Archaeology
Historical Archaeology in Louisiana
Archaeologists at sites across Louisiana help fill in the written record through physical excavations of the past.
Archaeologists at sites across Louisiana help fill in the written record through physical excavations of the past.
In New Orleans archaeological explorations span 2,500 years of history
This entry covers the Pre-Clovis and Clovis cultures during the Early Paleoindian Period, 11500–9500 BCE, and Middle Paleoindian Period, 9500 BCE–8800 BCE.
The Mississippian culture spanned from roughly 1050 to 1700 CE
J. N. B. de Pouilly was a successful architect in antebellum Louisiana.
The original St. Francis Chapel of Point Coupee, was one of the first parish churches in Louisiana.
Louisiana artist and architect Thomas Wharton is best known for the writings and sketches he kept in a daybook.
The Centenary State Historic Site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
Darryl Reeves is a master blacksmith who hand-forges decorative and functional ironwork for many of New Orleans' historic homes and public buildings.
New Orleans artist Juanita Gonzales produced clay sculpture, tile, and pottery that was far ahead of its time in terms of both technique and glazing.
A Connecticut native, C. R. Parker was working as an artist in Louisiana, where he received a commission for several large portraits for the state capitol.
New Orleans painter Henry Casselli is one of the most highly regarded watercolorists in the nation.
An unofficial cultural ambassador for Louisiana beginning in the 1970s, Paul Prudhomme was a Cajun chef, restauranteur, author, television star, and entrepreneur.
Enslaved people endured brutal conditions on sugarcane and cotton plantations during the antebellum period.
Founder of L’Union, the South’s first Black-owned newspaper, as well as the New Orleans Tribune, America’s first Black daily, Louis Charles Roudanez was a staunch abolitionist and advocate for the liberation of all Black people.
Flint-Goodridge Hospital opened in 1896 to serve New Orleans’s Black community and provide medical training for Black nurses and physicians at a time when other hospitals denied services to Black people.
The last known epidemic of yellow fever in the United States occurred in Louisiana in 1905. Due to the intensity and frequency of these epidemics, it was often referred to as the "saffron scourge."
Hurricane Gustav was the first major storm to test New Orleans’s rehabbed defenses after Hurricane Katrina.
One of the worst environmental disasters in US history
On June 9, 1865, the SS Kentucky capsized in the Red River south of Shreveport, marking the second deadliest inland maritime disaster in US history.
The Campeche chair, a leather or caned sling seat supported by a non-folding cross-frame, was in widespread use in the United States and New Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Healers draw on a folk tradition that dates to the eighteenth century and includes Creole, Native American, Cajun, and European influences.
Allison "Tootie" Montana was Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas Mardi Gras Indian tribe in New Orleans.
Allen and Georgie Manuel were a husband-wife team who made traditional costumes of the Cajun courir du Mardi Gras, the celebration of Carnival season in rural South Louisiana.
Crawfish boils are a springtime ritual in Louisiana.
Although okra is consumed throughout the South, it is predominantly associated with South Louisiana, where it is used as a thickener for gumbo.
Boudin is a Cajun sausage made of meat and rice typically consumed with the filling removed from the casing and often squeezed directly into the mouth.
Beignets, or pockets of fried dough served with powdered sugar, are an iconic New Orleans treat.
The Fontainebleau State Park bears the name of Bernard de Marigny's sugar plantation, which formerly occupied this site and was itself named after the estate of the French king Francois I.
The Neutral Strip existed outside the governance of either the United States or Spain until 1821.
The Great Raft was a thousand-year-old logjam in the Red River that prevented transportation downriver to New Orleans.
The Natchitoches settlement, founded in 1714, is the oldest in the Louisiana Territory.
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville was a Canadian naval officer who, with his brother Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, explored the lower Mississippi River Valley in 1699 and established the first permanent French settlement in Louisiana.
John J. McKeithen, the 49th governor of Louisiana, served from 1964 to 1972.
The Treaty of Fontainebleau ceded all the territory of French colonial Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, along with New Orleans, to Spain.
During Reconstruction, Unionist Benjamin Flanders was selected as Louisiana’s first Republican governor in June of 1867.
Built in 1819 as a fortification against the Spanish and slave insurrections, today the Pentagon Barracks house a museum, apartments, and the lieutenant governor's office.
The history of the fort, mission, and settlement of Los Adaes reflects both intercolonial rivalry and cooperation among the Spanish, French, and Native Americans who lived along the border of New Spain and French Louisiana.
This Catholic cemetery in Donaldsonville was laid out in a grid plan shortly after the church parish was founded in 1772.
Canadian explorer Pierre Sidrac Dugue de Boisbriand, one of the founding fathers of colonial Louisiana, served as acting governor of Louisiana between February 1725 and March 1727.
New Orleans has been the subject of literature from the colonial period to the present day.
Wilmer Mills was a poet deeply rooted in the rural Protestant culture of the Plains, an area located between St. Francisville and Baton Rouge.
Charles Bukowski came to New Orleans in 1942 on his first cross-country trips and returned to the city many times over the years.
Louisiana’s folktales have been influenced by Indigenous peoples and the many cultural and ethnic groups that have immigrated to the state.
Byron O. Thomas, known professionally by his stage name Mannie Fresh, is a Grammy-nominated producer and rapper from New Orleans.
The Théâtre d’Orléans , established in 1815, was located on Orleans Avenue between Royal and Bourbon streets in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
New Orleans’s first couple of jazz.
Lloyd Price was a New Orleans rhythm-and-blues singer, songwriter, producer, and music industry executive who forged a uniquely colorful and successful career spanning seven decades.
The Chitimacha Tribe is the only federally recognized tribe in Louisiana to still occupy part of its ancestral territory.
The influence of Irish immigrants in New Orleans can still be seen in the Irish Channel neighborhood, St. Patrick's Day celebrations and churches such as St. Alphonsus.
The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana is the largest of four federally recognized tribal governments in Louisiana.
The Quapaw Indians, whose four villages were located along the Arkansas River, were military allies and trade partners of colonial Louisianans.
Held on the Saturday before Easter Sunday, this women-led vigil includes counterclockwise percussive foot movement and call-and-response singing.
Mother Mary Hyacinth led nine Daughters of the Cross from France to central Louisiana in 1855 to open a convent and several schools.
Called the "King of Honky Tonk Heaven" by Newsweek in 1982, Ferriday's Jimmy Swaggart was America's most popular televangelist in the 1980s.
Voudou, a synthesis of African religious and magical beliefs with Roman Catholicism, emerged in New Orleans in the 1700s and survives in active congregations today.
Louisiana hurricanes have played an essential role in the state’s history from colonization through the present and are as memorable as the places and people they impact.
During the nineteenth century, cholera epidemics caused tens of thousands of deaths throughout the state of Louisiana.
An American effort to explore the Louisiana Purchase territory was hindered by a log jam on the Red River and two hundred Spanish troops.
The gradual loss of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is a slow-moving disaster largely set in motion by a series of human interventions in natural processes.
Ham Richardson was one of the top-rated mens tennis players in the world in the 1950s.
Jimmy Perrin made his professional boxing debut in 1933 against Tony Feraci at the Coliseum Arena in New Orleans.
Vinton native Ted Lyons pitched the most winning games in Chicago White Sox history and earned induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Toby Hart brought New Orleans its first professional sports franchise in 1887.
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