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Louisiana History
In pre-Columbian times, the area that is today the state of
Louisiana was home to many
Native American peoples. These included the Atakapa, Chitmacha, Bayougoula,
Houma, Avoyel, Tunica and Caddo.
The first Europeans to visit the region were Spanish explorers in
the 16th century. In 1528, Panfilo de Narvaez's expedition visited
the mouth of the Mississippi River, and in 1541, Hernando de Soto
crossed the region.
The French began arriving in the late 17th century and quickly
established settlements. Robert Cavelier de La Salle named the
region "Louisiana" in honor of the French King, Louis XIV,
in 1682. And a settlement, Fort Maurepas, was established in 1699
(at what is now
Ocean Springs,
Mississippi, near
Biloxi.
The French colony of Louisiana contained land on both sides of the Mississippi
River and extended all the way to Canada,
including all or part of the following present-day states:
Louisiana,
Mississippi,
Arkansas,
Oklahoma,
Missouri,
Nebraska,
Kansas,
Iowa,
Illinois,
Michigan,
Wisconsin,
Minnesota,
South Dakota and
North Dakota.
Following the Seven Years' War (generally known in the US as
the "French and Indian War"), control of most of the territory
east of the Mississippi River, with the exception of the area around
New Orleans passed to the British, and the rest
of French Louisiana became a colony of Spain. During this period, French-speaking
refugees from Acadia (French colonies in
Canada and New England)
arrived in what is today Southwest Louisiana, their descendants eventually
becoming known as the Cajun people.
In 1800,
France reacquired Louisiana from
Spain in a secret treaty, however three years, in 1803,
the territory was sold to the United States, in the Louisiana Purchase.
The United States divided Louisiana into two parts; the Orleans Territory (which
was to become the state of Louisiana in 1812), and the District of
Louisiana (which was all the rest of the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase).
A boundary dispute then arose between the US and
Spain over West Florida, with the Spanish insisting
that this region had not been sold back to
France in 1800. However, in the meantime, British
settlers have moved into the area, and rebelled against
Spain in 1810 forming the short-lived West Florida
Republic, which was later annexed to the United States (eventually becoming
Louisiana's Florida Parishes) by Presidential proclamation.
During the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), Louisiana seceded and joined
the Confederates States of America.
New Orleans was captured by the Union
in the Spring of 1862, and because a significant part of the state's
population had pro-Union sympathies, those parts of the state which were under
federal control were designated as a state within the Union - even going so far as
having their own representatives in the Congress.
Following the Civil War, Louisiana went
through a difficult period of Reconstruction. For a brief period, the idea of equality for
former slaves flourished, but soon segregation, Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination
were imposed. The famous court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the US Supreme
Court ruled that racial segregation was legal so long as it did not result in obvious inequality
("separate but equal") was a result of these events in Louisiana.
Racial segregation lasted for the best of a century, only being abolished in the 1960s,
as a result of the nationwide Civil Rights struggle.
In the first half of 20th century, New Orleans became an important center
for jazz music. During the period of the Great Depression, the state's Governor, Huey Long,
became famous for his radical populist and redistribution policies.
In 2005,
Louisiana (along with other states on the Gulf of Mexico coast)
was hit by Hurricane Katrina. In particular, when
New Orleans was battered by the hurricane, the
city's levees and flood walls were breached, and much of the city, which
was largely below sea level, was flooded.
