Through the lens of race, Creole New Orleans explores a city that is in many ways unlike the rest of the South, yet inextricably embedded in it. In a remarkably cohesive collection of essays, the authors advance from the colonial period to the present with broad strokes, illuminating odd twists and turns. Borrowing from C. Vann Woodward’s notion of historical counterpoint, they juxtapose “the Franco-African protest tradition of New Orleans and the tragic racial mind-set of Anglo-America.”