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Fierce Women: Power, Resistance, and Reinvention
Check out the insightful Louisiana Book Festival biographical panel "Fierce Women: Power, Resistance, and Reinvention" at 10:30 a.m. in Author Tent B in the A.Z. Young Park.
Melissa Daggett’s Eugène and Eulalie is an epic story of love, race, prosperity, and legal maneuvering. It chronicles the largely forgotten lives of Eulalie Mandeville, a free woman of color, and her white partner, Eugène Macarty. Mandeville and Macarty, both descendants of elite colonial families, began a relationship in the 1790s that endured for more than half a century and produced five children. It also led to Mandeville’s phenomenal rise to the pinnacle of wealth and success within the unique tripartite racial structure of nineteenth-century New Orleans.
Vaudeville’s Wildflower: The Many Lives of Cora Youngblood Corson by James P. Gregory, Jr. uncovers the extraordinary story of one of early twentieth-century America’s most dynamic and overlooked entertainers. Drawing on rare archives, family records, and vivid period accounts, Gregory restores Cora Youngblood Corson - a trailblazing brass musician, bandleader, and vaudeville performer - to her rightful place in performing arts history.
In Fearless Philanthropy, Roberta Brandes Gratz tells the story of Edith Rosenwald Stern, the wife of successful cotton broker Edgar Bloom Stern, who encountered a city rife with racism and antisemitism, and run by a set of entrenched social rules that she was not about to abide by. Her father, Julius Rosenwald of Sears & Roebuck, one of the richest men in America, had begun transforming lives of Black Americans in the South through his efforts to promote Black education. Edith proceeded to follow in his footsteps, and with her willing partner Edgar helped revolutionize aspects of New Orleans still visible today.
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