Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Louisiana
No city in America can rival New Orleans for the number and variety of buildings from the Colonial and Antebellum era
Photographs by Edwin S. Grosvenor unless otherwise credited.
In one of the most remarkable about-faces in American history, Confederate general James Longstreet became a strong supporter of Reconstruction during the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant.
Editor’s Note: Elizabeth R. Varon is a professor of American History at the University of Virginia.
Can the disasters that befell other cities help save this one?
Wynton Marsalis believes that America is in danger of losing the truest mirror of our national identity. If that’s the case, we are at least fortunate that, today, jazz’s foremost performer is also its most eloquent advocate.
When Wynton Marsalis burst into the public eye in the early 1980s, it was as a virtuoso trumpet player. From the start he was an articulate talker too, but his bracing opinions were off-thecuff and intuitive; his ideas, like his playing, needed seasoning.
The foremost student of a belief held by nearly half of all Americans traces its history from Darwin’s bombshell through the storms of the Scopes trial to today’s “scientific creationists," who find William Jennings Bryan to have been too liberal.
Behind the Cajuns’ joie de vivre lies a strong-willed independence and a tumultuous past.
Fred’s Lounge is a small place with a plain red-brick facade on the main street in Mamou, Louisiana. When I was there, late last December, Fred’s was packed. Members of a five-piece Cajun band took up most of the space inside and ignited the room with their rowdy fiddle music.
New Orleans cuisine, with its French roux, African okra, Indian filé, and Spanish peppers, is literally a gastronomic melting pot. Here’s how it all came together.
Across most of America nowadays the term Creole when applied to food variably conjures up images of charred, blackened fish and meat, overbearing, fiery seasonings, and a ubiquitous red sauce not unlike the kind you buy in a ca
A brilliant demagogue named Huey Long was scrambling for the Presidency when an assassin’s bullets cut him down just fifty years ago
In May 1932 Louisiana’s flamboyant senator, Huey Pierce Long, told a throng of newspapermen to prepare for a headline-making announcement.
The Revolution might have ended much differently for the Americans if it weren’t for their ally, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, who helped them wrestle the Mississippi valley from the British.
Imagine, for a moment, an alternate ending to the American Revolution. The thirteen rebel colonies sign a peace of exhaustion with Great Britain in 1783.
With astonishing tenacity, the people of the rich river-mouth region of the Mississippi have remained what and where they are through two and a half centuries
Just a few decades more, or so we are told, and the process of the homogenization of America will have been completed.
A TALE OF RECONSTRUCTION
Of the turbulent career of Pinckney B. S. Pinchback, adventurer, operator, and first black governor of Louisiana. He reminds one powerfully, says the author, of the late Adam Clay ton Powell, Jr.
His name seems pure invention —Pinckney B. S. Pinchback. It sounds so much like pinchbeck , dictionary-defined as “counterfeit or spurious,” that one suspects a joke by political enemies.
The wrecker’s ball swings in every city in the land, and memorable edifices of all kinds are coming down at a steady clip.
There are places on this earth, in Europe particularly, where conservation is taken to mean the preservation of the notable works of man as well as nature.
Along the Mississippi the spirit of vanished culture lingers in the ruined columns of the great plantations
The old house, many-hued in ruin, stands rotting, some thirty miles above New Orleans, farther from the changing river bed than in its youth, deserted, its records mostly forgotten; but it speaks of the land of the Acadians, of the Bayous Teche, Vermillion and LaFourche and of a distinctive people. Acadians lived here for many years. They did not build the old mansion, to be sure, for that was the work of the Creoles, the aristocrats.
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