New Orleans as it is : Its manners and customs--morals--fashionable life--profanation of the Sabbath--prostitution--licentiousness--slave markets and slavery, &c. &c. &c.

A resident’s unflinching eye draws listeners into the tangled streets of mid‑nineteenth‑century New Orleans, where every dock, courtyard and market teems with contrasting lives. The narrator sketches the city’s public holidays, fashionable salons and the shadowed corners where vice thrives, offering a vivid sense of the sounds, smells and restless energy that defined daily existence.

Beyond the surface, the work weaves in the region’s early history, from the first Spanish expeditions to the swelling rivers that fed a bustling entrepôt. It explores how a mosaic of languages, customs and economies produced a community caught between opulent display and stark moral contradictions, including the harsh realities of slavery and the relentless quest for pleasure. Listeners receive a candid portrait of a city that, even then, felt like a micro‑cosm of the wider world—complex, beautiful, and unmistakably alive.