James Pitot (1761-1831)

James Pitot (1761-1831)

Author: Henry Pitot

Publisher: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.

Published: 2011-02-28

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 9781879714168

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A scholarly reconstruction of the life of the French immigrant who rose to become a prominent judge, businessman, and mayor of New Orleans.


Instruments of Empire

Instruments of Empire

Author: Michael K. Beauchamp

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-02-17

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 0807174971

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M. K. Beauchamp’s Instruments of Empire examines the challenges that resulted from U.S. territorial expansion through the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. With the acquisition of this vast region, the United States gained a colonial European population whose birthplace, language, and religion often differed from those of their U.S. counterparts. This population exhibited multiple ethnic tensions and possessed little experience with republican government. Consequently, administration of the territory proved a trial-and-error endeavor involving incremental cooperation between federal officials and local elites. As Beauchamp demonstrates, this process of gradual accommodation served as an essential nationalizing experience for the people of Louisiana. After the acquisition, federal officials who doubted the loyalty of the local French population and their capacity for self-governance denied the territory of Orleans—easily the region’s most populated and economically robust area—a quick path to statehood. Instead, U.S. officials looked to groups including free people of color, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, all of whom found themselves ideally placed to negotiate for greater privileges from the new territorial government. Beauchamp argues that U.S. administrators, despite claims of impartiality and equality before the law, regularly acted as fickle agents of imperial power and frequently co-opted local elites with prominent positions within the parishes. Overall, the methods utilized by the United States in governing Louisiana shared much in common with European colonial practices implemented elsewhere in North America during the early nineteenth century. While historians have previously focused on Washington policy makers in investigating the relationship between the United States and the newly acquired territory, Beauchamp emphasizes the integral role played by territorial elites who wielded enormous power and enabled government to function. His work offers profound insights into the interplay of class, ethnicity, and race, as well as an understanding of colonialism, the nature of republics, democracy, and empire. By placing the territorial period of early national Louisiana in an imperial context, this study reshapes perceptions of American expansion and manifest destiny in the nineteenth century and beyond. Instruments of Empire serves as a rich resource for specialists studying Louisiana and the U.S. South, as well as scholars of slavery and free people of color, nineteenth-century American history, Atlantic World and border studies, U.S. foreign relations, and the history of colonialism and empire.


Interim Appointment

Interim Appointment

Author: Jared W. Bradley

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2002-06-01

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 9780807126844

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William C. C. Claiborne, the first governor of Orleans Territory, was at the hub of officials who grappled with the political, diplomatic, and administrative challenges that arose following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Letters both to and from Claiborne during the critical months of 1804–1805, mysteriously excluded in 1917 from Dunbar Rowland’s Official Letter Books of W. C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, are now made widely accessible, over half of them published here for the first time. To enhance appreciation of the letters, Jared William Bradley has furnished biographical sketches of thirty-one heretofore little-known individuals crucial to Claiborne’s correspondence, delineating their personalities and their contributions to the development of law and the establishment of American government in the French Creole society. Bradley also treats in four essays the origins and growth of the “Municipal,” or the New Orleans city council; two organizations of businessmen that were ensnared in the so-called Burr Conspiracy in 1807; and the early history of Fort St. Philip, which guarded access to New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. Bradley’s essays joined with 218 of Claiborne’s letters makes Interim Appointment of incalculable value. It provides fresh insights into the political, constitutional, and social histories of Louisiana and the United States.


Louisiana History

Louisiana History

Author: Florence M. Jumonville

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2002-08-30

Total Pages: 810

ISBN-13: 0313076790

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From the accounts of 18th-century travelers to the interpretations of 21st-century historians, Jumonville lists more than 6,800 books, chapters, articles, theses, dissertations, and government documents that describe the rich history of America's 18th state. Here are references to sources on the Louisiana Purchase, the Battle of New Orleans, Carnival, and Cajuns. Less-explored topics such as the rebellion of 1768, the changing roles of women, and civic development are also covered. It is a sweeping guide to the publications that best illuminate the land, the people, and the multifaceted history of the Pelican State. Arranged according to discipline and time period, chapters cover such topics as the environment, the Civil War and Reconstruction, social and cultural history, the people of Louisiana, local, parish, and sectional histories, and New Orleans. It also lists major historical sites and repositories of primary materials. As the only comprehensive bibliography of the secondary sources about the state, ^ILouisiana History^R is an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers.


