reason to be appalled at the misleading reality he has conjured: Born in 1946, candidate Trump had never known a time in which the United States had not exercised significant global power. Diplomatic historians need to continue to probe the deep sense of entitlement to power that Trump has tapped into and his success in positioning himself as the strong man who could restore U.S. preeminence. And yet diplomatic historians must also continue to probe the vulnerabilities that Trump maximized for political gain. This work has been picking up pace. After years of highlighting U.S. hegemony, unipolarity, and global imperial reach, foreign relations historians are increasingly charting post-Cold War declines in U.S. power and mapping the limits to U.S. power that have existed from the start.90 They have also taken a more critical look at blanket statements about U.S. power, advancing the point that the United States is more a quilt than a uniform cloth. By drawing on and contributing to scholarship that disaggregates the United States, dividing it into smaller parts by factors such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, religion, region, and generation, foreign relations historians have helped demonstrate that references to U.S. power have always hidden profound forms of disempowerment, even in the heart of empire. Local histories that are truly attentive to the multiplicity of experience in any one spot can advance this larger effort. As the history of New Orleans reveals, the deeper we drill into the heart of empire, the more precarity we find. All our attention to national security has made it easier to overlook not only the extent to which the U.S. security state has been an imperial security state but also how people have experienced foreign relations in their daily lives, in small-scale, place-specific ways.91 Embracing local history as both an entry point into larger stories and as a subject of analysis can contribute to the larger effort to disaggregate the America referenced by terms such as the United States of America, American Foreign Relations, and America First. It can help us understand that histories reflexively framed in transnational terms can hide more than transimperial crossings, connections and hierarchies, they can also hide the translocal aspects of border-crossing histories.92 Scaling down can help us better understand and recognize internal disparities and divisions and to disentangle national security from other place-specific security concerns—such as the desire to hold the seas at bay.93 Scaling down to the local can also help us grasp the formation of foreign policy constituencies. As Joseph A. Fry has noted in an essay on regionalism, “Place matters in how Americans have responded to and influenced the formation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy.”94 Climate change denialism, for example, is becoming harder to reconcile with place-based experience, leading politicians from Gulf Coast communities to identify climate change as a threat.95 Feelings of insecurity are also leading to new forms of municipal foreign relations involvement that build upon older endeavors such as refugee resettlement programs, sanctuary provisions, sister city arrangements, mayoral trade missions, divestment policies, and the establishment of International Relations offices within City Hall.96 Consider the report, Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans, published by the city in 2017. In the preface, mayor Mitchell J. Landrieu spoke about the city’s comprehensive resilience strategy, launched in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to address urgent threats through combining “local expertise with global best practices.” Landrieu made the threat clear: “If global temperature rises unchecked, New Orleans will not see another 300 years.” In response to the threat, Landrieu called for adaptation and preventive action: “It is not enough to plan for how we will adapt to climate change. We must end our contribution to it.” Lest some of the proposed steps—such as commitments to low-carbon electricity, a reduction in driving, and greener forms of tourism—be seen as ineffectual moves in the face of a global threat, the report noted that the agreement agreed to by 195 nations in Paris in December 2015 highlighted city action and that mayors representing more than 600 million constituents had participated in the deliberations.97 Along with claiming that “Local leadership is now more critical than ever,” the report also called for global partnerships. Noted Landrieu: “As the world committed to action in Paris in 2015, so too did we. I signed the Global Covenant of Mayors on Climate & Energy, adding New Orleans to the team of more than 7,400 cities in 119 countries worldwide committed to taking climate action.” The report pointed out that New Orleans was “already part of several intercity networks that provide opportunities for us to learn from other cities … New Orleans is