By Walter Johnson
Harvard University Press
Paperback (320 pages)
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Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved. Using recently discovered court records, slaveholders' letters, nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, and the financial documentation of the trade itself, Johnson reveals the tenuous shifts of power that occurred in the market's slave coffles and showrooms. Traders packaged their slaves by "feeding them up," dressing them well, and oiling their bodies, but they ultimately relied on the slaves to play their part as valuable commodities. Slave buyers stripped the slaves and questioned their pasts, seeking more honest answers than they could get from the traders. In turn, these examinations provided information that the slaves could utilize, sometimes even shaping a sale to their own advantage. Johnson depicts the subtle interrelation of capitalism, paternalism, class consciousness, racism, and resistance in the slave market, to help us understand the centrality of the "peculiar institution" in the lives of slaves and slaveholders alike. His pioneering history is in no small measure the story of antebellum slavery. (20011101) |
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By Edward T. Haslam
Trine Day
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The 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher sets the stage for this gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations over the course of three decades. Following a trail of police records, FBI files, cancer statistics, and medical journals, this revealing book presents evidence of a web of medical secret-keeping that began with the handling of evidence in the JFK assassination and continued apace, sweeping doctors into coverups of cancer outbreaks, contaminated polio vaccine, the arrival of the AIDS virus, and biological weapon research using infected monkeys. |
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By Chris Rose
Simon & Schuster
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Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland. They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators. Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life. |
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By Ken Wells
Yale University Press
Hardcover (272 pages)
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With a long and colorful family history of defying storms, the seafaring Robin cousins of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care. In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. Focusing on the plight of the intrepid Robin family, whose members trace their local roots to before the American Revolution, Wells recounts the landfall of the storm and the tumultuous seventy-two hours afterward, when the Robins’ beloved bayou country lay catastrophically flooded and all but forgotten by outside authorities as the world focused its attention on New Orleans. Wells follows his characters for more than two years as they strive, amid mind-boggling wreckage and governmental fecklessness, to rebuild their shattered lives. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them. |
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By Douglas Brinkley
William Morrow
Released: 2006-05-09
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Bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley, a professor at Tulane University, lived through the destruction of Hurricane Katrina with his fellow New Orleans residents, and now in The Great Deluge he has written one of the first complete accounts of that harrowing week, which sorts out the bewildering events of the storm and its aftermath, telling the stories of unsung heroes and incompetent officials alike. Get a sample of his story--and clarify your own memories--by looking through the detailed timeline he has put together of the preparation, the hurricane, and the response to one of the worst disasters in American history. |
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By Jed Horne
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Released: 2008-07-15
Paperback (464 pages)
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Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.
As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches’ brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.
Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense–all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.
Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In Breach of Faith, Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.
From the Hardcover edition. |
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By Ruby Bridges
Scholastic Press
Hardcover (64 pages; 1)
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Surrounded by federal marshals, 6-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first black student ever at the all-white William Frantz Public School in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 14, 1960. Perhaps never had so much hatred been directed at so perfect a symbol of innocence--which makes it all the more remarkable that her memoir, simple in language and rich in history and sepia-toned photographs, is informed mainly by a sort of bewildered compassion. Throughout, readers will find quotes from newspapers of the time, family members, and teachers; sidebars illustrating how Ruby Bridges pops up in both John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and a Norman Rockwell painting; and a fascinating update on Bridges's life and civil rights work. A personal, deeply moving historical documentary about a staggeringly courageous little girl at the center of events that already seem unbelievable. (Ages 6 and older) --Richard Farr |
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By John M. Barry
Simon & Schuster
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When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape. While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself. |
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By Cathy Scott
Howell Book House
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In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many animals had to fend for themselves because their owners lost them or were unable to care for them. In Pawprints of Katrina: Pets Saved and Lessons Learned, Cathy Scott documents her experience working with the Best Friends Animal Society triage center to rescue lost animals and reunite them with their owners. Over two hundred stories with accompanying photos describe dramatic and challenging rescue cases with details about the rescues, the examinations, treatment, and follow-up care by the selfless volunteers who worked to save beloved best friends. |
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By Ned Sublette
Lawrence Hill Books
Hardcover (368 pages)
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New Orleans is the most elusive of American cities. The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance. The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.” This book is a logical continuation of Ned Sublette’s previous volume, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo, which was highly praised for its synthesis of musical, cultural, and political history. Just as that book has become a standard resource on Cuba, so too will The World That Made New Orleans long remain essential for understanding the beautiful and tragic story of this most American of cities. |
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