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ackNowledgMeNts I am grateful to Gaines Foster and the Louisiana State University Department of History for the lecture invitation that began this whole business , and for their hospitality in Baton Rouge. I also thank the staff of the LSU Press, who have been a delight to work with. Particular thanks to Rand Dotson, who was involved in this almost from the beginning; Lee Sioles, who ably and uncomplainingly oversaw the complicated job of production ; and Laura Gleason, who did the splendid design and layout. I’m especially grateful that the Press indulged me (usually) in the matter of illustrations . My view that a blurry, grainy, pixelated image is better than none at all is not always shared by publishers. I am also beholden to Derik Shelor, whose copyediting caught far too many solecisms, inconsistencies, and downright errors of fact. He also asked some embarrassingly penetrating questions that led me to rewrite not just the odd sentence but several whole paragraphs. The last of the Famous Creoles died in 1998, so I missed the chance to meet any of them, but fortunately Joseph Blotner, Carvel Collins, and Kenneth Holditch each interviewed many of the principals, often at length, and thoughtfully archived transcripts which I read with delight. (I also had a very agreeable and informative lunch with Professor Holditch.) I thank them for their assiduous research. I’m likewise indebted to the biographers of individual Famous Creoles, especially four whose help went beyond writing useful books: Chance Harvey, Taylor Littleton, John W. Scott, and Anthony Stanonis. Without Lisa Eveleigh’s hard work and organization I would still be trying to get permission to use some of the illustrations in this book. Lisa and I had the good luck to deal with a great many obliging people (many of them 327 328 | Acknowledgments archivists and librarians, who are God’s gift to the world of scholarship). Sean Benjamin at Tulane’s Louisiana Research Collection, Ann Case at the Tulane University Archives, and Eric Seiferth at the Historic New Orleans Collection deserve special mention, but others include Judith Bonner, Charlene Bonnette, Sybil Boudreaux, Marcello Canuto, Lorraine Fletez-Brant, Robert Hamblin, Rebecca Hamilton, Daniel Hammer, Christine Hernandez, Fran Huber, Jennifer Ickes, Mary-Allen Johnson, Pat Kahle, Kathe Lawton, Tony Lewis, Leon Miller, Meg Partridge, Henri Schindler, Elizabeth Sherwood, Lisa Speer, Eira Tansey, Margaret Tenney, Susan Tucker, I. Bruce Turner, Elizabeth Weinstein, Lisa Werling, Mary Lynn Wernet, and Cindy Woessner. By the way, I particularly appreciate those individuals, organizations, and archives who let me use their images (and in some cases reproduced them for me) without charging extortionate fees—that is, most of them. For hospitality in New Orleans and other miscellaneous favors, I’m grateful to Jane and Corny Apffel, Curtis Wilkie, Lolis Elie, Brett Anderson, and David Cuthbert, as well as Harry Watson and Josh Lynn at Chapel Hill’s Center for the Study of the American South (they know why). John Mark Ockerbloom , editor of the Online Books Page, has done enormously useful work on copyright that saved me a great deal of trouble, and the foreign language skills of Philip Lewis and E. Christian Kopff helped to make up for my lack of any. I wrote much of this book while a visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge , and David Houston, Richard King, and Tony Badger read and commented on an early proposal, and Jim Cobb did the same for the almost-finished manuscript. I’m much obliged to all of them. Finally, I thank Dale for her help—and for having the idea in the first place. ...

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