TriPod: New Orleans At 300

In this edition of TriPod Xtras, Laine Kaplan-Levenson speaks with Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of Skift , a media company that looks at travel trends. The two discuss a report his company published about civil rights Tourism in the Deep South . The South has historically steered clear of slavery and Jim Crow when it comes to tourism marketing, and focused on topics like music and architecture. But civil rights museums are now becoming an important part of the South’s tourism economy, even though

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns with a story of the city’s above ground cemeteries, and those working behind the scenes. The many above ground cemeteries around town are hard to miss. And they are crowded. These above ground tombs, built since the 19th century to keep coffins away from the city's high water table, are like apartment buildings full of the dead, with multiple people in each tomb. Add to that the tour groups that cross paths as guides tell stories that keep the crowds coming, so

October is Louisiana Archeology month! And this week’s TriPod New Orleans at 300 digs into the discovery, and rediscovery, of New Orleans’ first cemetery. When you walk around the French Quarter, you see all kinds of tours going by- intimate horse drawn carriage tours, ghost tours, architectural tours. But most tours don’t touch one of the neighborhood’s most significant landmarks. Probably because you can’t see it.

This is the first edition of TriPod Xtras- exclusive interviews with guests on topics of New Orleans history. Here, Laine Kaplan-Levenson speaks with journalist and author Cokie Roberts. A native New Orleanian, Roberts talks about her connection to the city, and its politics, starting with her Congressional parents.

There is a common myth told about 19th-century New Orleans. It goes something like this: Imagine you’re in an elegant dance hall in New Orleans in the early 1800s. Looking around, you see a large group of white men and free women of color, who were at the time called quadroons, meaning they supposedly had ¼ African ancestry. The mothers play matchmakers, and introduce their daughters to these white men, who then ask their hand in a dance.

Tripod New Orleans @300 revisits the UpStairs Lounge Fire in the wake of last month’s Orlando Pulse Night Club shooting. In 1973, Clayton Delery-Edwards was living just outside New Orleans in Metairie, going to high school and- as he puts it - wrestling with "the G question." “You know by that point I figured out what it was, and I still wasn't sure how it was done, but I knew what it was.” Clayton’s talking about being gay. “I was fifteen years old, I had been gay bashed pretty relentlessly and

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns to remember the 1866 massacre at the city’s Mechanics' Institute. It’s part of a series of episodes on the Reconstruction era.

It was June. It was hot. Kids were out of school, keeping busy outdoors. Parents were inside. Kind of like how it is now, except it was 146 years ago.

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns with part two in a series on links between history and tourism.

TriPod New Orleans at 300 returns with a two-part series on tourism, starting with the city’s relationship to the industry, and how we became dependent on it.

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns with part two of its highway series. This is the story of the I-10 interstate bridge that sits above Claiborne Avenue. Part one of this story was about the proposed Riverfront Expressway through the French Quarter and along the Mississippi River. That leg of the highway did not happen, and the French Quarter was saved from being demolished under a freeway. But that same year, 1968, a different section of the Riverfront Expressway did go up. Under that part? The

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns with a two-part series on highways. The first looks at a controversy so intense, it’s called the ‘Second Battle of New Orleans.’

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns with a story about George Washington Cable, and the beautiful danger of writing New Orleans-based historical fiction.

TriPod: New Orleans at 300 returns with a profile of Eliza Jane Nicholson, a small town poet who became the first woman publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper.