Louisiana: A History

by Joe Gray Taylor

Book Overview

Handing the colony of Louisiana back and forth between their empires, the French and Spanish left a legacy that lives in such forms as the architecture of the Vieux Carre and a civil law deriving from the Napoleonic Code. Acadian refugees, German farmers, black slaves and free blacks, along with Italians, Irish, and the Kaintucks who helped Andrew Jackson win the Battle of New Orleans added to the state's distinctiveness. Made rich by sugar cane, cotton, and Mississippi River commerce before the Civil War, Louisiana faced poverty afterward. Battles between Bourbon Democrats and Reconstruction Republicans followed, ultimately involving the Custom House Ring and the Knights of the White Camelia. By methods that remain controversial, Huey Long ended government by gentlemen with economic transformations other had sought. Gas, oil, and industrialization have additionally Americanized the state.

Something of Louisiana's historic joie de vivre remains, however, to the gratification of residents and visitors alike; both will enjoy Joe Gray Taylor's telling of the story.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393301745
• ISBN13: 9780393301748
• Release Date: May 1984
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 228 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Louisiana a bicentennial history

In late 1698, four ships sailed from France under the command of Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville.Aboard were some two hundred people destined to become the first settlers of a French post in the lower Mississippi River. Iberville landed first at Dauphin Island near modern Mobile, then moved further East to Ship Island. Sailing up to the great River Iberville visited with the bayou goula Indians on the west bank. Rene Robert cavalier Sieur de la Salle who were a wealthy important immigrant to Canada who heard of the voyage of Marqette and Joliet and comprehended the strategic significance of a fort at the mouth of Mississippi. During the winter of 1682, La Salle led an expedition of fifty-six persons, including ten indians women and three children down the Mississippi to its mouth.He reached salt water on April 6, placed a cross in the mud and claimed the Country for France. He gave the name of Louisiana, in honor of king Louis XIV. That's was the basis for France's claim to Louisiana,though the Spanish Explorer Hernando De Soto had discover the Mississippi and crossed it 140 years earlier. Louisiana was a French-Speaking Spanish colony when the nineteenth century began. Twelve years later Loisiana was one of the United States, successfully operating a system of goverment radically different from the autocracy tempered by ineffiency that had gone before.