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WORK TITLE: Building the Land of Dreams
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Faber, Lo
BIRTHDATE: 5/20/1966
WEBSITE: http://lofaber.com/
CITY: New Orleans
STATE: LA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://cmfa.loyno.edu/music-industry-studies/bio/eberhard-lo-faber * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_Faber * http://lofaber.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Faber_CV2014.pdf * http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/books/article_9c107331-4d07-5e4e-8a30-f6aee828c1cc.html * http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2015/09/22/an-interview-with-eberhard-faber-on-building-the-land-of-dreams/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 20, 1966, in Wilkes-Barre, PA; son of Ellen Faber; married; wife’s name Lisa; children: Eberhard Jr., Millie.
EDUCATION:Attended Manhattan School of Music; Skidmore College, B.A., 2006; Princeton University, M.A., 2008, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, musician, and educator. College of New Jersey, Ewing Township, adjunct instructor, 2012; Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, LA, visiting assistant professor, 2012-15, Extraordinary Professor of Music Industry Studies, 2015—. Worked for more than fifteen years as a touring musician, guitar player, songwriter, bandleader, and record producer with groups such as God Street Wine, Ominous Seapods, and the Lo Faber Band. Also worked briefly for Faber-Castell (pencil manufacturer), 1980s.
AWARDS:WRITINGS
Also writer and composer of the rock operas Henry’s House, 2001, and Friday Night Freakshow, 2003.
Contributor to books, including KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana, edited by Joyce Miller, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (New Orleans, LA), 2011. Contributor to periodicals, including Louisiana History.
SIDELIGHTS
Eberhard L. Faber, a musician, performs under the name Lo Faber. He is also a writer, historian, and educator at Loyola University New Orleans, where is serves as Extraordinary Professor of Music Industry Studies, a position he has held since 2015. He earned a B.A. in American studies at Skidmore College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He also studied jazz at the Manhattan School of Music.
Early in his career, Faber worked for the family business, a pencil manufacturing company that shares his name. However, he was not attracted to the world of business and soon left the company to pursue a career in music.
Faber worked as a touring musician for more than fifteen years, serving as a guitar player, songwriter, and producer with groups such as God Street Wine, Ominous Seapods, and the Lo Faber Band. In an interview with Debra Liese on the Princeton University Press blog, Faber said that his transition from musician to historian stemmed from a long-term interest in history. “It took a long time for me to become a professional historian,” Faber told Liese. “As a kid I remember reading William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. During my music years I remember reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in the back of the tour bus. History is simply a way of looking at the world and trying to understand it. I’ve always looked at the world this way.”
Faber’s academic interests include New Orleans and Gulf Coast history during the colonial period and in the nineteenth century, Jeffersonian democracy and politics, nineteenth-century American history, and the intersection of culture and politics in 1830s America.
In his first book, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America, Faber explores in depth the changes that took place in Louisiana, and particularly in New Orleans, following the Louisiana Purchase. In the interview with Liese, Faber stated: “It has been a very common assumption that the United States imposed certain changes on Louisiana after 1803. That the course New Orleans and its wider region took, in the early nineteenth century, was an outcome of the policies of Thomas Jefferson and other American statesmen. What Building the Land of Dreams shows is that there were already very powerful entrenched interests in the area and that they, not the United States, ultimately had the power to dictate outcomes.”
Faber carefully assesses the political, social, and economic condition of New Orleans in the time periods before, during, and after 1803. He provides details on the major individuals and powers who figured in the developments of the time, including those within the United States and outside influences from France and Spain. He charts a history that contains elements that are likely to be surprising to some. For example, he notes that “the United States was not a powerful engine driving slavery into Louisiana because that institution was already well entrenched in the lower Mississippi River Valley,” mostly through Creole plantation owners, noted David E. Narrett in the Journal of Southern History.
“Looking [at] the ideological struggle, class politics, and powerful personalities that accompanied its transformation, Building the Land of Dreams is the narrative biography of a fascinating city at the most crucial turning point in its history,” Liese commented. “This well-researched snapshot of a brief period of the city’s lengthy history richly details personalities and events,” remarked Barbara Ferrara in a review for the Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly contributor called Building the Land of Dreams a “remarkable and thorough history” in which Faber “ably describes the city’s complex evolution in a packed chronological narrative.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, May, 2016. J. P. Sanson, review of Building the Land of Dreams, p. 1380.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, David E. Narrett, review of Building the Land of Dreams, p. 156.
Library Journal, October 1, 2015, Barbara Ferrara, review of Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America, p. 93.
New Orleans Advocate, November 28, 2015, Susan Larson, “In Land of Dreams, a Vivid Look at New Orleans’ Colonial Era,” review of In the Land of Dreams.
