Louisiana USA
Travel Guide & Hotel Reservations
Swathed in the romance of pirates, voodoo and Mardi Gras, LOUISIANA is
undeniably special. Its history is barely on nodding terms with the view that America was
the creation of the Pilgrim Fathers; its way of life is proudly set apart. This is the
land of the rural, French-speaking Cajuns (descended from the Acadians,
eighteenth-century French-Canadian refugees), who live in the prairies and swamps in the
southwest of the state, and the Creoles of jazzy, sassy New Orleans . (The term Creole
was originally used to define anyone born in the state to French or Spanish colonists -
famed in the nineteenth century for their masked balls, family feuds and duels - as well
as native-born, French-speaking slaves, but has since come to define anyone or anything
native to Louisiana, and in particular its black population.) Louisiana's spicy
home-cooked food , regular festivals and lilting French-based dialect - and
above all its music ( jazz, R&B, Cajun and its bluesy black counterpart,
zydeco) - draw from all these cultures. Oddly enough, north Louisiana - Protestant
Bible Belt country, where old plantation homes stand decaying in vast cottonfields - feels
more "Southern" than the marshy bayous, shaded by ancient cypress trees and
laced with wispy trails of Spanish moss, of the Catholic south of the state.
The French first settled Louisiana in 1682, braving swamps and plagues to
harvest the abundant cypress, but the state was sparsely inhabited before its first
permanent settlement, the trading post of Natchitoches , was established in 1714.
In 1760, Louis XV secretly handed New Orleans, along with all French territory west of the
Mississippi, to his Spanish cousin, Charles III, as a safeguard against the
British. Louisiana remained Spanish until it was ceded to Napoleon in 1801, under the
proviso that it should never change hands again. Just two years later, however, Napoleon,
strapped for cash to fund his battles with the British in Europe, struck a bargain with
president Thomas Jefferson known as the Louisiana Purchase . This sneaky agreement
handed over to the US all French lands between Canada and Mexico, from the Mississippi to
the Rockies, for a total cost of $15 million. The subsequent "Americanization"
of Louisiana was one of the most momentous periods in the state's history, with the port
of New Orleans, in its key position near the mouth of the Mississippi River ,
growing to become one of the nation's wealthiest cities. Though the state seceded from the
Union to join the Confederacy in 1861, there were important differences between Louisiana
and the rest of the slave-driven South. The Black Code , drawn up by the French in
1685 to govern Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti) and established in Louisiana in 1724, had
given slaves rights unparalleled elsewhere, including permission to marry, meet socially
and take Sundays off. The black population of New Orleans in particular was renowned as
exceptionally literate and cosmopolitan.
Though Louisiana was not physically scarred by the Civil War, with few important
battles fought on its soil, its economy was ravaged, and its social structures all but
destroyed. The Reconstruction era, too, hit particularly hard here, with the once
great city of New Orleans suffering a period of unprecedented lawlessness and racial
violence. In time the economy, at least, recovered, benefiting from the key importance of
the mighty Mississippi River and the discovery of offshore oil, but over the last century
Louisiana has come to rely more and more heavily upon tourism , centered around New
Orleans and Cajun country. And it's not hard to see why: whether canoeing along a
moss-tangled bayou, dining in a crumbling Creole cottage on spicy, buttery crawfish, or
dancing on a steamy starlit night to the best live music in the world, few visitors fail
to fall in love with Louisiana.
Reserve a Hotel Room in Louisiana USA
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