The City that Care Forgot
Opening Reception and Program

The exhibition "The City that Care Forgot: The Southern Remembers New Orleans" is on view through July 31 in the Manuscripts Department on the fourth floor of the Wilson Library.

"The City that Care Forgot" presents a few slices of New Orleans life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through letters, diaries, scrapbooks, and oral histories of its residents and visitors; photographs of the place and its people; and sound recordings of its musicians.

Items displayed include:

• A letter that U.S. Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson wrote before the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, fought because troops had not yet received news that a treaty had ended the War of 1812 two weeks earlier.
• An 1841 recipe for New Orleans gumbo soup.
• Photographs of street musicians in the city's French Quarter.
• Oral histories from the city's last white mayor, Moon Landrieu, and first black mayor, Ernest Morial.
• Commercial sound recordings by jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, soul singer and songwriter Irma Thomas, funk band The Meters, pop artists The Neville Brothers and Fats Domino, and others.

These materials were drawn from the Southern Historical Collection and Southern Folklife Collection. As neither collection lays claim to extensive documentation of the city, it is a small display but a moving tribute to the city.

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