joining a global movement.”98 Further evidence of the border-crossing solidarities could be found in the action plan’s acknowledgements, which thanked Chief Resilience Officers from Boulder, Colorado; Mexico City, Mexico; and Melbourne, Australia.99 As the report’s claim that “cities must lead,” suggests, Landrieu framed the city’s initiative as a rebuke to the federal government. The mayor affirmed that he, along with almost 300 other U.S. mayors, remained committed to the 2016 Paris agreement, even after the Trump administration had rescinded the U.S. commitment. “We must not waver,” admonished Landrieu. “We must work together. Time is of the essence in combatting this critical existential threat, and our coastal city is on the front line.”100 If the federal government would not protect U.S. inposts from a global threat, then NOLA would seek its own alliance partners. Such a move could be read as evidence of distrust in the capacity of the nation-to-nation system to provide for the city’s security in the face of a global challenge. Or it could be read more radically: as a vote of no-confidence in the nation as the unit for assuring security; as evidence that the existential threats of the twenty-first century were exposing the kinds of internal geographic fractures associated with older systems of imperial rule. The New Orleans report noted one more way in which the city could advance human security. As a magnet for millions of visitors each year, it could do more to educate. “In the past, we have effectively marketed our celebratory traditions of abundance, and we now have the opportunity to showcase the adaptability of our city and our embrace of a low-carbon future.”101 We too can play a greater part in this educational effort. Going local provides a teaching opportunity, for it enables us to turn attachments to place into starting points for wider and more critical understanding. Imagine the streets of New Orleans—or of any other place—if SHAFR members wrote the markers and signs.102 Whether in our scholarship, classrooms, or public engagement efforts, the more we can convey an understanding of foreign relations history as something proximate, rather than distant, the more we can make our field seem immediate and relevant to audiences concerned about the now and here. And the more we can add the weight of history to present-minded analyses of global interconnections, the better we can counter the insularity seen, for example, in the assertion by the climate-change denying Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal a decade after Katrina that the people of New Orleans had been able to go it alone; to deliver hope and change for themselves.103 Where to begin in the face of such claims? With local histories that open out, labelling inposts of empire as such. Notes Kristin Hoganson is the Stanley S. Stroup Professor of United States History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998), Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2016), and The Heartland: An American History (New York, 2019). Footnotes 1 This statement is taken verbatim from “Indigenous Tribes of New Orleans and Louisiana,” American Library Association, last accessed February 14, 2020, http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/nola-tribes. 2 J.O. Snowden, W.C. Ward, and J.R.J. Studlick, Geology of Greater New Orleans: Its Relation to Land Subsidence and Flooding (New Orleans, LA, 1980), 3. 3 On shells, see Justin A. Nystrom, Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture (Athens, GA, 2018), 48. 4 Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (New York, 2012), 177. 5 On toxins, see Evan Casper-Futterman, “Salacious and Crustaceous,” Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (Berkeley, CA, 2013), 82–85. On elevation-creating and biodiversity promoting shell middens from the pre-Columbian era, see Tristam R. Kidder, “Making the City Inevitable: Native Americans and the Geography of New Orleans,” Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, ed. Craig E. Colten (Pittsburgh, PA, 2000), 9–21. 6 Morris, The Big Muddy; Robert W. Hastings, The Lakes of Pontchartrain: Their History and Environments (Jackson, MS, 2009), 105–17. On venom, see Sarah Zhang, “Yes, That’s a Huge Floating Mass of Live Fire Ants in Texas,” The Atlantic, August 29, 2017, last accessed April 22, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/fire-ants-flooding-hurricane-harvey/538365/. 7 Andy Horowitz, “Could New Orleans Flood Again?” New York Times, June 1, 2016. According to the United States Geological Survey, Louisiana lost 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000 -- the equivalent of the entire state of Delaware, see Todd Miller, Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (San Francisco, CA, 2017), 19. 8 Bob Marshall, Brian Jacobs, and Al Shaw, “As Louisiana Sinks and Sea Levels Rise, The State is Drowning. Fast,” HuffPost, August 28, 2014, updated December 6, 2017, last accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/louisiana-sea-level-rise_n_5731916?