Publishers Weekly, September 28, 2015, review of Building the Land of Dreams. p. 78.
ONLINE
Eberhard L. Faber Home Page, http://www.lofaber.com (July 22, 2017).
Loyola University New Orleans, College of Music and Fine Arts, Department of Music and Film Industry Studies Web site, http://cmfa.loyno.edu/music-industry-studies/ (July 22, 2017), biography of Eberhard L. Faber.
Princeton University Press Blog, http://blog.press.princeton.edu/ (September 22, 2015), Debra Liese, “An Interview with Eberhard Faber on Building the Land of Dreams.”*
Eberhard L. Faber, Ph. D. Visiting Assistant Professor, Loyola University New Orleans449 Bobet Hall6363 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, LA 70115lfaber@loyno.edu • (908)-655-5097CURRICULUM VITAEEducationPhDPrinceton University History,September 2012 Dissertation:Building The Land Of Dreams: The American Transformation of New Orleans, 1795-1820 Advisor: Sean WilentzMAPrinceton University History, September 2008 General Exam Fields: The United States, 1754-1860 (Sean Wilentz, Peter Silver) The US & the World, 1815-1919 (Daniel T. Rodgers) The British Empire at War, 1688-1856 (Linda Colley)BASkidmore College American Studies, 2006Thesis:The Embargo of 1807: Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and the Wreck of Republican IdeologyEmploymentLoyola University New Orleans, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2012—2015The College of New Jersey, Adjunct Instructor, Spring 2012Research InterestsAmerican Revolution and Early Republic; New Orleans and the Gulf South; Thomas Jefferson; Jeffersonian politics and political thought; cities in early America; the links between urban violence, class stratification, gender, and antislavery in the 1830s.Fellowships & AwardsPrinceton University Graduate Student Fellowship, 2006-2012Princeton History Department Rollins Award, 2008-2009, 2010-2011Visiting Scholar, Tulane University, 2009-2010Diane Woest Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities, Historic New Orleans Collection, 2012Massachusetts Historical Society, Mellon Research Fellowship, 2013
Faber —2Publications & Presentations•BOOKBuilding the Land of Dreams: the American Transformation of New Orleans (Princeton University Press; scheduled for publication inFall 2015).•REFEREED ARTICLES“The Passion of the Prefect: Pierre Clément de Laussat, 1803 New Orleans, and the Bonapartist Louisiana That Never Was,” Louisiana History, Summer 2013•REFEREED ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES“Spanish Colonial Period,” “Anglo-Americans,” “Slave Insurrections,” in Joyce Miller, ed., KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana (www.knowla.org), Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, 2011.•REVIEWSReview of Robert H. Gudmestad, Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom (LSU Press, 2011) for H-Net http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=34683, June 2012.Review of Julien Vernet, Strangers on Their Native Soil (University Press of Mississippi, 2013) in Louisiana History (forthcoming Spring 2014). •INVITED LECTURES “The Dreamers: Elite American Newcomers in Territorial New Orleans,” lecture at The Historic New Orleans Collection’s 15th Annual Williams Research Center Symposium, Between Colony & State: Louisiana in the Territorial Period, January 30, 2010“The Battle of New Orleans in Global Perspective,” featured lecture at the Louisiana State Museum’s Battle of New Orleans Bicentennial Symposium, January 10, 2015•CONFERENCE PAPERS“The Dreamers: Elite Newcomers and American Identity in New Orleans, 1800-1820,” paper presented at the Omohundro Institute 16th Annual Conference, Oxford MI, June 2010“New Land, New Nation: Edward Livingston and the New Orleans Batture,” paper presented at the SHEAR annual meeting, Rochester, NY, July 2010“New Orleans 1803: Infant City Between three Empires,” paper presented at the Louisiana Historical Association annual conference, Lafayette, LA, March 2011“‘He Could Not Have Been Attacked in a More Vulnerable Spot’: The New Orleans Planter Elite and the Crisis Over Federal Slavery Policy, 1803-1805,” paper presented at the SHEAR annual meeting, Philadelphia, PA, July 2011
Faber —3“Creation of an Un-American Republic: Democracy, Class Conflict, and the coming of Louisiana Statehood, 1811-1812,” paper presented at the Louisiana Historical Association annual conference, New Orleans, LA, March 2012 “ ‘A Strong Case of Wanton Oppression’: Edward Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and the New Orleans Batture,” paper presented at the American Historical Association annual conference, New Orleans, LA, January 2013“ ‘The Most Respectable Characters Could Not Suppress the Agitation of Their Tempers’: The Short-Lived Slave Trade Ban in the Orleans Territory, 1804-1805,” paper presented at the Omohundro Institute 20th Annual Conference, Halifax, NS, June 2014TeachingLOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS, AS ASSISTANT PROFESSORHISTORY T122: Global History IHISTORY T124: Global History IIHISTORY A200: United States History to 1877HISTORY A224: Revolutionary AmericaHISTORY X283: The Rise of Global CapitalismMUIN M110: Introduction to the Music IndustryMUIN M494: The History of the Music BusinessTHE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY, AS ADJUNCT INSTRUCTORHISTORY 130: The Craft of HistoryHISTORY 265: Revolutionary America, 1754-1820PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, AS PRECEPTOR (TEACHING ASSISTANT)HISTORY 370: Britain 1815-1945: Dominance, Democracy, and Decline (Linda Colley)HISTORY 377: Gilded Age & Progressive Era United States, 1877-1920 (Rebecca Rix)HISTORY 373: The New Nation (Sean Wilentz)PEDAGOGICAL TRAININGMcGraw Center For Teaching and Learning, Teaching Transcript Certificate ProgramService to the FieldBlind article reviews for Louisiana History, 2013-2014Conference Co-Chair: Jeffersonian Democracy in Theory and Practice, May 2012, Princeton University
