October 2, 2020, marks the 100th wedding anniversary of General L. Kemper and Leila Moore Williams, founders of The Historic New Orleans Collection. To celebrate this milestone, we look back at their biographies to see how their personal histories set forth the impetus to collect, preserve, and share the history of Louisiana.
For years, cinephiles have lamented a lack of originality coming out of Hollywood studios. However, there’s no shortage of stories waiting to be told onscreen, and that’s where we can be of use to studio bosses.
To help us celebrate one of the triumphs of recent Hollywood South creativity, Benh Zeitlin—who directed, co-wrote, and co-scored Beasts of the Southern Wild—answered a few of our questions.
Over the course of the two years after Hurricane Katrina, Rolland Golden roamed the city’s flooded areas, sketching and painting a series of 26 scenes representing the turmoil and devastation of the city during the flood and the stark desolation after the waters receded.
The 1951 film of Tennessee Williams’s New Orleans-set A Streetcar Named Desire won multiple Academy Awards and is considered a landmark of American cinema. To prepare for the August 24, 2020, #NolaMovieNight group re-watch of the film, First Draft returned to local dialect coach and acting teacher Francine Segal for insight into the film’s accents (always of interest to New Orleanians) and acting styles.
To set the stage (as it were) for the August 24 #NolaMovieNight group screening of the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, First Draft reached out to two Tennessee Williams Annual Review principals for insight into the publication and some thoughts on the film’s cultural impact.
The wide range of materials features objects such as the typewriter Williams used to write the play, early manuscript drafts, original playscripts, playbills, and photographs (including Vivien Leigh’s photograph collection from the shooting of the 1951 film version), as well as posters, lobby cards, first editions of published volumes, and foreign translations.
Often, the story of women’s suffrage ends at the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Yet, for many women in the South, the fight did not end there.
A new pumping system in the early 20th century improved New Orleans's drainage crisis, decreased disease rates, increased the quality of the water supply, and drove economic growth throughout the city. These improvements, however, came at a mighty cost.
A large photograph album bound in red leather documents a 1906 “quarantine tour” of Central America sponsored by the United Fruit Company during the final outbreak of yellow fever in New Orleans. The book is a fascinating example of the tremendous influence of the banana-import business in early 20th-century New Orleans and the efforts by one company to skirt quarantine regulations.