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAALTJdpIpbN8_cxaI446FB7EAEvCs9scnS6gk51modQ-5bVyiJ5bbp-Qc6t-J4pjqxOMnnO6V5MiIslU2_oBwWlBE1YlCrXYRu8ZTAv8qBN4K4xzOe9EbONmAwgH1AjpYZJlL26AyE25cMcJ 7FyitMvUKUdvGsm9uztMj_0RKVy-K. 9 One percent translates to two million of 200 million, see Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore (Minneapolis, MN, 2018), 26. 10 Tribal Council, Isle de Jean Charles band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, “Tribal Resettlement,” Isle de Jean Charles, last accessed April 5, 2020, http://www.isledejeancharles.com/our-resettlement/; Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey, Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America’s Shores (Durham, NC, 2019), 6. 11 Quoted from Oliver Milman, “Meet the ‘Climate Refugees’ Who Already Had to Leave their Homes,” The Guardian, September 24, 2018, last accessed May 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/24/climate-refugees-new-orleans-houston-hurricane-katrina-hurricane-harvey. 12 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign News Bureau, “Impact of Climate Change on Louisiana’s Houma Tribe,” ScienceDaily, September 27, 2019, last accessed May 8, 2020, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190927122529.htm. 13 Monique Verdin, “Southward into the Vanishing Lands,” in Unfathomable City, ed. Solnit and Snedeker, 19–24. Looking beyond Louisiana, Inupiat Eskimo people and other groups of Native American Alaskans are also heading inland as the rising seas tear at their shorelines; the Native Hawaiians who live on reserved land in Maui are at risk as well, as are the people of the Marshall Islands and the Shinnecock Indians of eastern Long Island. Pilkey and Pilkey, Sea Level Rise, 6, 15, 24, 54. On the Shinnecock Indians, see “The Original Long Islanders Right to Save their Land from a Rising Sea,” New York Times, March 5, 2020. On the people of the Marshall Islands relocating to Springdale, Arkansas, see Miller, Storming the Wall, 19. 14 Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (Lincoln, NE, 1995), 203; on the “amalgamation” of the remnants of tribes such as the Quinapisa and the Mugulasha, see Fred B. Kniffen, Hiram F. Gregory, and George A. Stokes, The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana from 1542 to the Present (Baton Rouge, LA, 1987). 15 On U.S. territories and on “foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones” as “the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on territory” and “the shape of power today,” see Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York, 2019), 390. On fortified outposts and the question of what should be considered “abroad” see Brooke L. Blower, “Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 3 (2017): 439–59. 16 Megan Black has traced administrative frameworks linking “interior” and “exterior” spaces, pointing out that the portfolio of the U.S. Department of the Interior extends beyond the management of U.S. National Parks to encompass management of Indigenous affairs and global and outer space resource prospecting, see Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 2. On domesticity, see, for example, Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606; Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Reconsidering Domesticity Through the Lens of Empire and Settler Society in North America,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1249–66; Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC, 2000). 17 On imperial formations, see Ann Laura Stoler and Carole McGranahan, “Introduction: Refiguring Imperial Terrains,” in Imperial Formations, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue (Santa Fe, NM, 2007), 3–42. 18 For one study on violence, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 19 See Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, MA, 2013). 20 Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York, 2015); Andrew Friedman, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (Berkeley, CA, 2013); Catherine Lutz, Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century (Boston, MA, 2001); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003). 21 See for example Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 1991); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia, PA, 2006); Emily S. Rosenberg, “Walking the Borders,” Diplomatic History 14, no. 4 (1990): 565–73; Emily S. Rosenberg, “Considering Borders,” in Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, third edition, ed. Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge, 2016), 188–202; Holly M. Karibo, Sin City North: Sex, Drugs, and Citizenship in the Detroit-Windsor Borderland (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); J.C.A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821 (New Haven, CT, 2009); Nathan J. Citino, “The Global Frontier: Comparative History and the Frontier-Borderlands Approach,” Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, third edition, ed. Costigliola and Hogan, 168–87. On contact zones, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992). On enclaves, see Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, CA, 2007); Sarah Miller-Davenport, Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2019); Jana Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 2009); Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepôt (Chicago, IL, 2014). On centers, peripheries, and the built environment, see Rebecca Tinio McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines (Chicago, IL, 2017). On remaking space in the U.S.-ruled Panama Canal Zone, see Marixa Lasso, Erased: The Untold Story of the Panama Canal (Cambridge, MA, 2019). For references to nodes, see for example Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley, CA, 2012), 54, 120. 22 On cities, see for example Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 2 (2005): 27–43; Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge, 2007); Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago, IL, 2012). On agricultural areas, see for example Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the U.S. and Mexican Countryside (Princeton, NJ, 2017); Cindy Hahamovitch, No Man’s Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton, NJ, 2011); Courtney Fullilove, The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (Chicago, IL, 2017); Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, We are Left Without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico (Durham, NC, 2014); Kristin Hoganson, The Heartland: An American History (New York, 2019). 23 Kurk Dorsey, “Dealing with the Dinosaur (and Its Swamp): Putting the Environment in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 29, no. 4 (2005): 573–87. On everything being connected, see Mark H. Lytle, “An Environmental Approach to American Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 20 (1996): 279–300. 24 For one such example, see Andrew Friedman, “Decolonization’s Diplomats: Antiracism and the Year of Africa in Washington, D.C.,” Journal of American History 106, no. 3 (2019): 614–38. By “local history,” I mean histories of face-to-face communities located in specific places such as towns, cities, counties, Congressional districts, and suburbs. 25 Theorists of locality such as Arjun Appadurai and Doreen Massey have argued that locality should be regarded as relational and contextual. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN, 1996), 178; Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place,” in Exploring Human Geography: A Reader, ed. Stephen Daniels and Roger Lee (London, 1996), 237–45. On transimperial approaches, see Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, ed., Crossing Empires: Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain (Durham, NC, 2020). For examples of local histories that open out, see Julio Capó, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017); Jessica M. Kim, Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2019). 26 For a critique of local histories that have erased Native Americans, see Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, MN, 2010). 27 On the external geographies of place, see Massey, World City, 7. 28 For a critical assessment of the local as a site of resistance and liberation, see Arif Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC, 1996), 21–45. 29 On inter-Indigenous relations, see Daniel H. Usner, American Indians in Early New Orleans: From Calumet to Raquette (Baton Rouge, LA, 2018); on African-Indigenous relationships, see Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA, 1992), 18, 115. On market connections, Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago, IL, 2008), 102, 104, 107; Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (New York, 2013), 89; Bradley G. Bond, ed., French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, LA, 2005). 30 Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York, 2016), 121; David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), 15. 31 On refugees, DuVal, Independence Lost, 68; Light Townsend Cummins, Spanish Observers and the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1991), 13–14; on returning runaways, see Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1992), 108. 32 Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012), galleys, 128–29. 33 René Robert Cavelier de La Salle quoted in Usner, American Indians in Early New Orleans, 3–4, on Saint Domingue, 18-19, on foreign languages, 23. 34 Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, 9. 35 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), rice, 44, Senegambians, 44, Biafra 133. Ibrahima Seck, “The Relationships between St. Louis of Senegal, Its Hinterlands, and Colonial Louisiana,” trans. Joanne E. Burnett, in French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bond, 265–90. 