| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Alecia P. Long. The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2004. Pp. xv, 282. $39.95.

Any book about sex in New Orleans, even a scholarly one, faces the challenge of having to meet raised—indeed, perhaps unrealistically high—expectations. The possibilities seem endless. Alecia P. Long's book concerns itself less with sex and sexual practices per se than it does with exploring the complex interaction and tensions among the sexual culture, evolving notions of race and race relations, and emerging conceptions of middle-class respectability in this notoriously decadent city between the Civil War and 1920. Yet Long maintains that while New Orleans is often thought to be unique, and while its particular circumstances must be taken into account, it nonetheless epitomized much that was true of the South in general during this period, especially concerning race. Moreover, the intersection of, and conflicts over, sex, race, and respectability in New Orleans also reflected larger trends in American society during these years on such matters as commercialized sex, modern notions of leisure time, and the rise of a distinct tourist industry. By exploring "concubinage" (legally, a relationship between two people outside marriage), prostitution, and interracial sex—or, as she calls it, "sex across the color line"—in New Orleans, and by measuring them against prevailing standards of bourgeois morality and decency, Long insists, we can learn much about American society in general. As she puts it, "sexual practices and the politics that surround them provide an important barometer for measuring and understanding other things that are going on in a society at the same time" (p. 8).

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