Building Antebellum New Orleans

Building Antebellum New Orleans is a meticulous account of the architectural contributions of free people of color to the city, and of the cultural landscape they worked within and acted on.

~ANTIGRAVITY Magazine

Rendering life in serene prose from an arrangement of discrete data points is part of Tara A. Dudley’s art in Building Antebellum New Orleans. It is a consummate work of social, genealogical, and architectural history...This is a book of impeccable calculation and comprehensive accounting...Dudley’s investment in the 'significance of African Americans’ place' in the American landscape documents the untold and telling efforts of both free and unfree people of African descent to bear the long-contested dispossession built into the fabric of the colonial American experiment.

~ARRIS: The Journal of the Southeast Chapter of Architectural Historians

To refer to this book as an architectural history of New Orleans after statehood would describe only a fraction of its scholarly importance. Beyond the material culture that is manifest in the built environment and the building types that gens de couleur libres builders preferred, the reader gets many glimpses of the unique social and economic position of this mixed-race class and the racial politics they negotiated...Building Antebellum New Orleans reveals the rich and complicated social landscape created by free people of color in New Orleans and the privileges that came with belonging to old Francophone families.

~Journal of Southern History

Dudley demonstrates the control gens de couleur libres (free people of color) exerted on the city's architecture and urban design, and she convincingly asserts the importance the built environment had for their families and community, thereby expanding our understanding of gens de couleur libres material strategies and New Orleans's built environment...Dudley recovers a sizeable group of builders obscured by scholars' focus on the city's European and Anglo-American professional architects, and she offers a nuanced analysis of her subjects' complex racial identities, acknowledging some family members' role as enslavers. Her study resonates with questions emerging across architectural history and material culture studies about the importance of enslaved and free Black craftspeople's expertise and labor in building trades across the South.

~Journal of American History

For readers across disciplines, this book is a fascinating insight into the Creolization of New Orleans while looking at a tumultuous, contentious political era in Louisiana’s history. For emerging scholars in similar disciplines, it gives an apt roadmap to follow—to try and lend voice to people who are seldom written about, like the women of the families, and to connect the dots not just through a paper trail but also a trail of emotions.

~E3W