This guide presents selected resources about the history of Louisiana which are available through the Delgado Community College Libraries and open access websites.
Faubourg Tremé by Logsdon, DawnFounded as a suburb (or faubourg in French) of the original colonial city, the neighborhood developed during French rule and many families like the Trevignes kept speaking French as their first language until the late 1960s. Tremé was the home of the Tribune, the first black daily newspaper in the US. During Reconstruction, activists from Tremé pushed for equal treatment under the law and for integration. And after Reconstruction's defeat, a "Citizens Committee" legally challenged the resegregation of public transportation resulting in the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court case. New Orleans Times Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie bought a historic house in Tremé in the 1990s when the area was struggling to recover from the crack epidemic. Rather than flee the blighted inner city, Elie begins renovating his dilapidated home and in the process becomes obsessed with the area's mysterious and neglected past. Shot largely before Hurricane Katrina and edited afterwards, the film is both celebratory and elegiac in tone.
Call Number: DVD 60
Publication Date: 2008
Triumph at Carville: a Tale of Leprosy in America by PBS Home VideoDocuments the triumph over mankind's most feared disease--leprosy--and one of the most unusual communities in American history, the Louisiana leprosarium known as Carville. Crafted from contemporary interviews, as well as old radio shows, movie news accounts, and an exclusive trove of photographs taken by a longtime patient, this takes viewers inside Carville and introduces them to patients, nuns, doctors, and staff who lived and worked there.
Call Number: DVD 111
Publication Date: 2005
Faded Ladies by Sillery, BarbaraBorn of the resilient skills of native American builders and shaped by the endeavors of African, French, Spanish, German and West Indian artisans and craftsmen, a new Creole culture emerged in a vast untamed delta landscape. Yet much of this treasure trove of Louisiana's architectural heritage hovers on the edge of obscurity. Fire, flood, and the efforts of man himself are erasing the past slowly. Includes Africa House, Ashland-Belle Helene, Badin-Roque, Destrehan, and more.
Call Number: DVD 116
Publication Date: 1999
Renaissance Village by Pierce, WendellLooks at the relationship between government and citizen in the wake of disaster, following the personal struggles of five characters in the small city of Baker, Louisiana, as they reclaim their lives after living nearly three years in a FEMA trailer park. After allegations of formaldehyde poisoning force the park to close, residents must leave to find a new home.
The Great Fever by PBS Home VideoIn June 1900, Major Walter Reed, Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army, led a medical team to Cuba on a mission to investigate yellow fever. For more than two hundred years U.S. cities had experienced outbreaks of the disease, which killed an estimated 100,000 people in the 19th century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana, they began testing the radical theories of a Cuban doctor, Carlos Finlay, who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever. The production documents the efforts of Reed's medical team to verify Finlay's theory. Eventually their discovery enabled the U.S. to successfully eradicate the disease among workers constructing the Panama Canal, making possible the completion of the strategic waterway. When yellow fever struck New Orleans in 1905, federal public health officials launched an aggressive mosquito-eradication campaign and successfully ended the epidemic. It was the last yellow fever outbreak in the United States, and the first major public health triumph of the 20th century.
Call Number: DVD 552
Publication Date: 2006
Interesting Facts about Louisiana
In 1803, Thomas Jeffersondoubled the size of the United States by purchasing the Louisiana Territory—828,000 square miles of land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains—from France. Louisiana was the first of 13 states, or parts of states, to be carved out of the territory in 1812.
Due to slow communications, the Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the Treaty of Ghent was signed on December 24, 1814, ending the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. General Andrew Jackson, who led between 6,000 and 7,000 troops to victory, emerged from the battle a national hero.
Confederate General Thomas Jonathan Jackson earned his famous nickname, "Stonewall," from his steadfast defensive efforts in the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas). At Chancellorsville, Jackson was shot by one of his own men, who mistook him for Union cavalry. His arm was amputated, and he died from pneumonia eight days later.
At 34 stories high and 450 feet tall, the Louisiana State Capitolis the tallest of all state capitol buildings. On September 8, 1935, Senator Huey Long—who had been instrumental in convincing the public to construct the new building in 1935—was assassinated in one of its corridors.
Louisiana is home to a wide diversity of cultures. Two prominent ethnic groups are Cajuns, descendants of a French-speaking group of Acadians from Canada, and Creoles, people with a mixed French, Spanish, Caribbean, African and/or Indian background.
Hurricane Katrina hit landfall in southeastern Louisiana on August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 storm. The most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history, it resulted in more than 1,800 deaths—over 1,500 of which were in Louisiana—and close to $100 billion in damages.