Parks over Pasture: Enclosing the Commons in Postbellum New Orleans

This article examines the enclosure of the de facto commons that surrounded New Orleans during the final decades of the nineteenth century and argues that public parks were crucial tools deployed by civic elites on behalf of that initiative. As the regulatory efforts of reform-minded mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare failed to eliminate the persistent “cattle nuisance” that emanated from the undeveloped suburbs, he turned to parks as a means of fundamentally transforming the character of the land. By physically enclosing large swathes of acreage, conditioning the public to be urban subjects, and associating the area with leisure rather than agrarian production, the parks made it possible for the city’s modernizers to push dairy farmers out of the area and initiate a process of residential development. By examining this strategic use of greenspace in Gilded Age-era New Orleans, this article seeks to shed new light on the ways in which the urban environment was manipulated in service of the broader New South movement.

Transborder Capitalism and National Reconciliation: The American Press Reimagines U.S.-Mexico Relations after the Civil War

The end of the Civil War did not eradicate Americans’ concerns regarding the fragility of their republic. For many years after Appomattox, newspapers from across the political spectrum warned that the persistence of sectionalism in the postwar United States threatened to condemn the country to the kind of interminable internal disorder supposedly endemic among the republics of Latin America. This article examines how, from the early 1870s onward, growing numbers of U.S. editors, journalists, and political leaders called on Americans to concentrate on extending their nation’s commercial reach into Mexico. In doing so, they hoped to topple divisive domestic issues—notably Reconstruction—from the top of the national political agenda. These leaders in U.S. public discourse also anticipated that collaboration in a project to extend the United States’ continental power would revive affective bonds of nationality between the people of the North and South. In making this analysis, this article argues that much of the early impetus behind U.S. commercial penetration south of the Rio Grande after the Civil War was fueled by Americans’ deep anxieties regarding the integrity of their so-called exceptional republic.