TriPod: New Orleans at 300 is WWNO’s history podcast of New Orleans. Each TriPod episode is its own micro-documentary, devoted to a single story or subject from New Orleans’ rich history. The series explores lost and neglected stories, delves deeper into the familiar, and questions what we think we know about the city’s history. Why “TriPod”? “Tri” for the city’s three centuries, “Pod” for podcast, and “tripod”, a three-legged tool used to steady a capturing device that documents a time and place. TriPod moves beyond the familiar themes of New Orleans history to focus on forgotten, neglected, or surprising pieces of the city’s past, and to enrich understanding of its present and future.

TriPod is a production of WWNO in collaboration with The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the University of New Orleans. The series is hosted and produced by WWNO’s Laine Kaplan-Levenson, working with the assistance of a forty-member international advisory group of historians and archivists.

Click to meet the TriPod Editorial Board and Advisory Group.

Click here to open TriPod in iTunes.

Click here to open TriPod in Stitcher.

Subscribe using another podcast player:

– Open your player

– Find the “Subscribe to Podcast” option

– Enter this URL: http://wwno.org/podcasts/88432/rss.xml

Check out the Tripod episode citation page to see original air dates for each episode.

Our Team

Laine Kaplan-Levenson, Host/Producer

Laine is a multimedia producer in New Orleans, Louisiana. They are the host and producer of TriPod, as well as the political podcast Sticky Wicket. Laine has filed for NPR, Marketplace, Latino USA, Oxford American, Here and Now, Backstory, Gravy, and others. They’ve also worked with podcasts including This American Life, Death Sex and Money, Nancy, and 10 Things That Scared me. In addition to reporting, Laine is the founder and lead producer of the live storytelling series, Bring Your Own, a producer with the multiracial collective of queer artists, activists, and archivists Last Call, and a storytelling/podcast/media consultant.

Eve Abrams, Editor 2017-2018

Eve is a radio producer, writer, audio documentarian, and educator whose work centers on amplifying the voices from her adopted hometown, New Orleans. She produces the audio project Unprisoned, which tells stories at the intersection of the criminal legal system and human lives. Unprisoned was a Peabody Finalist, has received several awards including a Gabriel, and is the foundation for Eve’s TED talk, The Human Stories Behind Mass Incarceration.  Eve’s radio stories air on a host of national programs such as Morning Edition, Reveal, and This American Life, and she edits the award-winning podcast, TriPod. Abrams is a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellow. She has been a classroom teacher for 25 years.

Eve Troeh, Editor 2016-2017

Eve has been working in audio journalism since the dawn of this century. Currently Eve is Senior Producer at Marketplace, based in Los Angeles. She served as the founding News Director at New Orleans Public Radio, and has covered South Louisiana in many capacities as a news reporter, editor and producer.

Mary Niall Mitchell (Molly), Senior Editorial Advisor

Molly is Ethel & Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair in New Orleans Studies and the Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History at the University of New Orleans, where she co-directs the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies.  She is author of Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery (2008) and has published online for The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The History Channel, and Commonplace among others. She is also one of five lead historians on Freedom on the Move, a crowd-sourced database of fugitive slave advertisements retrieving the stories of self-liberating people from North American newspapers.

Jessica Dorman, Editorial Committee

Jessica is director of publications and student education at The Historic New Orleans Collection. She earned her PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and has taught American literature and American Studies at Harvard, Penn State Harrisburg, and Trinity College (Hartford). At THNOC, where she has been on staff since 2004, Dorman has edited numerous award-winning books. From 2006 to 2015, she was associate editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review.

Dr. Connie Zeanah Atkinson, Editorial Committee

Connie is Co-Director, Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies, University of New Orleans. Dr. Atkinson received her PhD from the Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool, England. In addition to her research work, she teaches courses on the history of New Orleans music, sports, and graduate courses on public history methods. A music journalist in New Orleans for many years, Dr. Atkinson edited and published Wavelength, New Orleans Magazine from 1980-1992.

