Welcome to the Shifting Landscapes virtual tour of Gallier House, which focuses deeply on how the house was experienced by the enlaved people—Laurette, Rose, Julienne, and François—who lived and labored there between the house’s completion in 1860 and the end of the Civil War in 1865. In addition to exploring the buildings, outdoor spaces, and collections at Gallier House, visitors will be given a glimpse into everyday life on the property and how the enslaved people at the house navigated their environment on the eve of slavery’s abolition in the southern United States. The tour will explore the idea of “shifting landscapes”: not only the ways in which the physical spaces of the house meant different things to different people at different times, but also the many ways in which social landscape shifted for enslaved people during this brief but tumultuous period in history. The tour also challenges us, in the present day, to shift our ways of thinking about the history of the landscapes—both physical and metaphorical—that we experience every day.
We greatly appreciate the feedback of our virtual visitors! Please consider completing the following survey so that we can learn from it as we work towards the completion of the full version of the Shifting Landscapes tour. The survey should take around 5 minutes to complete.
Educational Resources
Interested in using the Shifting Landscapes tour in your classroom? Stay tuned for lesson plans for K-12 and higher education that use Shifting Landscapes as a teaching and student research tool.
Virtual Field Trips
Unable to visit Gallier House in person? Please reach out to education@hgghh.org to learn more about offerings and pricing for a Zoom lesson and Q&A with the Director of Educational Programming to accompany use of the Shifting Landscapes tour in your classroom.
Credits
The Shifting Landscapes: Slavery and the Built Environment virtual tour was created by the Hermann-Grima + Gallier Historic Houses (HGGHH) staff together with eleven collaborating scholars and HULLFILM.
Project Director: Dr. Amy Katherine Medvick.
Executive Director: Tessa Jagger.
Curator: Katie Burlison.
Curatorial Associate: Peter Dandridge
Panoramic image capture and digital assembly by Brandon Hull of HULLFILM.
Volumetric scanning and 3D model rendering by Dr. Bryan Carter, Director of the Center for Digital Humanities, University of Arizona, and Amelia Latania Matheson, Earnest Jerome Walker, and Cosmo Vittorio Brusa Zapellini.
Additional website assistance by Nathan duToit.
Phase 1 Collaborators: Dr. Anastacia Scott, Project Director, and Dr. Dell Upton, Distinguished Professor of Architectural History, Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles.
Videos feature Gaynell Brady of Our Mammy’s, LLC.
Creative direction by Amy Katherine Medvick.
Videography and editing by Brandon Baudier of Implicted, LLC.
Tour text and video script editing by Amy Katherine Medvick and Katie Burlison.
Tour text and video script content development by Amy Katherine Medvick, Katie Burlison, Tessa Jagger, and the collaborating scholars (listed alphabetically by surname):
Dr. Fallon Samuels Aidoo, Assistant Professor of Real Estate & Historic Preservation, School of Architecture, Tulane University.
Fallon Samuels Aidoo is a preservation planner interested in the history and future of real estate that is vital to Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Her research, teaching, consulting, and public service revolve around the diversity of preservation practitioners, patrons, and practices that contribute to cultural heritage vulnerability and sustainability. At Tulane School of Architecture, Dr. Aidoo teaches real estate development and historic preservation and supervises urban studies. She applies research to practice, and vice-versa, as an advisor to the U.S. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and the Louisiana Office of Historic Preservation and consultant to National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Park Service, NEH, and Mellon Foundation grantees. Dr. Aidoo holds a PhD in urban planning (Harvard), M.S. in architectural history (MIT) and B.S. in civil / structural engineering (Columbia University).
Dr. Bryan Carter, Professor of Africana Studies, Director, Center for Digital Humanities, University of Arizona
Dr. Bryan Carter received his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is currently the Director of the Center for Digital Humanities and an Associate Professor in Africana Studies at the University of Arizona. He specializes in African American literature of the 20th Century with a primary focus on the Harlem Renaissance. Dr. Carter’s research centers on how using traditional and advanced interactive and immersive technologies change the dynamic within the learning space. Dr. Carter has completed his first book, entitled Digital Humanities: Current Perspectives, Practice and Research through Emerald Publishing, and he completed his second manuscript through Routledge Press, entitled AfroFuturism: Experiencing Culture Through Technology (June 2022).
Dr. Clifton Ellis, Elizabeth Sasser Professor of Architectural History, Huckabee College of Architecture at Texas Tech University
Clifton Ellis earned his PhD in Architectural History at the University of Virginia, focusing on the colonial and antebellum periods of the United States. He has written widely on race and gender in the plantation households of the Antebellum South. He teaches at Texas Tech University’s Huckabee College of Architecture.
Dr. Walter D. Greason, DeWitt Wallace Professor of History, Department of History, Macalester College.
Walter Greason, Ph.D., DeWitt Wallace Professor in the Department of History at Macalester College is the preeminent historian of Afrofuturism, the Black Speculative Arts, and digital economies in the world today. His work as a viral engagement coordinator for the Shifting Landscapes virtual tour with HGGHH expanded the project's public and scholarly impact.
Dr. Erin M. Greenwald, Historian and Founder, The Working Historian, LLC.
Erin M. Greenwald, PhD, is a historian, curator, and founder of the Working Historian, a consultancy supporting museums, publishers, researchers, and cultural organizations in the development and execution of high-quality public history and humanities projects. From 2018 to 2024, Greenwald served as Vice President of Public Programs and Editor-in-Chief of 64 Parishes magazine and website at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Prior to joining the LEH, she was senior curator and historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection.
Dr. Leslie M. Harris, Professor of History and Black Studies, Department of History, Northwestern University.
