A History of French Louisiana

A History of French Louisiana
Author: Marcel Giraud
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 415
Release: 1974-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0807156574

Marcel Giraud has long been acknowledged as the leading European scholar in the filed of the history and development of colonial French Louisiana. Now the long-awaited English translation of Volume One of his Histoire de la Louisiana Française makes the results of his meticulous research readily available. Professor Giraud explores all phases of the beginnings of colonization in the vast Louisiana territory from the first voyage of d'Iberville to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. He examines the attitude of he French regency, the interest of the Church, and the effects of wars and private monopoly on the struggling settlements along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and on the Mississippi. The almost unbelievable poverty with which the emigrants contended, brought on the their lack of agricultural knowledge and by France's niggardly financial support, is portrayed vividly. Professor Giraud has assembled an immense store of information bolstered by documentation from all available sources. The book includes an excellent bibliography and a list of archival resources.

A History of French Louisiana

A History of French Louisiana
Author: Marcel Giraud
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 544
Release: 1991-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807115718

The first four volumes of Marcel Giraud's History of French Louisiana, published in France between 1951 and 1974, represent the most exhaustive and authoritative scholarly study of France's establishment in the lower Mississippi Valley. In this fifth and final volume of Giraud's magnum opus, published in the United States for the first time ain a translation by Brian Pearce, Giraud unravels the complex story of the Company of the Indies between 1723 and 1731 and traces the development of the Louisiana colony during those difficult years.When the Company of the Indies was reorganized after the defection of Scotsman John Law, its leaders faced economic and political conflicts in both France and America. Managerial abuses and power struggles within the new system often interfered with the administrative process and created divisions of loyalties among officials and settlers.Political leaders were not, however, the only ones struggling for control within the new territory. As Giraud relates, Jesuit and capuchin religious leaders were also at odds with one another over the division of territory in which they were to minister. Giraud explores the strained relationship between the two orders and the political motives an associations that influenced their leaders. Despite political and religious turmoil within the territory, the foundations of colonial society were being laid in New Orleans and Mobile. Attributing the growth of these areas to agricultural expansion and to the introduction of slavery, Giraud offers a lively, detailed description of the economic and social development of Louisiana's nascent urban centers.Giraud also traces the expansion of colonial control into the interior of the colony -- the Illinois country, Nachitoches, and the Natchez country. It was the neglect of the defense of these outposts, blamed by Giraud of the Company's emphasis on economic development and its strict fund-sharing policy, that ultimately resulted in its downfall. On November 28, 1729, angry Indians attacked the small French garrison in Natchez, massacring numerous soldiers and civilians. This attack marked the beginning of war with the Natchez tribe and the withdrawal of the Company of the Indies from Louisiana.

The Story of French New Orleans

The Story of French New Orleans
Author: Dianne Guenin-Lelle
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2016-02-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496804872

What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

French, Cajun, Creole, Houma

French, Cajun, Creole, Houma
Author: Carl A. Brasseaux
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2005-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0807130362

In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities. Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society -- one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation. A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers -- the Houma tribe. A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.

Building the Devil's Empire

Building the Devil's Empire
Author: Shannon Lee Dawdy
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0226138437

Building the Devil’s Empire is the first comprehensive history of New Orleans’s early years, tracing the town’s development from its origins in 1718 to its revolt against Spanish rule in 1768. Shannon Lee Dawdy’s picaresque account of New Orleans’s wild youth features a cast of strong-willed captives, thin-skinned nobles, sharp-tongued women, and carousing travelers. But she also widens her lens to reveal the port city’s global significance, examining its role in the French Empire and the Caribbean, and she concludes that by exemplifying a kind of rogue colonialism—where governments, outlaws, and capitalism become entwined—New Orleans should prompt us to reconsider our notions of how colonialism works. "[A] penetrating study of the colony's founding."—Nation “A brilliant and spirited reinterpretation of the emergence of French New Orleans. Dawdy leads us deep into the daily life of the city, and along the many paths that connected it to France, the North American interior, and the Greater Caribbean. A major contribution to our understanding of the history of the Americas and of the French Atlantic, the work is also a model of interdisciplinary research and analysis, skillfully bringing together archival research, archaeology, and literary analysis.”—Laurent Dubois, Duke University

French on Shifting Ground

French on Shifting Ground
Author: Nathalie Dajko
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1496830962

In French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana, Nathalie Dajko introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. French on Shifting Ground allows both scholars and the general public to get an overview of how rich and diverse the French language in Louisiana is, and serves as a key reminder that Louisiana serves as a prime repository for Native and heritage languages, ranking among the strongest preservation regions in the southern and eastern US. Nathalie Dajko outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world and including the first published comparison of the way it is spoken by the local American Indian and Cajun populations. She then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language—in this case French—is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the academic community as well as for the people whose cultures—and identities—are literally at stake.

Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955

Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720-1955
Author: Sylvie Dubois
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2018-01-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0807168459

Over the course of its three-hundred-year history, the Catholic Church in Louisiana witnessed a prolonged shift from French to English, with some south Louisiana churches continuing to prepare marriage, baptism, and burial records in French as late as the mid-twentieth century. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 navigates a complex and lengthy process, presenting a nuanced picture of language change within the Church and situating its practices within the state’s sociolinguistic evolution. Mining three centuries of evidence from the Archdiocese of New Orleans archives, the authors discover proof of an extraordinary one-hundred-year rise and fall of bilingualism in Louisiana. The multiethnic laity, clergy, and religious in the nineteenth century necessitated the use of multiple languages in church functions, and bilingualism remained an ordinary aspect of church life through the antebellum period. After the Civil War, however, the authors show a steady crossover from French to English in the Church, influenced in large part by an active Irish population. It wasn’t until decades later, around 1910, that the Church began to embrace English monolingualism and French faded from use. The authors’ extensive research and analysis draws on quantitative and qualitative data, geographical models, methods of ethnography, and cultural studies. They evaluated 4,000 letters, written mostly in French, from 1720 to 1859; sacramental registers from more than 250 churches; parish reports; diocesan council minutes; and unpublished material from French archives. Their findings illuminate how the Church’s hierarchical structure of authority, its social constraints, and the attitudes of its local priests and laity affected language maintenance and change, particularly during the major political and social developments of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Speaking French in Louisiana, 1720–1955 goes beyond the “triumph of English” or “tragedy of Cajun French” stereotypes to show how south Louisiana negotiated language use and how Christianization was a powerful linguistic and cultural assimilator.

A History of French Louisiana

A History of French Louisiana
Author: Marcel Giraud
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 424
Release: 1974
Genre: Louisiana
ISBN: 9780807100585

Keep in mind that French Louisiana took in a lot more area than the present-day state of Louisiana.

Louisiana: A History

Louisiana: A History
Author: Joe Gray Taylor
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 229
Release: 1984-05-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393243745

From the earliest colonists through the latest Mardi Gras, Louisiana has had a history as exotic as that of any state. Even its political corruption--extending from French governors for whom office was exploitable property through the "Louisiana Hayride" following the death of Huey Long--seems to have had a glamorous side. 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.

The French Quarter of New Orleans

The French Quarter of New Orleans
Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 256
Release:
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781617034978

The author, a native of New Orleans, displays his passion for the "French Quarter" of the city in 106 color photographs highlighting Old World architecture, style, and history that has made this section of the city famous throughout the world.