Crescent City Girls

“Breaks meaningful new ground and serves as a model for future studies in African American and gender history.”—Journal of American History

“Highly recommended, as it intelligently includes voices entirely lost in most academic literature and . . . will be vital to those studying gender, youth, and urban histories.”—American Historical Review

“Gives its readers the opportunity to explore New Orleans as black girls may have experienced it. . . . Demonstrate[s] the ways that consideration of black girls’ experience provides richer and more nuanced historical narratives. . . . Provide[s] important context and foundation for the conceptions of black girlhood that we have inherited.”—Public Books

“An excellent contribution to the study of children’s geographies. The author explores the racial, sexual, violent, affective, classed, gendered and imagined geographies of New Orleans from the vantage point of black girls. As such it will be of interest not only to historians, but also to scholars interested in past and present spatializations of sexual and racial violence.”—“Childrens Geographies”

“Readers are introduced to the interior lives of black girls in a city shaped by complex color lines, racial identities, and demands on what girlhood was supposed to mean.”—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

“A significant new contribution to southern history, African American history, and gender studies that belongs in every academic library and should receive serious consideration by public libraries.”—CHOICE

“Addresses many of the themes scholars and others consider when they think of New Orleans. Entertainment districts, Mardi Gras balls and parades, the power of Catholicism, the importance of schools, the complexity of definitions of race and the power of racial segregation are all crucial to Crescent City Girls.”—Reading the South

“Crescent City Girls is a provocative, insightful, and important perspective on the complexities of black female childhood in the Jim Crow South. Simmons not only fills an important gap in the scholarship regarding how we might understand the interiority of black girls' lives; her work also raises new questions and insights about the different ways that black communities navigated the South’s racialized and gendered violence.”—Cheryl D. Hicks, author of Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1930–1935

“This book is like a quilt as it pieces together many fragments to tell a rich and fascinating story. I see it as part of a new scholarship that looks at historical questions from a different angle, making a significant contribution.”—Elizabeth Higginbotham, University of Delaware