Faber —4Multimedia Course Development Assistance, Rebecca Rix/The Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Fall 2009, and Martha Sandweiss/The American West, Summer 2011Co-Chair, Colonial Americas Workshop, 2008-09, 2010-11, 2011-2012 Arranged lectures and seminars with distinguished visiting scholars, brought visitors in contact with graduate students at dinners and coffees, handled logistics, lodging, finance, bookings, introduced speakers, and moderated discussions.Graduate Student Liaison, Early Americanist Job Searches, Winter 2007-08, Fall 2008, Fall 2010Attended job talks, teaching lunches, and candidate meetings with grad students; solicited grad student feedback and compiled it into reports for faculty committee use.Labyrinth Bookstore, Student Advisory Committee, 2010-2012Research Assistant, Thomas Bender, Fall 2008AffiliationsAmerican Historical Association; Organization of American Historians; Society of Historians of the Early American Republic; Omohundro Institute; Southern Historical Association; Louisiana Historical Society; Louisiana Historical AssociationReferencesSean WilentzGeorge Henry David 1886 Professor of American History, Princeton Universityswilentz@princeton.edu609-258-4702Peter SilverAssociate Professor, Rutgers Universitypeter.silver@rutgers.edu732-932-6696Mark FernandezAssociate Professor, Loyola University New Orleansmffernan@loyno.edu504-865-2566John MurrinProfessor Emeritus, Princeton Universitymurrin@princeton.edu609-258-4152Lawrence N. PowellEmeritus Professor of History, Tulane Universitypowell@tulane.edu504-314-2883David W. MooreRev. James Pillar O.M.I. Distinguished Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, Loyola University New Orleansdmoore@loyno.edu504-865-2565
An interview with Eberhard Faber on “Building the Land of Dreams”
September 22, 2015 by Debra Liese
Faber jacketNew Orleans, iconic city of Mardi Gras, gumbo and jazz, was once little more than a sleepy outpost at the edge of Spain’s American empire. By the 1820s, with thriving cotton and sugar industries, the city was well on the way to becoming the urban capital of the antebellum South. Looking the ideological struggle, class politics, and powerful personalities that accompanied its transformation, Building the Land of Dreams is the narrative biography of a fascinating city at the most crucial turning point in its history. Recently, Eberhard Faber took the time to answer some questions about his book.
What inspired you to become a historian?
EF: It took a long time for me to become a professional historian; I was a touring musician for almost fifteen years before going back to school to study history. But I was always fascinated by history. As a kid I remember reading William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. During my music years I remember reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in the back of the tour bus. History is simply a way of looking at the world and trying to understand it. I’ve always looked at the world this way.
As far as how I got interested in New Orleans and the South, it happened early in grad school at Princeton; I wrote a research paper for Linda Colley about the short-lived British colony in West Florida formed in 1763, and all the sources that I read pointed to New Orleans as a crucial strategic point in that era. The next year I wrote a paper for John Murrin about the South in the War of 1812, culminating with the Battle of New Orleans. The year after that I moved down to New Orleans for what was to have been a year of research; we got hooked and live here still.
What was the most interesting thing you learned from writing Building the Land of Dreams?
EF: Well, so many things. But perhaps it would be the biographies of the many people who moved to New Orleans in the months following the Louisiana Purchase, from the northern United States but also from across the Atlantic: England, Ireland, and France especially. In the book I call them the “generation of 1804” because they arrived right after the Louisiana Purchase. They were a varied cohort, and they fought amongst each other a lot, but I found their energy, ambition and idealism very appealing. One common characteristic was that they were all sincere believers in the world-changing possibilities of republican rule. They thought this radical experiment that the United States had only recently embarked upon was going to rewrite everything about human history. In New Orleans they ran into a conservative creole planter class that believed in none of those things, and they had a rude awakening of sorts. It’s a fascinating encounter.
What do you think is the book’s most important contribution?
EF: I think it has been a very common assumption that the United States imposed certain changes on Louisiana after 1803. That the course New Orleans and its wider region took, in the early nineteenth century, was an outcome of the policies of Thomas Jefferson and other American statesmen. What Building the Land of Dreams shows is that there were already very powerful entrenched interests in the area and that they, not the United States, ultimately had the power to dictate outcomes. What Jefferson and Madison could do was actually very limited; while the creole elite, on the other hand, initially threatened by republicanism, figured out that it actually gave them tremendous power to design the regimes – of law, of slavery, and race – that they had long wanted under colonial rule.
What is the biggest misunderstanding people have about what you do?
EF: Well, as far as my work in particular, I don’t think enough people know it for any major misunderstandings to have developed. As for the profession, I think there is a very wide gap between what the general public thinks of as “history” and what historians do in colleges and universities. If you go into a book store, many of the history books will be about military history (and at least half of those will be about the Civil War) and of the rest, a good portion will have Presidents on the cover. This leads many people to believe history is mostly about battles and Presidents, whereas in fact the field is so much bigger than that. The fact that it’s not understood is the fault of the field, of course. We need to do a better job of reaching the public and engaging their interest in historical issues.
What is your next project?
EF: I have two. One is a biography of the lawyer, legal reformer, and politician Edward Livingston, who was Mayor of New York and then fled from a scandal in 1803 to New Orleans. He ended up deeply entangled in New Orleans politics and power struggles and plays a major role in Building the Land of Dreams. I read almost all his personal papers in the course of writing the book and would love to focus on him exclusively for my next project.
The other one is totally different: a history of the music industry in the United States since the invention of the gramophone in the 1890s, with an emphasis on the parallel history of the rise of American capitalism.
What would you have been if not a historian?
EF: Well, that’s easy, since I was a musician (guitar player, songwriter, bandleader, arranger, record producer) for fifteen years before turning to history. I still play actively, too, within the limits imposed by writing and teaching. If the question is what would I have been if I was neither a musician nor a historian – well, my original hope was to be a professional baseball player, but at 5’ 5” that was never entirely realistic.
What are you reading right now?
EF: I’m currently reading Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams. It covers some of the same historical ground as my book – even including the word Dreams in the title! – but from a very different attitude and perspective. I find it alternately infuriating and revelatory. Either way it’s certain to become an important part of the discussion on the antebellum South. Other wonderful books I’ve read lately include Sarah Carr’s brilliant exposé on the New Orleans public school system since Katrina, Hope Against Hope; Robert Gordon’s classic history of Stax Records, Respect Yourself; and Greg Iles’ epic Southern mystery novel Natchez Burning.
What was the most influential book you’ve read?
EF: I always come back to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, an allegorical novel about Europe before the Great War. Although it’s fiction, it contains great intellectual history, and combines themes that are essentially historical with deep exploration of human psychology. The same is true of War and Peace, which also had a profound effect on me: a meditation on the meaning of history and the sources of historical change, inextricably intertwined with such “interior” issues as the nature of human suffering and the attempt to find meaning in the universe. All historians should read these books. They remind us of the spiritual dimension behind the often dry academic debates that tend to cloud the field.
Meanwhile, in the realm of historical scholarship, I could mention so many – Henry Adams, Schlesinger, Hofstadter, Genovese, Gordon Wood, Rhys Isaac, William Cronon, Alan Taylor, my mentors Linda Colley and Sean Wilentz – but the one book that truly did influence me more deeply and permanently than any other was Richard White’s The Middle Ground. I don’t even think I’m very much like White as a historian, temperamentally and aesthetically; he’s a burrower, while I’m a wanderer; he eschews drama completely, while I am simply incapable of living without it. But the method, the dedication, the integrity, the matching of evidence to ideas, the rigor of the concepts, the sense of change over time, in that book, all of that is just so beautiful to me, and it remains a very distant and unreachable benchmark of sorts.
Describe your writing process. How long did it take you to finish your book? Where do you write?
EF: I like to write in libraries. I really love a nice library: the sensation that you are being enveloped in quiet and ideas and books, and that your work is going to merge into this enormous sea of scholarship that surrounds you. I wrote most of the first draft of Building the Land of Dreams on the C Floor of Princeton’s Firestone Library, 3 floors below ground level, in a tiny carrel. I wrote most of the revised version at the Community Coffee shop at the corner of Jefferson Ave. and Magazine St. in New Orleans (which is appropriate, because developing Thomas Jefferson’s part in the story was one of the biggest changes in the second draft).
