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PReFACe T his book began its life as the Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University in April 2011. I was both delighted and intimidated to be invited to give those lectures—delighted because of the distinguished company of Fleming lecturers I would be joining, but intimidated . . . for the same reason. No doubt many other lecturers have felt that way, but in my case there was the added complication that the full title of the lectures is “the Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History,” and (although historians have always been very gracious about it) I am not an historian. I was in fact the first sociologist ever to give the lectures, so I feared that a poor performance would embarrass not just me, but my discipline . Anyone who studies the South will know a great many of the books resulting from earlier Fleming Lectures, but to get a more systematic idea of what was expected I consulted Burl Noggle’s historiographical essay on the series. There I found that since Charles W. Ramsdell gave the first lectures in 1937 different speakers have gone about their task in many different ways. Some have used the occasion to look back and to summarize their previous work, but I started doing that some time ago and really ought to give it a rest. Others have taken the opportunity to plow new furrows in the fields they had been working, but my old field suffers from soil exhaustion—or maybe it’s just me who is exhausted. Anyway, if it is to be restored to production , someone else will have to come manure it (and this metaphor is getting out of hand). The point is that I didn’t want to write on a subject where I had nothing new to say, so I started casting about for topics that (1) would make suitable vii viii | Preface Fleming Lectures and (2) wouldn’t bore me, but (3) I had a reasonable chance of addressing satisfactorily. There are fewer of those than I like to admit. I kicked around three or four that fell short on one count or another, until one day my sometime coauthor and longtime wife, Dale, suggested that I write about the French Quarter in the 1920s. Neither of us can remember why she suggested it, but it surely has something to do with the fact that she and I have collected Mexican silver for years. William Spratling designed some of the best of it, and we were interested in him even before we knew that William Faulkner shared his apartment in the Quarter. I haven’t had many “Eureka” moments in my life, but when Dale made that suggestion, the figurative light bulb lit immediately: I got to work the next day, and have not once regretted the choice. I hope readers will come to see why I found that topic such fun to work on. (Of course it didn’t hurt that it required me to spend a couple of months in New Orleans doing research at the Historic New Orleans Collection, Tulane, and Galatoire’s.) DIXIE BOHEMIA This page intentionally left blank ...

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