Emilie Gagnet Leumas, Editorial Committee

Emilie (Lee) PhD, CA, CRM, is the Director of Archives and Records for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. She holds leadership positions in several national and international archives organizations, including the International Council on Archives. Her publications include Roots of Faith: History of the Diocese of Baton Rouge(2009 with Renee Richard).   Leumas’ subject expertise includes Louisiana French, Louisiana Catholic Church history, archival research methods, archives management, records management and disaster recovery.

Karen Trahan Leathem, Editorial Committee

Karen is a historian at the Louisiana State Museum for more than 17 years, has worked on a broad range of exhibitions on Louisiana history and culture, including Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond and Iris and the Goddesses of Carnival. Her publications include essays in New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories and Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times. A native of Kaplan, Louisiana, Leathem earned her Ph.D. in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Denise Frazier, Editorial Committee

Denise is currently the Assistant Director for the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. An interest in Cuban politics and African Diaspora culture within Latin America led Denise to New Orleans where she received an MA and PhD in Latin American Studies at Tulane University. Denise’s graduate studies in Cuba and Brazil aligned with her interest in contemporary music, specifically hip hop, and public performance. Frazier frequently plays violin with performance organizations and musicians around the city. She has performed with several local New Orleans musicians and performance artists. Denise has taught several university-level courses, and has lectured and presented seminars and workshops on diversity, African Diaspora culture, contemporary music and performance all around the country.

Christina Bryant, MLIS, CA. Editorial Committee

Christina Bryant, a native New Orleanian, is the current head of the Louisiana Division/City Archives & Special Collections at the New Orleans Public Library.  Christina previously worked on Hurricane Katrina recovery projects, as an archivist at the Notarial Archives and in business archives, before joining the staff at the Louisiana Division/City Archives & Special Collections in 2013. Christina has served in leadership roles in various national and local professional groups such as the Greater New Orleans Archivists and the Society of American Archivists.  Christina gives frequent presentations about genealogy, historic newspapers and property research focusing on the collection in the Louisiana Division/City Archives & Special Collections.

Charles D. Chamberlain III, Editorial Committee

Charles Chamberlain is president of Historia, a New Orleans-based history consulting and museum services business with clients including the LSU Rural Life Museum, Vermilionville Living History and Folklife Park, San Francisco Plantation, among others.  A licensed tour guide for the city of New Orleans, Chamberlain received his PhD in U.S. History from Tulane University in 1999, and worked for ten years as the Museum Historian at the Louisiana State Museum. His book Victory at Home: Race and Manpower in the American South during World War II (University of Georgia Press) was published in 2003, and he has written numerous articles on jazz history, and Gulf Coast culture.  Since 2014, he has served as professor of history at the University of New Orleans, concentrating on Louisiana, and graduate level Public History. An active musician, he has played guitar with the New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra and the Dark Water Jazz Band since 2002.

Evan Christopher, Theme Composer

Anchored in the musical vocabulary created by early Creole clarinetists such as Sidney Bechet, Omer Simeon, and Barney Bigard, Evan Christopher strives to extend the legacy of the New Orleans clarinet style. Charismatic and versatile, he was drawn to New Orleans from his native California in 1994 by the rich cultural landscape and music scene. Critics remarking on Christopher’s dynamic expressiveness and intimate approach have coined his style “close-encounter music” (NEW YORK TIMES) and have called his respect for the music traditions of New Orleans, “a triumph, joining the present seamlessly to a glorious past.” (THE OBSERVER, UK). Advocacy for the cultural workforce, tours and recording work with forward-looking artists, performances complemented by educational workshops and community outreach, as well as occasional columns for www.vianolavie.org about New Orleans music and culture evidence his passion for the city’s indigenous traditions.

Josh Pitts, Web Developer

Josh Pitts has been providing freelance web design and development services for New Orleans non-profits, small businesses, artists and people since 2009 as Sideways Designs. He is also a founder and captain of Interrobang ‽ Parading Krewe, a small collective of local artists, creators & builders that aspires to bring medium and large-scale kinetic hand-pushed and pedal-propelled creations to the streets of New Orleans, as well as other interactive events and experiences.

Header image credits: Batter trying to get ball that fell (lay field ground) / The Historic New Orleans Collection, Gift of Waldemar S. Nelson, 2003.0182.389