As far as method and process, I think research and preparation is really 80% of the task, the actual writing is the final 20%. I spent lots of time on research; I read Edward Livingston’s papers in their entirety (140-some boxes worth), I read the New Orleans Conseil de Ville records in their entirety from 1803 to 1819, I have read pretty much every piece of secondary literature on early Louisiana ever written. It all goes into a big database (although, life being what it is, there’s always lots of stuff that never makes it into the database, too). By the time I actually start writing I have a very good idea of what I am going to say, including exact phrasing in many cases. The phrases have been building up in my head during showers and long drives for the months prior to writing them down. When I actually get going I write fast, and I write a lot. I have to trim a lot, too, eventually. The final version of Building the Land of Dreams is probably about equal in size to the pile of stuff that got left out and discarded along the way.
The whole project took almost seven years from beginning to end – three of which were spent working on the project pretty much full time, and four of which were spent balancing the writing and research with teaching.
Why did you write this book?
EF: I think I wrote the book because I had the very good fortune to have the institutional backing of Princeton University and Loyola University New Orleans; because I have a wonderfully supportive family; because I have a terrific network of colleagues and peers including a handful of close friends in my grad student cohort, my mentors at Princeton and in New Orleans, and the brother/sisterhood of Louisiana historians; in short because I am a very fortunate person in many ways. Good work doesn’t just spring from the genius of the author, but from very particular social circumstances in which the author is embedded. When I switched from a music career to an academic one, I knew I still wanted to be a creative person. I was lucky to find a great topic I could throw myself into and a great network of supporters to help me towards the finish. And lastly, in the final phase of turning this from a “project” into an actual book, I have also benefited greatly from the support and advice of Brigitta van Rheinberg, Quinn Fusting, and everyone else at Princeton University Press.
How did you come up with the title or jacket?
EF: Building the Land of Dreams – well, the phrase “Land of Dreams” comes from two places. One is William Blake’s poem, from the Pickering Manuscript, written around the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Blake never traveled to New Orleans, but the poem suggests the expanded mental universe of possibilities in the midst of the Age of Revolutions – and those world-changing possibilities were very much a part of the mental landscape of early 19th century New Orleans in the years after 1803. The second source, of course, is Spencer Williams’ “Basin Street Blues,” made famous by Louis Armstrong’s 1926 recording, which led to the “Land of Dreams” becoming one of the Crescent City’s many nicknames – and which, in the line about the banks of the Mississippi being “the place where dark and light folks meet,” also speaks to the central place of race in the city’s history and in my understanding of it.
The book’s jacket is a painting by John Boqueta de Woiserie, A View of New Orleans Taken from the Plantation of Marigny. It was painted in 1803, in celebration of the Louisiana Purchase and the American takeover, and it shows an eagle hovering over New Orleans, with a banner in its beak that reads “Under my wings/everything prospers.” It shows the enormous optimism with which some people, at least, greeted the prospect of American rule; the linked faith in personal liberty and material prosperity; and an unironic faith in the American promise that seems, in this cynical era, all too naïve. The book is the story of the various ways that promise was both betrayed and fulfilled.
Eberhard L. Faber teaches history and music industry studies at Loyola University, New Orleans. Previously, he spent twelve years leading the New York-based rock band God Street Wine. He blogs on New Orleans history and other topics at www.crescentcityconfidential.com.
In ‘Land of Dreams,’ a vivid look at New Orleans’ colonial era
By Susan Larson Special to The Advocate NOV 28, 2015 - 2:18 PM (0)
In ‘Land of Dreams,’ a vivid look at New Orleans’ colonial era _lowres
"Land of Dreams" by Everhard L. Faber
In ‘Land of Dreams,’ a vivid look at New Orleans’ colonial era _lowres
Photo by Cathy Weeks -- Eberhard L. Faber, author of "Land of Dreams."
To an impressionable college student, a professor can often seem like a rock star. And for students in Lo Faber’s classes at Loyola University, the professor really is a rock star. Before turning to serious academic life, Faber was the lead singer for the group God Street Wine for 12 years, then founded two other groups.
“I dropped out of college to tour with a rock band. I always tell my students not to follow my example,” he said.
Faber seems fated to have become a writer. If his name, Eberhard Faber, strikes a familiar note, it’s because a long-ago ancestor started the pencil company of the same name in 1849. Faber worked in the family business for a while after high school, then started college, then turned to a life in music, and after great success there, went back to school in earnest.
In 2001, Faber had a daughter and decided to go back to college, receiving his bachelor’s degree from Skidmore on his 40th birthday. His interest in history led to graduate studies and a doctorate from Princeton, working with renowned scholar Sean Wilentz. Now, he has published his first book, “Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America,” about the turbulent and passionate colonial era in our city. In its pages, Pierre Clement de Laussat, Daniel Clark and William C.C. Claiborne, among many others, spring to life with all their hopes and schemes in the early days of our city.
At Loyola, Faber teaches in the music industry department — two courses called Introduction to the Industry, the basic class about the business, and History of Music, which goes from Thomas Edison and the first recordings right up to Napster. His students call him Dr. Lo. (The Lo is a shortening of his middle name, Lothar). Eberhard Lothar Faber — “a Germanic mouthful,” he said.
He has lived in New Orleans for 6 years with his wife, Lisa, a preschool teacher at McGehee School, his son Eberhard Faber Jr., 9, and daughter Millie, 14.
Faber wasn’t seduced by New Orleans history in the way that many are; he had no real personal connection to the city. He grew up in New Jersey, and says, “Like any Jersey kid with any ambition, I wanted to live in New York. And I did.”
His work is an outgrowth of his interest in cities in general, particularly “how this collection of seaboard cities and the drive of American expansion led to us becoming a continental nation. I started to think New Orleans was really a key hinge.”
Like many New Orleans historians, he sees the landscape through layers of time and history, even as he speaks. “While we’re talking, I’m sitting on my back porch, looking out over Tchoupitoulas (Street), where I can see the port and big container ships,” he said. “None of this was around in the period I’m writing about; the land itself was recently formed. I’m a great fan of the work of Richard Campanella. I’m a big fan of historical geography. I’m always thinking how the geography has changed, looking for the lines of continuity and the lines of difference.”
His work focuses on key figures of the colonial era, and Faber chronicles the subtleties of race and class and culture and ideology, drawing similarities to what was happening elsewhere as a new nation forged its identity.
Through it all runs the sense of New Orleans as a locale of hope and energy, a city to be dreamed of. “Of course, most people are familiar with the idea from that Spencer Williams song, which we know from Louis Armstrong’s version — “Basin St. Blues” — the place where light and dark folks meet on the banks on the Mississippi.’
“But I always think of William Blake’s poem from the late 1790s, ‘The Land of Dreams.’ Blake was a visionary for this age of revolutions,” Faber said. “The American and French and Haitian and Latin American revolutions were all taking place during this time period, and it was really a period when the possibilities for the whole human race expanded.
“The idea of a land of dreams was a place where human possibilities could be imagined that were not possible a century before.”
Susan Larson is the host of WWNO’s The Reading Life and the author of The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans.
Lo Faber
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lo Faber (born May 20, 1966 in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania) is a musician and who founded the influential New York City jam band God Street Wine. Faber was the creative center of the band and wrote or co-wrote most of the songs with Aaron Maxwell, with whom he shared vocal duties.
His mother Ellen Faber played in a bluegrass band when he was young and he recalls that his mother's band "rehearsed directly under my bedroom and I remember many night when I couldn't sleep all night for listening to them practicing their harmonies and learning new tunes."[1] He grew up in rural Belle Mead, New Jersey and in high school began by playing the bass and later the guitar in several bands around Princeton, New Jersey with future God Street Wine drummer Tom Osander.[1] One band, Aid To The Choking Victim, briefly included Blues Traveler bass player Bobby Sheehan.[2]
For a time in the mid 80's after graduating high school he worked for the family business, the Eberhard Faber GmbH pencil company, but was "pretty miserable wearing a suit and selling pencils" and by 1986 he'd enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music to study jazz with future God Street Wine bassist Dan Pifer.[1] By 1991 the band had built a large following playing clubs in New York City such as The Wetlands Preserve and Nightingales bar, and in 1992 began what would become several years of touring and recording.[2]
God Street Wine broke up in 1999 and Faber has since developed solo projects which include the rock musicals Henry's House (2001) and Friday Night Freakshow (2003).[3] Soon after writing Henry's House he toured for a year with members of the Ominous Seapods as the Lo Faber Band playing material from Henry's House and God Street Wine.[4] On July 9 and 10 of 2010 God Street Wine reunited its original lineup for two shows at New York's Gramercy Theatre. The concerts were a benefit for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.[5] Faber pursued a Ph.D in early 19th-century American History at Princeton University.[6] After earning his doctorate in 2012, he became a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University New Orleans.[7] As of Spring 2015, Faber is now the main professor of Loyola's Music Industry Department for the Intro to Music Industry courses.
