Abstract: This essay draws attention to a recurring pattern within American reactionary thought that imagines university professors as subversive threats to the culture and morality of the nation. Two stories from the University of Florida illustrate this pattern: In 1911, historian Enoch Marvin Banks became the object of censure when he published an academic article that argued slavery was a cause of the Civil War. In 1959, geographer Sigismond Diettrich became known to state operatives when he was coerced by investigators to confess to his participation in sexual acts with men. In narrating the stories of Banks and Diettrich—both of whom the University of Florida forced to resign because of these controversies—the article argues that the shifting terrains of the culture wars do not provide firm foundations from which to reform and improve universities.
Abstract: This essay focuses on New Orleans’s first and only beach for Black citizens, Lincoln Beach. It tells a particular story about Louisiana’s legal and governing aims under Jim Crow between the 1880s and 1960s. It argues that the Orleans Levee Board, the government agency that created Lincoln Beach, developed the land in the name of public interest as an economic bet on the success of segregation in the city. Additionally, the article looks at Lincoln Beach as a unique place to examine leisure in New Orleans and Louisiana, with geographic and legal realities that highlight the failures of segregation. Through focusing on memories, laws, and the land itself as evidence, this project reconstructs Lincoln Beach as a place of cultural significance for Black New Orleanians, tracing its little-known history alongside state neglect and dispossession.
