If you'd like some background on the history of New Orleans and its vibrant African American community, start with these books:

Blassingame, John W. Black New Orleans, 1860-1880. University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Carter, Hodding, ed., et al. The Past as Prelude: New Orleans, 1718-1968. New Orleans: Tulane University, 1968.

Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769-1803. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, c1999.

Tinker, Edward Larocque. Creole City: Its Past and Its People. New York: Longmans, Green, 1953.

Loren Schoenberg, author of the History Now essay on New Orleans you've just read, contributed a fine piece on Lester Young for this great reference book:

Kirchner, Bill, ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, c2000.

He also wrote the first jazz resource book to be endorsed by National Public Radio:

Schoenberg, Loren. The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Jazz. Perigee Books, 2002.

The following books provide a good foundation for the study of jazz in New Orleans. The first is Louis Armstrong's 1954 memoirs, reprinted with a new introduction by Dan Morgenstern:

Armstrong, Louis. Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans. New York, NY: Da Capo Press, 1986.

Barker, Danny. Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville. New York: Cassell, 1998.

Brothers, Thomas David. Louis Armstrong's New Orleans. New York: W.W. Norton, c2006.

Rose, Al. Storyville, New Orleans. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1978.

Suhor, Charles Jazz in New Orleans: The Postwar Years Through 1970. New Brunswick, NJ: Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 2001.

For Jazz in Chicago, look at:

Whiteis, David. Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, c2006.

The following are only a few of the most recent books on great figures in twentieth century jazz:

Shipton, Alyn. Fats Waller, The Cheerful Little Earful. London: New York: Continuum, 2002.

Storb, Ilse. Louis Armstrong: The Definitive Biography. New York: Peter Lang, c1999.

Giddins, Gary. Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong. New York: Da Capo Press, 2001.

These two books are currently your best sources for Hurricane Katrina:

Horne, Jed. Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City. New York: Random House, c2006.

Brinkley, Douglas. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. New York: Morrow, 2006.

Websites:

The websites I list here are only the beginning. Each has great "link" features that will take you to other sites. Be sure to use them.

As a starting place Wikipedia will serve you well for New Orleans, jazz, and many related subjects. I think that Wikipedia is, at least for the moment, your best source for Hurricane Katrina information as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina

And Katrina's effects on New Orleans in particular:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_Hurricane_Katrina_on_New _Orleans

Be sure to look at the "references" sections for both entries as well as the "links." Many of the references are to articles available online.

The National Park Service "Jazz" Historic Site in New Orleans provides short histories of jazz and jazz movements:

http://www.nps.gov/jazz/historyculture/stories.ht m

as well as good sketches of figures like Armstrong, Bolden, and Laine:

http://www.nps.gov/jazz/historyculture/people.htm

You can also download samples from Park Service CDs of early jazz there:

http://www.nps.gov/jazz/historyculture/music.htm

Piero Scaruffi's online A History of Jazz provides good sections on New Orleans and Chicago jazz and other regional varieties, with links to sketches of famous interpreters:

http://www.scaruffi.com/history/jazz.html

Tulane University's online exhibition on jazz on riverboats, mounted by Bruce Raeburn, curator of the Ransom Jazz Archive, casts light on an interesting aspect of jazz in and around New Orleans:

http://www.tulane.edu/~lmiller/raeburn/rivboatintro.htm

PBS's "Teaching with Historic Places" website has good lesson plans on New Orleans's "Vieux Carré" neighborhood as starting point for teaching history of the city and the state:

http://www.cr.nps.gov/NR/TWHP/wwwlps/lessons/20vieux/20vieux.htm

The Louisiana State Museum's "Educator's Corner" has a really fine series of lesson plans focusing on the New Orleans Cabildo for city and state history. Each unit has a section on "artifact reading," for those of you interested in material culture:

http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/education/lesson.htm

And now we get to the websites that are entirely jazz-focused. Your eyes and ears and brains are in for a treat.

The PBS site for Ken Burn's "Jazz" documentary is terrific:

http://www.pbs.org/jazz/index.htm

A note of explanation for the "classroom" page here. The lesson plans for grades 1-5 are in the PBSKIDS website (see below). Those for grades 6-12 are available only through the following link. I have no explanation -- and they're all good:

http://www.pbs.org/jazz/classroom/

Don't skip the biography page either:

http://www.pbs.org/jazz/biography/

"Musical Notes" includes commentary by Loren Schoenberg on "Stardust" and a sample of the 1931 recording of Hoagy Carmichael's famous song:

http://www.pbs.org/jazz/beat/spotlight_stardust.htm

The "links" page for the Burns documentary offers links to other PBS series of interest to anyone interested in jazz and National Public Radio, and to websites unrelated to public broadcasting:

http://www.pbs.org/jazz/links/

The PBSKids Jazz website:

http://pbskids.org/jazz/index.html

has the lesson plans I mentioned above:

http://pbskids.org/jazz/lesson/index.html

as well as good section of sketches of great jazz performers:

http://pbskids.org/jazz/nowthen/index.html

From our nation's capital comes the "Smithsonian Jazz Class" – a really fine resource. Here you can find downloadable recordings and classroom lesson plans - all of them wonderful. You may find the "Groovin' to Jazz" section the most useful:

http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/class/jc_start.asp

From New Jersey comes the spectacular "Digital Jazz Greats Exhibits" mounted by the Institute of Jazz Studies and the Dana Library Media and Digital Services, both located at Rutgers University. Currently these exhibitions cover Count Basie, Fats Waller, Mary Lou Williams, and Benny Carter. You'll find intelligent text – wonderful photos – and the music, oh, will you ever find great music. Keep checking for new additions to this superb series:

http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/IJS/JazzGreats0.html