Eberhard "Lo" Faber
EXTRAORDINARY PROFESSOR, MUSIC INDUSTRY STUDIES
lo_faber_picture
OFFICE LOCATION
430 Communications/Music Complex
MAILING ADDRESS
Loyola University New Orleans
Music Industry Studies
6363 St. Charles Ave.
Campus Box 122
New Orleans, LA 70118
DIRECT PHONE
(504) 865-2569
E-MAIL ADDRESS
lfaber@loyno.edu
DEGREES
Ph.D., Princeton University
B.A., Skidmore College
SHORT BIO
Musician, songwriter, author, and teacher Eberhard "Lo" Faber holds a BA in American Studies from Skidmore College and a PhD in history from Princeton University. Currently, Lo serves as an Extraordinary Professor of Music Industry Studies at Loyola University New Orleans. His first book, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America, was published in October 2015.
Before academia, Lo spent twelve years (1988-2000) leading the influential New York rock band God Street Wine, as well as writing and recording two rock operas, 'Henry's House' (2001) and 'Friday Night Freakshow' (2003). God Street Wine reunited in 2010 for two performances at New York’s Gramercy Theatre, with proceeds benefiting the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
Dr. Faber's research interests include colonial and nineteenth-century New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the South, Jeffersonian Democracy and politics, the junction of culture and politics in the 1830s, and society and culture in nineteenth century America. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and two children.
ABOUT
Eberhard L. Faber (aka Lo) is an American musician, songwriter, author, and teacher. Currently he is Assistant Professor of history and music industry studies at Loyola University New Orleans. His first book, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America, will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2015. Before academia, Lo spent twelve years (1988-2000) leading the influential New York rock band God Street Wine, as well as writing and recording two complete rock operas. He lives in New Orleans with his wife and two children.
Faber, Eberhard L.: Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America
Barbara Ferrara
Library Journal. 140.16 (Oct. 1, 2015): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Faber, Eberhard L. Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America. Princeton Univ. Oct. 2015. 480p. maps, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780691166896. $35; ebk. ISBN 9781400873524. HIST
Creating a government for New Orleans that incorporated the aspirations of those who lived and prospered there challenged political leaders who sought a model for American expansion as the "empire of freedom." In this study of change over time, Faber (history, Loyola Univ. New Orleans) analyzes the geopolitical and cultural maneuverings that had far-reaching implications for Louisiana's eventual journey to statehood and beyond, as well as for the further growth of the new nation. That New Orleans and its environs changed hands from France to Spain and back to France again, before being sold to President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, sheds light on the region's frequent culture clashes during the period, a situation Faber argues was exacerbated more by inevitable socioeconomic striation than ethnic or religious differences. Like in Ned Sublette's The World That Made New Orleans, the slave trade is identified as an important part of the city's history, yet here the focus is on the Creole elite's expectation of continued prosperity as planters controlling access to the heartland via the Mississippi. VERDICT This well-researched snapshot of a brief period of the city's lengthy history richly details personalities and events, offering a valuable perspective to history students and anyone who has experienced the Crescent City's vibrant way of life.--Barbara Ferrara, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA
Ferrara, Barbara
Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America
Publishers Weekly. 262.39 (Sept. 28, 2015): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America
Eberhard L. Faber. Princeton Univ., $35 (480p) ISBN 978-0-691-16689-6
Multicultural New Orleans maintains a mystique that stems from its unique development under governments of France, Spain, and Thomas Jefferson's U.S., argues musician-turned-history teacher Faber in this remarkable and thorough history. He ably describes the city's complex evolution in a packed chronological narrative that takes note of Louisiana's key historical figures, harsh geographic considerations, and complex socioeconomic configurations. While the heavily Catholic, French-speaking city differed greatly in temperament from the predominantly British, Protestant republic surrounding it, Faber adroitly asserts that the port city (officially established in 1718) and the young country shared similar dreams of self-determination and trading opportunities. Steering away from traditional interpretations, Faber argues that "class, not ethnic identity" caused the bulk of conflict between the Creole elite and transplanted Easterners. But rampant intermarriage suggested common ground, he notes--a point that was solidified during Andrew Jackson's 1815 victory in the Battle of New Orleans. In spite of simultaneously enchanting and confounding Jefferson, New Orleans gained its singular identity through a long transition of becoming more "New Orleanian"--a process that ironically made it more American. Illus. (Nov.)
Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America
David E. Narrett
Journal of Southern History. 83.1 (Feb. 2017): p156.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America. By Eberhard L. Faber. (Princeton and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 441. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-16689-6.)
Eberhard L. Faber addresses a crucial problem regarding Louisiana's absorption into the Union in this deeply researched, vibrant, and passionately written book. Faber contends that Thomas Jefferson's '"empire of liberty' was sincere, profound, and revolutionary" through its federative and republican expansionist character (p. 14). He argues that the predominantly French creole elite of New Orleans rather quickly embraced U.S. sovereignty, which "empowered local elites to design the race regimes they wanted"--a movement leading to "the reactionary Black Code of 1806" and therefore a "harsher" system of "racial repression" (p. 17). In Faber's view, the United States was not a powerful engine driving slavery into Louisiana because that institution was already well entrenched in the lower Mississippi River Valley. The creole magnates of New Orleans, who were often plantation owners, continued to hold operative power as Spain's grasp on Louisiana weakened in the 1790s, through the turbulent period of regime change, and even beyond the Louisiana Purchase.
