The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865-1920. By Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xv plus 282 pp.).
Alecia Long set out to understand the history and culture of Storyville, New Orleans's notorious, and legal, vice district between 1897 and 1917. It was, she argues, at the center of common perceptions that New Orleans was the "great southern Babylon," a place in which Americans tolerated and even celebrated ...