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The State And The Spirits: Voodoo And Religious Repression In Jim Crow New Orleans, Kendra Cole

Honors Theses

Voodoo transitioned from a religion that caused its practitioners to be criminalized and apprehended by the state to a lure used to entice visitors to the Crescent City. This thesis attemtps to show how the public perception of Voodoo shifted in the late nineteenth-century from a hidden threat to a public novelty. I explain this shift through analyzing New Orleans guidebooks, newspapers, and court cases at the turn of the twentieth-century. This thesis fills the gap in the scholarship pertaining to the twentieth-century. I achieve this by drawing upon more extensive literature on the oppression of African-derived religions in other …