While Faber's book offers an overview of eighteenth-century New Orleans and a conclusion that reaches beyond 1815, his story lies mostly in the years 1803-1812, which witnessed ethnic rivalry and political infighting among the creole elite and Anglophone residents, including a bevy of U.S.-born and European newcomers. Crosscurrents of collaboration developed, too, with a commitment to racial hierarchy binding whites against free people of color as well as enslaved African Americans. Faber charts the frustrations experienced by provincial chief magistrates attempting to impose their will on a fractious society. Pierre Clement de Laussat, France's prefect for Louisiana in 1803, witnessed the eclipse of his Bonapartist vision. Territorial governor William C. C. Claiborne moved from suspicion of the creole elite to appeasement of its influential members over time. Local oligarchs kept the African slave trade legally open as long as possible, and they limited the institution of Anglo-American common law in favor of their cherished civil code. Claiborne worried over the large influx of white and free colored refugees from Haiti in 1809; French creoles of New Orleans generally embraced their white brethren but had racial disdain for free persons of color.
While Faber ably explains the role of French New Orleans leaders such as Julien Poydras and Pierre Derbigny, his most illustrative figure is Edward Livingston, a bankrupt New York aristocrat who remade himself in New Orleans as an attorney and power broker and cleverly purchased a portion of the batture--alluvial land along the river's bank outside the city's levee. When Livingston sought to develop the area commercially, the creole-dominated city council strongly opposed the effort because residents customarily had free access to the muddy soil. Governor Claiborne and President Thomas Jefferson sided with the local majority because they worried about alienating the city's elite from the U.S. government. Livingston achieved a reasonably favorable legal settlement in 1820, earning him a fortune as the city grew. Faber rejects the notion of Livingston as just a self-seeking capitalist but instead views him as a proponent of U.S. sovereignty and private entrepreneurship for the public good. In this provocative interpretation, Livingston's vision for New Orleans linked the city to a futuristic, materialistic, and commercially expansive American society, blighted by slavery but still progressive in important features.
Faber makes excellent use of notarial archives, legal treatises, newspapers, and other sources that convey Francophone perspectives. There are a few areas where he could be more precise--for example, in the role of Daniel Clark Sr., himself a key city figure, in the rapid ascent of his nephew, merchant-politico Daniel Clark Jr. Some readers will be puzzled by Faber's assertion that James Wilkinson "genuinely" believed that New Orleans was threatened by a hostile takeover by enemies of the United States when he declared martial law in the city in 1807 (p. 254). Wilkinson most probably stoked the crisis to distance himself from his erstwhile co-conspirator Aaron Burr and to assume the guise of the Union's savior and the covert friend to Spain. Future historians may wish to build on Faber's important scholarship by exploring more fully the relationship between New Orleans and the region's rural districts and frontier zones.
In the main, Faber has written a superb book explaining how the French creole elite adapted to U.S. republican and federative institutions in a manner advancing their own interests. Historians of early Louisiana will be debating Faber's book for years to come.
David E. Narrett
University of Texas at Arlington
Faber, Eberhard L.: Building the land of dreams: New Orleans and the transformation of early America
J.P. Sanson
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.9 (May 2016): p1380.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
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Faber, Eberhard L. Building the land of dreams: New Orleans and the transformation of early America. Princeton, 2015. 441p bibl index afp ISBN 9780691166896 cloth, $35.00; ISBN 9781400873524 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-4081
F379
2015-13605 CIP
Louisiana has always been a bit exotic when compared to other parts of the US. For some time after the Louisiana Purchase, other Americans referred to Louisianans as "foreigners" because of differences in language, religion, government, and social customs. New Orleans, the metropolis of Louisiana, concentrated those differences with its blend of French, Spanish, Creole, African, Haitian, and other cultural elements. Faber (Loyola Univ., New Orleans) explains how exotic New Orleans became somewhat less exotic after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleanians created an ordered world that reflected their values, but those values differed from American ideas of proper behavior. Faber explains how that orderly world was forced to adopt the economic, political, and social practices of the Jeffersonian US. The clash between those who ran the city and the new American arrivals who intended to run it led to a chaotic transition but built the foundations for one of the great contemporary US cities. The author also provides information about the powerful individuals who were part of the transition. The bibliography reveals his extensive research in primary and secondary sources. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. General collections; upper-division undergraduates and above.--J. P. Sanson, Louisiana State University at Alexandria