36 On revolutionary ferment, DuVal, Independence Lost, 8; on Spanish strategy, Bradford Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, vol. 1: The Creation of a Republican Empire, 1776–1865 (Cambridge, 1993), 100. 37 Perkins, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, 114–17; Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore, MD, 2010). 38 Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville, FL, 2007), 24, 169; Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 224. Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2012). On aid, see Nathalie Dessens, “From Saint Domingue to Louisiana: West Indian Refugees in the Lower Mississippi Region,” in French Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World, ed. Bond, 244–64. 39 Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (New York, 2011), 22–23, 37, 98, 183; Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 344. 40 Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York, 2010); Donna L. Akers, “Removing the Heart of the Choctaw People: Indian Removal from a Native Perspective,” in Decolonizing American Indian History: Native Historians Write Back, ed. Susan Miller and James Riding In (Lubbock, TX, 2011), 105–16. 41 Trafficking continued after the legal prohibition of such imports took effect in 1808, see Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2008); Aims McGuinness, Path of Empire: Panama and the California Gold Rush (Ithaca, NY, 2008); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 2; Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 2016). 42 R.W. Bradbury, assisted by Clint Hyatt, Water-Borne Commerce of New Orleans (Baton Rouge, LA, 1937), fourth in world, 7, 52. 43 Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, 2004). 44 George Lipsitz, “New Orleans in the World and the World in New Orleans,” Black Music Research Journal 31, no. 2 (2011): 261–90. 45 On filibusters, see Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 339, 365–68. On J.D.B. De Bow, see Scott P. Marler, The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge, 2013), 80. 46 John Bassett Moore, A Digest of International Law as Embodied in Diplomatic Discussions, Treaties and Other International Agreements, International Awards, the Decisions of Municipal Courts, and the Writing of Jurists, in eight volumes, vol. VII (Washington, DC, 1906), 811–14. 47 Gregory P. Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA, 2015); and Andrew F. Lang, In the Wake of War: Military Occupation, Emancipation, and Civil War America (Baton Rouge, LA, 2017). On seizing supplies, see Hastings, The Lakes of Pontchartrain, 62. On the occupation of New Orleans, see Michael D. Pierson, Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008); Jacqueline G. Campbell, “‘The Unmeaning Twaddle about Order 28’: Benjamin F. Butler and Confederate Women in Occupied New Orleans, 1862,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2, no. 1 (2012): 11–30. 48 New Orleans v. Steamship Co., 20 Wall. 387, 393, Moore, A Digest of International Law, vol. VII, 260. 49 Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 2. 50 Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD, 2006), 6–7, 222–23. 51 Nystrom, Creole Italian, 83. 52 Richard Gambino, Vendetta: A True Story of the Worst Lynching in America, the Mass Murder of Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891, the Vicious Motivations Behind It, and the Tragic Repercussions that Linger to This Day (New York, 1977), 49, 87, 103, 117, 119–20. On this case and an indemnity paid to Britain for the injury of one of its subjects in New Orleans, see Moore, A Digest of International Law, vol. VII, 838–50. 53 Peter Chapman, Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World (New York, 2007), 30. On Honduran migration, including to rebuild after Katrina and to seek asylum from drug-related violence, see Jessica Williams, “New Orleans' Honduran Community Prepares to Aid Migrant Caravan, ‘Raise Consciousness’,” The New Orleans Advocate, October 25, 2018, last accessed May 22, 2020, https://www.nola.com/news/article_d7ad8998-e50b-5d7c-8b6f-594ab9d7048f.html; Katharine M. Donato, Nicole Trujillo-Pagán, Carl L. Bankston III, and Audrey Singer, “Immigration, Reconstruction, and Settlement,” in The Sociology of Katrina: Perspectives on a Modern Catastrophe, 2nd ed., ed. J. Steven Picou, David L. Brunsma, and David Overfelt (New York, 2010), 265–90. 54 Urmi Engineer Willoughby, Yellow Fever: Race and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Baton Rouge, LA, 2017), 143, 158. 55 Claudrena Harold, “Reconfiguring the Roots and Routes of New Negro Activism: The Garvey Movement in New Orleans,” in Escape from New York: The New Negro Renaissance beyond Harlem, ed. Davarian L. Baldwin and Minkah Makalani (Minneapolis, MN, 2013), 205–24. 56 Brian Altobello, ed., New Orleans Goes to War, 1941–1945: An Oral History of New Orleanians during World War II (n.p., 1990), lv, iv, xv, xxi, 142, on recollections of a Holocaust survivor, 187. 