| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920. By Alecia P. Long. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xviii, 282 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2932-1.)

In Victorian America, civic leaders in many cities experimented with creating vice districts in order to isolate and contain the threats to morality they saw especially in prostitution. Few if any of these districts achieved the notoriety of New Orleans's Storyville, which despite its relatively brief existence continues to attract tourists more than eight decades after its official demise in 1917. As the center of sanctioned sin in a city with a national reputation for sensuality, it was perhaps inevitable that Storyville would become enshrouded in legend and myth. But Alecia P. Long, using a series of legal cases, moves beyond colorful anecdotes and reveals how the rise and fall of Storyville were phenomena whose dynamics were unique to New Orleans yet also how they were implicated in and played out amidst larger regional and national trends of progressive reform at the intersection of ideas about race, sexuality, and bourgeois respectability.

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