"Pralines, Madame?": Emancipation, Free Enterprise, and the Praline Seller

About this Event:

The exodus of African Americans from Louisiana's sugar plantations during the Civil War brought the praline to New Orleans. Pralines were a working-class food, powering Black laborers. With foraged pecans and cheap sugar often purchased through a thriving black market, Black women in New Orleans used their cooking skills to earn income and, in a few cases, fame. The growing popularity of the confection among tourists turned the praline, by the twentieth century, into a souvenir symbolic of the South.

About this Speaker:

Dr. Anthony J. Stanonis is a native New Orleanian. He received a BA in History from Loyola University New Orleans and his MA and PhD in History from Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Creating the Big Easy: New Orleans and the Emergence of Modern Tourism, 1918-1945 (2006), Faith in Bikinis: Politics and Leisure in the Coastal South since the Civil War (2014), and New Orleans Pralines: Plantation Sugar, Louisiana Pecans, and the Marketing of Southern Nostalgia (2024).

This lecture is made possible with support from the New Orleans Recreation and Culture Fund.

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