57 Jerry E. Strahan, Andrew Jackson Higgins and the Boats that Won World War II (Baton Rouge, LA, 1994), 3. 58 Laine Kaplan-Levenson, “A Community of Refugees in New Orleans East,” New Orleans Public Radio, May 24, 2018, last accessed May 27, 2020, https://www.wwno.org/post/community-refugees-new-orleans-east. 59 Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); 14, 159, 193; Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2004). On the float-making Kern Company, see Kevin Fox Gotham, “Tourism from Above and Below: Globalization, Localization and New Orleans’s Mardi Gras,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 2 (2005): 309–26. 60 Lisa Lindquist Dorr, A Thousand Thirsty Beaches: Smuggling Alcohol from Cuba to the South during Prohibition (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018), 20, 27, 169. 61 Marylin Wood, Eyewitness Travel New Orleans (London, 2017). 62 On nineteenth-century accounts, see Willoughby, Yellow Fever, 1. On centre of Africa, confusion of tongues, and miniature, see Guide to New Orleans (New York, 1884), 3, 23. On “Latin city,” “This is New Orleans,” pamphlet, 1941–1945, Adam Matthew, Marlborough, America in World War Two: Oral Histories and Personal Accounts, last accessed September 27, 2020, http://www.americainworldwartwo.amdigital.co.uk.proxy2.library.illinois.edu/Documents/Details/2001_158_AM_016, 1. Charmingly European is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s paraphrase, see Building the Devil’s Empire, xv. On least American, see Official Catalogue of the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition (New Orleans, LA, 1885), 4. On more northern Caribbean, see Karen Taylor-Gist and Cameron Quincy Todd, New Orleans (n.p., 2018), 3. The idea of New Orleans as foreign has not been limited to tourist guides, Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, 1976, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe, NM, 2003), 5. 63 On the United States as an empire-state, see Moon-Kie Jung and Yaejoon Kwon, “Theorizing the U.S. Racial State: Sociology Since Racial Formation,” Sociology Compass 7, no. 11 (2013): 927–40. 64 Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 140. 65 Willoughby, Yellow Fever, 8, 58. 66 On deportations, see Sonia Pérez D., Nomaan Merchant, Ben Fox and Michael Weissenstein, “Scant Testing in US Migration System Risks Spreading Virus,” NBC Boston, April 17, 2020, last accessed May 20, 2020, https://www.nbcboston.com/news/national-international/scant-testing-in-us-migration-system-risks-spreading-virus/2109640/. On ICE facilities in Louisiana, see Bryn Stole, “As number of immigrants behind bars soars under Trump, Louisiana becomes detention hub,” Times-Picayune, October 19, 2019, last accessed May 22, 2020, https://www.nola.com/news/article_197ff094-f1f5-11e9-ad15-f7503d2a8b7a.html; Jana K. Lipman and Olivia Mancing, “Coronavirus Exacerbates Plight of Asylum Seekers in Louisiana,” The Advocate (New Orleans), June 18, 2020, August 21, 2020, https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/opinion/article_fae78042-b027-11ea-b6c4-6fa7453aa9f7.html. 67 Two measures of the toll: Katrina caused an estimated $30 billion in damages and cost 1,833 direct fatalities, Stuart B. Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton, NJ, 2015), 319. 68 Christian Webersik, Climate Change and Security: A Gathering Storm of Global Challenges (Santa Barbara, CA, 2010), 53. Katrina also hit some low-lying suburban areas hard—these neighborhoods had been developed for white defense workers in the World War II era, with the G.I. Bill aiding postwar construction in these high-risk areas. See Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Cambridge, MA, 2020), 70–72. 69 Victoria Basolo, “Environmental Change, Disasters, and Vulnerability: The Case of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans,” Global Environmental Change and Human Security, ed. Richard A. Matthew, Jon Barnett, Bryan McDonald, and Karen L. O’Brien (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 97–116. 70 Webersik, Climate Change and Security, 3. On the harm that the canals used for pipelines and access to oil production facilities is causing to Louisiana’s marshes, speeding their erosion into the Gulf, see Pilkey, Sea Level Rise, 57; Jason P. Theriot, American Energy, Imperiled Coast: Oil and Gas Development in Louisiana’s Wetlands (Baton Rouge, LA, 2014). 71 Antonia Juhasz, “When They Set the Sea on Fire,” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, ed. Solnit and Snedeker, 50– 54; J. Steven Picou, David L. Brunsma, and David Overfelt, “Introduction: Katrina as a Paradigm Shift: Reflections in Disaster Research in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Sociology of Katrina, ed. Picou, Brunsma, and Overfelt, 1–24. 72 Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker, “Epilogue,” in Hurricane Katrina: America’s Unnatural Disaster, ed. Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker (Lincoln, NE, 2009), 277–80. 73 Ruth Gordon, “Katrina, Race, Refugees and Images of the Third World,” in Hurricane Katrina, ed. Levitt and Whitaker, 226–54. 74 Willis quoted in Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 328. 75 Kathleen Tierney and Christine A. Bevc, “Disaster as War: Militarism and the Social Construction of Disaster in New Orleans,” in The Sociology of Katrina, ed. Picou, Brunsma, and Overfelt, 37–54. 76 Russell R. Dynes and Havidán Rodríguez, “Finding and Framing Katrina: The Social Construction of Disaster,” in The Sociology of Katrina, ed. Picou, Brunsma, and Overfelt, 25–36. 77 Rebecca Solnit, “Nothing Was Foreordained,” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, eds. Solnit and Snedeker, ed., 127–32. 78 C. Warner, “History Lesson,” The Times-Picayune, April 22, 2006. Planner cited in Jeffry M. Diefendorf, “Reconstructing Devastated Cities: Europe after World War II and New Orleans after Katrina,” Journal of Urban Design 14, no. 3 (2009): 377–97. 79 Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Ten Year Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina,” New Orleans, August 27, 2015, last accessed April 10, 2020, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/08/28/remarks-president-ten-year-anniversary-hurricane-katrina. 80 “History of Help,” The Times-Picayune, Dec. 28, 2005. 81 Solnit, “Nothing Was Foreordained,” 129. 82 Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 328. On a Mexican convoy, see Maribel Hastings, “Aprueban mas ayuda para victimas del huracán: El Congreso de EU da luz verde para un fondo de asistencia de casi 52 millones de dólares,” La Opinión (Los Angeles and digital), September 9, 2005. The Mexican providers of humanitarian aid served in San Antonio, where they aided dislocated people living in shelters, “Convoy Mexicano Llega a EU: Asistirá a las victimas del huracán Katrina en una misión humanitaria sin precedentes,” La Opinión (Los Angeles and digital), September 9, 2005. 83 Diefendorf, “Reconstructing Devastated Cities,” 387. 84 “Comparan Katrina con 11-S: El Presidente Bush afirma que el país vencerá la prueba del huracán al igual que la de los atentados terroristas,” El Diario Monitor (Mexico City), September 11, 2005. 85 James Chaney, “A Glance at New Orleans’ Contemporary Hispanic and Latino Communities,” American Association of Geographers Newsletter, October 2, 2017, last accessed May 27, 2020, http://news.aag.org/2017/10/a-glance-at-new-orleans-contemporary-hispanic-and-latino-communities/. 86 Scholars who critiqued the failures of government made evident by Katrina have cited the World Health Organization and the international law of humanitarian intervention to buttress their assertions on health as a human right and the responsibility to protect, see Alyssa G. Robillard, “From Worse to Where? African Americans, Hurricane Katrina, and the Continuing Public Health Crisis,” 132–55; Linda S. Greene, “Governmental Liability for the Katrina Failure,” 206–25, both in Hurricane Katrina, ed. Levitt and Whitaker. 87 Schwartz, Sea of Storms, 329. 88 On veterans, Obama, “Remarks by the President on the Ten Year Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.” Interpreting the Katrina disaster in light of imperial politics extends the analyses that have highlighted domestic injustices. See, for example, Jeremy I. Levitt and Matthew C. Whitaker, “‘Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again’: Katrina and its Aftermath,” Hurricane Katrina, ed. Levitt and Whitaker, 1–22. 89 Donald Trump, campaign remarks, March 4, 2016, last accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9md6Qxsatg0. 90 See, for example, two recent Bernath Lectures: Jay Sexton, “From Triumph to Crisis: An American Tradition,” Diplomatic History 43, no. 3 (2019): 405–17; Daniel Sargent, “Pax Americana: Sketches for an Undiplomatic History,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 3 (2018): 357–76. 91 Melvyn P. Leffler, “National Security,” in Costigliola and Hogan, eds., Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 25–41; Jeffrey A. Engel, ed., Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Washington, DC, 2007). 92 To take one example, disruptions to supply chains caused by disasters such as Katrina ripple out in place-specific ways, affecting network nodal points differently than places linked by smaller capillaries, see Chris Shughrue, B.T. Werner and Karen C. Seto, “Global Spread of Local Cyclone Damages through Urban Trade Networks, Nature Sustainability 3, no. 8 (2020): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0523-8. On the “translocal” ties between places such as New Orleans, Havana, Kingston, San Juan, Limón, and Colón, see Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 7. 93 As Emily Rosenberg has noted: “Universalized systems and supposed objectivity help to create the discourses of hegemonic power; the language of critique may, as a result, be localized, partial, and contextual,” Rosenberg, “Walking the Borders,” 568. 