'The Great Southern Babylon': Sexuality, race, and reform in New Orleans, 1865--1920 (Louisiana)

New Orleans' reputation as the “Great Southern Babylon” was well established by the antebellum period. Following the Civil War, profoundly altered social and economic conditions reshaped the meaning and import of prostitution and sexual relationships across the color line and generated debates about the desirability of the city's notorious reputation and lucrative culture of commercial sexuality. Although reformers sought to control vice by segregating its practitioners and their places of business, this policy had unforeseen outcomes.; This work provides a long-overdue account of the city's experiences with prostitution and the commercialization of sex at the turn-of-the-century, while placing events in New Orleans in a regional and national context. Using testimony from court cases and other official records, this dissertation provides the first detailed explanation of how and why the city chose to segregate all of its commercial sexual enterprises and prostitutes into a single neighborhood in 1897. The resulting vice district, Storyville, became one of the nation's largest and most notorious.; The process that led to the creation of Storyville also yields significant findings about the connections between racial and spatial segregation in the South's most heterogeneous city. The first two chapters explore reformers' attempts to reorganize the city spatially in response to evolving ideas about respectability, ethnicity, gender, and social class. Evolving ideas about race and interracial sex also played a role in delineating the boundaries of respectability and vice in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Thus, chapters three and four focus on sex across the color line, both within and outside the city's vice district. Sex across the color line was only one aspect of the city's culture of commercial sexuality, but, as the final chapter demonstrates, it was a critical factor in defining the city as symbolically sexual and forging it into a notorious attraction and tourist destination with national appeal. Although Storyville was outlawed in 1917, the vice district remains an icon of the city's sybaritic appeal, and a sexually alluring beacon to tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond.