Our work explores how narratives about New Orleans, circulated both within and outside of the city, shaped American and global conceptions about race, class, gender, and industrialization in ways that endured well after the Civil War. First, we bridge the gap between pre- and post-Civil War historiography, arguing that the romanticized nostalgia for the “Old South” associated with “Lost Cause” ideology was shaped throughout the antebellum period. By critically examining antebellum anxieties about the colonial status quo and slavery following the Haitian Revolution, the material transformations of urbanization, and conceptualizations of hybridity, our research reveals the circumstances that provided an outlet for writers, planters, and colonists to create narratives around New Orleans. Second, we examine how francophone Afro and White Creole populations interpreted the contradictions of post-emancipation regimes through an Atlantic framework. The Morant Bay Rebellion served as a transimperial mirror through which New Orleans observers reassessed Reconstruction-era violence, reevaluated British emancipation as a comparative model, and contributed to the racialization of Creole political identities. Third, we explore a flashpoint in New Orleans’s postbellum effort to make itself the North American hub of the pan-American economic and cultural movement. Most scholarship on the “New South” focuses on the achievements and failures of industrialization, while less attention has been paid to the significant efforts to invest in cultural outreach and commercial expansion. One major element of that initiative involved hosting conventions and expositions, the most notable of which in New Orleans was the 1884-85 Cotton Centennial, where boosters used spectacle and sentimentality to bolster their reputation as “the Imperial City of the Gulf.” Finally, our analysis of the Creole Historic Exhibit of 1885–1886 reveals how elite, White‑identified Louisiana women used visual and material culture to craft a modern, Creole identity amid post‑Reconstruction racial and political upheaval. By revealing how these women produced Creole mythologies through curated “relics” and displays, our research emphasizes women’s central role in shaping Creole identity and demonstrates how expositions functioned as sites of racial myth-making in the New South.

This scholarship illuminates the ways in which the image of nineteenth-century New Orleans was forged, negotiated, and contested by historical stakeholders. We hope to offer a critical lens through which to challenge New Orleans’s mythological identity, contextualize historical exhibitionary impulses, and understand constructions of place and urbanity.