by Gabrielle Heenan
With the help of the 2025 Spring Research Grant from the Department of Religious Studies, I was supported in traveling to New Orleans, Louisiana, to explore Tulane University’s Library and Special Collections. There, I had the opportunity to delve into the Louisiana Research Collection (LRC), the largest archive concerning Louisianan history and culture in the United States. Through engaging these diverse archives, the cultural and religious significance tied to the city of New Orleans became clear. Positioned as the urban center of Louisiana and as a popular tourist attraction in American public discourse since the 1930s, New Orleans has played a central role in not only Louisiana’s cultural development, but also in the evolution of American cultural and national identity. Therefore, when investigating these repositories, New Orleans reveals itself as a central site of cultural production.
While visiting the LRC, archives like the “Lyle Saxon Papers” provided me intimate insight into the entanglements surrounding New Deal programs as they affected New Orleans’s perception in the public imagination from 1935 through the 1940s. Most notably, I was granted a glimpse into the inner workings of the Louisiana Writers’ Project, a New Deal initiative that focused on producing state-funded art while instigating a process of cultural reform. The “Lyle Saxon Papers” held materials related to the Louisiana Writers’ Project’s editorial development of three publications: 1938’s New Orleans: A City Guide, 1941’s Louisiana: A Guide to the State, and 1945’s Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales—all of which promoted tourism in New Orleans as a strategy to counter the economic devastation of the Great Depression. The materials in this collection, which mostly belonged to the Louisiana Writers’ Project’s director, Lyle Saxon, point to this program’s dual goals of promoting tourism while also managing the vibrant religiosity found in New Orleans as a way of forging a more modern and “American” identity for a city perceived to be “exotic” and “primitive.”
Spending a week at Tulane University’s research facilities further allowed me to explore the touristic, economic, and cultural infrastructure built during the New Deal Era. This familiarity, paired with the wide-ranging perspectives provided in the LRC, painted a vibrant portrait of not only the religious life within mid-twentieth century New Orleans, but also of the creatively oppressive modes of state-guided religious management at play during this time.
This fully-funded research trip to the Louisiana Research Collection laid the groundwork for my recently completed Master’s Thesis, which examines the state and local management of religion within the Louisiana Writers’ Project as exhibited in their three main pieces of travel literature. From here, I will continue to interrogate the themes and dynamics present within this collection as I work to expand this project into a dissertation.
Gabrielle Heenan is a PhD student in the Religion of the Americas. Her work specializes in religion and secularism in the United States, as well as looks at how secularism interacts with ideas of race, gender and sexuality. She is currently working on a project about the historical development of secularism in New Orleans.