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New Orleans has always inspired stories about its past that have earned it a place in both popular culture and the imagination as a mysterious city of decadence and decay, romance and myth. In the past few decades, an increasing number of scholars have also turned their attention to the city's history. While helping to untangle the past from the mythic narratives used to memorialize the city's history, these studies also highlight the distinctive sense of place created by its diverse inhabitants and by its geographic location. Fascination with New Orleans grew in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, as people around the country sought to understand how the city's past gave rise to the circumstances of the present. The books under review represent the diverse array of new publications and reprinted texts now available to those seeking to satisfy this interest. Although very different in scope, time frame, and subject, they all provide readers with a glimpse into the forces that shaped both past and present in the city.Just as contemporary battles over the future of New Orleans reflect efforts of different groups to claim and reclaim the city, some writers claim ownership of its past. What authors reveal and obscure, however, often depends on their own relationship to the city and its history. As Judith Kelleher Schafer remarks in the introduction to the reprint edition of Henry C. Castellanos's New Orleans as It Was, his "vignettes are as remarkable for the aspects of New Orleans life that he omitted as much as for what he included" (p. xii). For Castellanos, a white, male lawyer coming to terms with a present in the 1890s that he could no longer reconcile with the past, telling his stories was a means of recapturing the "startling, romantic and improbable" truths that shaped life in New Orleans prior to the Civil War. In contrast to Schafer's insight, Castellanos believed he "omitted none of the salient

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