94 On the value of a regional approach to U.S. foreign relations history, see Joseph A. Fry, “Place Matters: Domestic Regionalism and the Formation of American Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (2012): 451–82. 95 Christopher Flavelle, “Conservative States Seek Billions to Brace for Disaster (Just Don’t Call It Climate Change),” New York Times, January 20, 2020. On understanding climate change through place, see Alan Sano, “Farmers Don’t Need to Read the Science. We Are Living It,” New York Times, August 2, 2019. 96 On a 2019 executive order that granted local politicians veto power over refugee placement, see Zolan Kanno-Youngs, “Trump Threw Weighty Refugee Decisions to Local Government, with Painful Results,” New York Times, February 1, 2020. Jessica Williams, “From Cuba, LaToya Cantrell Talks about Long-Planned Trip,” The Times-Picayune, April 4, 2019, last accessed May 13, 2020, https://www.nola.com/news/article_b1449ce7-4f12-59e5-9ba8-87b7bdb3e5b6.html. On the New Orleans Director of International Relations, see Kyle J. Shelly, “City Hall Spotlight: Rosine Pemasanga,” City of New Orleans website, August 9, 2019, last accessed May 13, 2020, https://nola.gov/neighborhood-engagement/news/august-2019/city-hall-spotlight-rosine-pemasanga/. On the municipal foreign policy movement, see Andrew Kirby and Sallie Marston, with Kenneth Seasholes, “World Cities and Global Communities: The Municipal Foreign Policy Movement and New Roles for Cities,” in World Cities in a World-System, ed. Paul L. Knox and Peter J. Taylor (New York, 1995), 267–79; Pierre-Yves Saunier and Shane Ewen, ed., Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Movement. 1850–2000 (Basingstoke, 2008). 97 Mitchell J. Landrieu and Jeffrey P. Hebert, Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans, City of New Orleans, 2017, https://www.nola.gov/nola/media/Climate-Action/Climate-Action-for-a-Resilient-New-Orleans.pdf, 2, 7, 10. 98 The report listed C40, a network of cities committed to addressing climate change; ICLEI—Local Governments for Sustainability; Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN); and 100 Resilient Cities—Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation (100RC), Landrieu and Hebert, Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans, 2, 10. 99 Landrieu and Hebert, Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans, 72. This echoed the city’s 2015 resilience report, which contained inset boxes crediting Mexico City and Medellín for inspiration and acknowledging the 100 Resilient Cities Network, Mitchell J. Landrieu and Jeffrey P. Hebert, Resilient New Orleans: Strategic Actions to Shape Our Future City (New Orleans, LA, 2015) 59, 61. 100 Landrieu and Hebert, Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans, 2. 101 Landrieu and Hebert, Climate Action for a Resilient New Orleans, 56. 102 On community engagement pedagogy, see Corey M. Brooks, “Students Think Critically by Acting Locally,” Perspectives, October 2019, 20–22. On place attachment, see Maria Lewicka, “Place Attachment: How Far Have We Come in the Last 40 Years?” Journal of Environmental Psychology 31, no. 3 (2011): 207-30; Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974). 103 Keith Brekhus, “Bobby Jindal Urges President Obama Not to Mention Climate Change on Katrina Anniversary,” PoliticusUSA, August 27, 2015. Author notes I would like to gratefully acknowledge my ace team of undergraduate research assistants: Rylee Abrahamson, Spenser Bailey, Albert Byrn, Kassidy Mahoney, and Edward Ryan. I am also indebted to Stanley S. Stroup for enabling me to assemble this team and to Ikuko Asaka, Augusto Espiritu, Yuki Takauchi and the colleagues who provided advice and elevated spirits in the course of a lively Zoom conversation: Terri Barnes, Antoinette Burton, Claire Crowston, Ken Cuno, Lindsay Marshall, Kathy Oberdeck, Dana Rabin, and Leslie Reagan. Additional thanks are due to the University of Illinois Library Staff, and especially Nancy O’Brien, Sarah Williams, and Celestina Savonius-Wroth, for their efforts to locate digitized materials after the library went virtual. Jana Lipman and Kathryn Statler made excellent bibliographic suggestions. And heartfelt gratitude is due to Annemily Hoganson, who provided essential tech support for the podcast version of this talk, and to Barbara Hoganson, Jerome Hoganson, Ann Hoganson, Edie Hoganson, Jerry Gammie, and Charles Gammie, who walked the city with me in December, all the while thinking it was legwork for June. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Inposts of Empire
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhaa076
DA - 2021-01-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/inposts-of-empire-TxanZ3y9hw
SP - 1
EP - 22
VL - 45
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
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