New Orleans: a brief history of tourism

 

A Brief History of Tourism in New Orleans

adapted from https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history

New Orleans emerged as a tourist destination following the Civil War. The arrival of transcontinental railroads, first-class hotels, and guides aimed specifically at tourists helped popularize New Orleans as a winter destination. New Orleans leaders, like peers in other southern cities, hoped to use tourism to entice northern investment. They crafted a romantic Old South image that, toward the close of the 19th century, relied on Jim Crow restrictions to forge the illusion of a stable racial order. African Americans became virtually invisible in promotional literature except as domestic servants or "picturesque" riverfront dockworkers. The city's business establishment exerted greater control over the city's Mardi Gras festivities, confining parades to specified routes and creating their own parading organization, the Krewe of Rex, in 1872 to act as the public face of Carnival. In the 1870s and 1880s, writers such as Lafcadio Hearn and George Washington Cable contributed to the city's emergent aura in the pages of Harper's, Scribner's, and Century Magazine. Blurring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, they depicted a city evoking the Mediterranean or Caribbean, where a visitor could see the world by strolling New Orleans's streets. The 1884–85 World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition increased the city's popularity as a tourist destination. By that time many railroads and steamboat lines served New Orleans, bringing more than one million attendees who marveled at the world's first electrically illuminated fair. Expo promoters issued a series of tourist guides extolling the city's unique architecture, cuisine, and local lore. These guidebooks prescribed highly selective paths through the city, teaching tourists to know the city by seeing its landmarks, literally turning sites into sights.

QUESTIONS:

a)    What sort of document is it?

b)    What is the main idea?

c)     Guess the meaning of ( no dictionary):

-        entice (l.4)

-        rely on (l.6)

-        blur (l. 13)

d)    What is the Krewe of Rex? ( use your own words).

e)    Use the web to answer the following questions:

1.When did the Civil War take place? Why?

2.What were the Jim Crow Laws?

f) Use  your own words to sum up the different reasons why New Orleans became attractive.