Archaeology
Mississippian Culture
The Mississippian culture spanned from roughly 1050 to 1700 CE
The Mississippian culture spanned from roughly 1050 to 1700 CE
Archaeologists at sites across Louisiana help fill in the written record through physical excavations of the past.
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.
This entry covers the Plaquemine culture in the Lower Mississippi River Valley during the Mississippi period, 1200 to 1700 CE
The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception serves as the seat of the Diocese of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
American architect Benjamin Latrobe designed plans for the US Capitol and other buildings. He came to New Orleans to develop waterworks and wrote about the city in his journal.
Camp Ruston was one of five large internment facilities established in Louisiana to house captured Axis soldiers transported to the United States during World War II.
Established in 1789, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is the oldest cemetery in the city of New Orleans.
Mitchell Gaudet is an internationally recognized glass artist and founder of the New Orleans School of Glassworks.
Janie Verret Luster is a master palmetto basket weaver and cultural preservationist of the United Houma Nation, a state-recognized tribe from southeast Louisiana.
Spanish painter Luis Graner y Arrufi lived and worked in New Orleans between 1914 and 1922. The simple, dignified landscapes he created in Louisiana are considered to be some of his best work.
New Orleans painter Henry Casselli is one of the most highly regarded watercolorists in the nation.
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.
Freeman & Harris Café was a Black-owned restaurant that served as a pillar of Black social, cultural, and political life in Shreveport.
One of the worst environmental disasters in US history
During World War II, Higgins Industries designed 92 percent of US Navy vessels, the majority of which were produced by workers in New Orleans.
Hurricane Ike’s size and timing was a sobering reminder that Louisiana was underprepared for another storm on the scale of Hurricane Katrina.
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."
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.
Mardi Gras Indians have become recognizable symbols of New Orleans's unique local culture, yet remain closely tied to their specific communities and traditions.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans is celebrated by costumed revelers, krewes, floats and flambeaux, parades, and masked balls.
New Orleans Jazz Funerals are public burial services for prominent community members; traditionally African American males. After the funeral service, a procession of musicians, funeral directors, family, and friends moves from the site of the funeral to the cemetery while marching to the beat of a brass band.
Marc Savoy is a Cajun folklorist, musician, and master accordion maker in Eunice.
The so-called poor boy (po-boy) sandwich originated from the Martin Brothers' French Market Restaurant and Coffee Stand in New Orleans during the 1929 streetcar strike.
Freeman & Harris Café was a Black-owned restaurant that served as a pillar of Black social, cultural, and political life in Shreveport.
Tabasco is a popular brand of pepper sauce products and related items manufactured by McIlhenny Company, a privately held, family-owned business headquartered on Avery Island, Louisiana.
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.
The Great Raft was a thousand-year-old logjam in the Red River that prevented transportation downriver to New Orleans.
The origins of the notorious adult playground
Surveyed and platted in 1883 for the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, Slidell was named for John Slidell, Confederate ambassador to France and U.S. congressman.
The Natchitoches settlement, founded in 1714, is the oldest in the Louisiana Territory.
Politician Willie Rainach was one of Louisiana's most vigorous opponents of desegregation.
Democrat Louis Wiltz served as governor of Louisiana from 1880 until his death in 1881.
Alexandre Mouton, the first Democratic governor of Louisiana, served from 1843 to 1846.
The Progressive movement that swept across the United States at the turn of the twentieth century brought changes to many of the nation's social and political institutions, including those in Louisiana.
Margeret "Pokey" McIlhenny was a New Orleans civic leader whose interests were politics, education, and public television.
Henry Adams was a former enslaved person who spearheaded North Louisiana’s first civil rights campaign for African Americans.
Spain governed the colony of Louisiana for nearly four decades, from 1763 through March 1803, returning it to France for a few months until the Louisiana Purchase conveyed it to the United States in 1803.
The LSU Rural Life Museum is an outdoor complex of southern rural vernacular buildings located in Baton Rouge.
Established in 1968 by writers Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam, BLKARTSOUTH was a community writing and acting workshop that provided a forum for emerging black poets and playwrights to develop and showcase their work.
Acadians, Cajuns, and their history became part of American literature, often represented through romantic myth.
America’s first Black daily newspaper, the New Orleans Tribune served as an organizing tool for Black activists as they campaigned for rights for men of African descent with an emphasis on building solidarity with the formerly enslaved.
A pioneer planter in what is now West Feliciana Parish, Rachel O'Connor wrote more than one hundred letters describing antebellum plantation life in southern Louisiana.
D. L. Menard was a popular Cajun Zydeco musician from Lafayette.
One of southern Louisiana's first great recording artists was Creole accordionist and singer Amédé Ardoin.
Jazz pianist Dolly Adams was a respected musician and band leader in New Orleans from the 1920s through the 1970s.
The rhythm and blues (R&B) music heritage in Louisiana includes a wide variety of styles, beginning in the 1940s and continuing until today.
Vietnamese Americans are one of the newest major ethnic groups in Louisiana
The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe is one of only four American Indian groups in Louisiana recognized by the federal government.
The Ishak are an Indigenous people who have lived in southwest Louisiana and southeastern Texas since precolonial times.
Following World War II, many Indigenous Louisianans joined regional and national efforts to promote tribal sovereignty, economic justice, and educational equality.
Established in 1789, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is the oldest cemetery in the city of New Orleans.
One of the first Black Protestant churches in Louisiana, Wesley Chapel played pivotal roles in social and political movements, from teaching freed Black women to read after the Civil War to engaging in the civil rights movement.
Members of the Cercle Harmonique held séances and received messages from the spirit world in support of Black rights and social equality.
A round, braided cake consumed during the Carnival season across Louisiana, especially in New Orleans.
An American effort to explore the Louisiana Purchase territory was hindered by a log jam on the Red River and two hundred Spanish troops.
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.
For a state experiencing land loss at an alarming rate, coastal restoration has become an urgent need.
Woody Gagliano sounded the alarm on Louisiana’s coastal land loss crisis and worked with his colleagues for decades to remedy the problem.
In 1924 New Orleans pitcher Oyster Joe Martina led the Washington Senators baseball team against the New York Giants to win the World Series.
The Evangeline League was a minor league baseball circuit in southern and central Louisiana in the first half of the twentieth century.
New Orleans’s basketball team is named for Louisiana’s state bird, the brown pelican.
The Negro Leagues were the network of African-American baseball teams and players from the 1880s to the integration of baseball in 1946–47.
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