Leslie M. Harris is Professor of History and Black Studies at Northwestern University. She has authored or co-edited five books and participated in a number of public history projects, including the award-winning Slavery in New York exhibition (2005-2007) at the New-York Historical Society, and the accompanying book (with Ira Berlin); and the re-interpretation of the urban slave quarters at Telfair Museum’s Owens-Thomas House in Savannah, Georgia, which included the edited volume Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (2013, with Daina Ramey Berry). Harris is currently completing Leaving New Orleans: A Personal Urban History, a book that combines memoir with family, urban and environmental histories to explore the multiple meanings of New Orleans from its founding through its uncertain future amid climate change.
Dr. Louis P. Nelson, Professor of Architectural History, University of Virginia
Louis P. Nelson is Professor of Architectural History and the Vice Provost for Academic Outreach. He is a specialist in the built environments of the early modern Atlantic world, with published work on the American South, the Caribbean, and West Africa, and is a leading advocate for the reconstruction of place-based public history.
Dr. Arijit Sen, Associate Professor, Department of History, Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Arijit Sen is a historian of everyday places and ordinary people. He examines the cultural landscapes of immigrant communities and interprets cities from the bottom up by engaging the voices and histories of urban communities traditionally ignored in official narratives. Sen has directed public history and preservation fieldwork projects in Milwaukee, Chicago, Calgary, and New Orleans. Since 2012 he has directed the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures field school, a public humanities project that engages students, scholars, and community members in a collaborative exploration and documentation of the history and heritage of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods. The field school is currently partnering with the Newark-based Humanities Action Lab to contribute to “Climates of Inequality," a traveling exhibit on environmental justice.
Brook Tesler, MPS, Founding Principal & Architectural Historian, Tesler Preservation Consulting, LLC; Adjunct Lecturer, Tulane School of Architecture.
Brook Tesler is an architectural historian and preservationist. Ms. Tesler holds a Master of Preservation Studies from Tulane University's School of Architecture and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She currently serves as the Senior Historic Preservation Manager for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, leading efforts to maintain and preserve historic structures under the purview of churches and deaneries across Southeastern Louisiana. She previously led the VCC Foundation as Executive Director, established Tesler Preservation Consulting, and created the highly regarded Vieux Carré Virtual Library.
Mr. Leon A. Waters, Historian, Publisher, Social Activist, and Manager of Hidden History LLC.
Mr. Leon August Waters is a New Orleans native, historian, publisher and social activist. Mr. Waters serves as the board chairperson of the Louisiana Museum of African American History. As a licensed tour host, where he directs tours on ‘hidden history’, Mr. Waters is also the manager of Hidden History, L.C.C. – a publishing, touring, and research company. He has published the book On To New Orleans: Louisiana’s Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt, documenting the story of the largest slave revolt in the United States that happened in St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, and Orleans Parishes.
Acknowledgements
The Shifting Landscapes: Slavery and the Built Environment virtual tour is possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH): Democracy Demands Wisdom and the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ Museums for America grant.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this tour do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Media inquiries
Please contact Amy Medvick, education@hgghh.org or 504.274.0751
Further Reading
Beckert, Sven, and Seth Rockman. Slavery’s Capitalism: A New history of American Economic Development. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Berlin, Ira. Slavery Without Masters: The Free Negro in Antebellum South. The New Press, 2007 [1974].
Berry, Daina Raimy. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of Enslaved from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Beacon Press, 2017.
Campanella, Richard. Cityscapes of New Orleans. Louisiana State University Press, 2017.
Campanella, Richard. Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans. University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2008.
Cromley, Elizabeth Collins. The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses. University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.
Dewulf, Jeroen. From the Kingdom of Kongo to Congo Square. University of Louisiana, 2017.
Ellis, Clifton, and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds. Slavery in the Cities: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America, University of Virginia Press, 2017.
Follett, Richard. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860. LSU Press, 2005.
Greenwald, Erin, Ed. In Search of Julien Hudson: Free Artist of Color in Pre-Civil War New Orleans. Historic New Orleans Collection, 2010.
Gross, Ariela and Alejandro de la Fuente. “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana and Virginia: A Comparison.” North Carolina Law Review 91, no. 5 (2013): 1699-1756.
Gross, Ariela. “Legal Transplants: Slavery and the Civil Law in Louisiana”, USC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09-16 (2009).
Johnson, Rashauna. Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 1999.
Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Yale University Press, 2019.
Nystrom, Justin. New Orleans After the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Olivarius, Kathryn. Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press, 2022.
Roudané, Mark Charles. The New Orleans Tribune: An Introduction to America’s First Black Daily Newspaper. Roudanez History and Legacy, 2018.
Schafer, Judith Kelleher. Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862. LSU Press, 2003.
Schafer, Judith Kelleher. Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana. LSU Press, 1994.
Seck, Ibrahima. Bouki Fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860. UNO Press, 2014.
Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth. Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans. Harvard University Press, 2009.
Thrasher, Albert. On To New Orleans: Louisiana's Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt. Cypress Press, 1995.
Usner, Daniel H. American Indians in Early New Orleans: From Calumet to Raquette. LSU Press: 2018.
Van Horn, Jennifer. Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery. Yale University Press, 2022.
Vlach, John Michael. “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy.” In Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture, edited by Dell Upton and John Michael Vlach. University of Georgia Press, c1986.
Vlach, John. “Without Recourse to Owners: The Architecture of Urban Slavery in the Antebellum South.” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 6 (1997): 150-160.
Wade, Richard C. Slavery in the Cities: the South, 1820-1860. Oxford University Press, 1967.
Walker, Nathaniel, and Rachel Engman. Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstruction. University of Virginia Press, 2025.