The Louisiana Purchase

The Louisiana Purchase

Author: Robert D. Bush

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 113507772X

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In 1803, the United States purchased 828,000 square miles of land from France at a price of approximately three cents per acre, dramatically altering the young nation’s geography and its political future. President Thomas Jefferson had struggled for three years over the purchase, which many believed to be unconstitutional, during which time the land changed hands between the French and the Spanish. In perhaps the nation's most formative development since the Revolutionary War, the deal secured the U.S. territory that would become fifteen new states, sparked intense public argument about the American Frontier, and ensured Jefferson a complicated legacy in American history. With special attention to the diplomatic and constitutional background of the purchase, The Louisiana Purchase examines the event in the context of the Atlantic world, including the impact of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars in Europe, colonial revolutions in the Caribbean, and the westward expansion of the U.S. population. In five concise chapters bolstered by primary documents including treaties, letters, and first-hand observations, Robert D. Bush introduces students to the political history of this momentous land acquisition.


Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America

Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America

Author: Alfred N. Hunt

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2006-08

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0807153729

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The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 as a slave revolt on the French colonial island of Saint Domingue and ended thirteen years later with the founding of an independent black republic. Waves of French West Indians -- slaves, white colonists, and free blacks -- fled the upheaval and flooded southern U.S. ports -- most notably New Orleans -- bringing with them everything from French opera to voodoo. Alfred N. Hunt discusses the ways these immigrants affected southern agriculture, architecture, language, politics, medicine, religion, and the arts. He also considers how the events in Haiti influenced the American slavery-emancipation debate and spurred developments in black militancy and Pan-Africanism in the United States. By effecting the development of racial ideology in antebellum America, Hunt concludes, the Haitian Revolution was a major contributing factor to the attitudes that led to the Civil War.


Stories from the St. Louis Cemeteries of New Orleans

Stories from the St. Louis Cemeteries of New Orleans

Author: Sally Asher

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1626198659

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The tombs and graves of the St. Louis Cemeteries rise from the ground, creating labyrinthine memorials aptly dubbed "cities of the dead." Most are in even rows with quaint street names. Some are of crumbling brick and broken marble. Others are miniature mansions clad in decorative ironwork with angelic guardians. Grand or humble, each is a relic of the story of New Orleans. Politicians, pirates, Mardi Gras Indian chiefs and one voodoo queen rest below. In an unprecedented inquiry, author Sally Asher reveals the lives within the mysterious and majestic tombs of the St. Louis Cemeteries.


Surveying the Early Republic

Surveying the Early Republic

Author: Robert D Bush

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2016-10-05

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0807163430

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In Surveying the Early Republic, Robert D. Bush contextualizes the firsthand account of Andrew Ellicott, the United States Boundary Commissioner appointed by President George Washington in 1796. Ellicott and his Spanish counterparts established the boundary line between the United States and Spanish territory in North America after the United States and Spain signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, opening the door to navigation of the Mississippi River and the export of American goods from the Spanish-held port of New Orleans. Over the course of this multiyear surveying project (1796–1800), Ellicott found himself entangled in the politics of these frontier lands, including an insurrection by inhabitants who favored the United States against the existing Spanish regime. He also reported to his superiors on various rumors, plots, and political intrigues as well as on the secret activities of individuals in the pay of Spain, including U.S. Army General James Wilkinson. Regrettably, the widespread acclaim that followed the publication of Ellicott’s journal in 1803, a year prior to the commencement of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, faded over time. In this first edited and annotated version of that journal, Bush illuminates the commissioner’s day-to-day narrative of events in what later became the Mississippi Territory and thus deepens our understanding of early American expansionism. In addition, Ellicott’s accounts of personalities, plots, counter-plots, and Indian affairs depict with unparalleled clarity the tumultuous diplomatic experiences faced by President John Adams’s administration as it pushed the bounds of America’s frontier. Bush’s deft treatment of this valuable primary source provides a critical contribution to the study of the history of early America.


Creole New Orleans

Creole New Orleans

Author: Arnold R. Hirsch

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1992-09-01

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780807117743

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This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community. Essays in the book's first section focus not only on the formation of the curiously blended Franco-African culture but also on how that culture, once established, resisted change and allowed New Orleans to develop along French and African creole lines until the early nineteenth century. Jerah Johnson explores the motives and objectives of Louisiana's French founders, giving that issue the most searching analysis it has yet received. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, in her account of the origins of New Orleans' free black population, offers a new approach to the early history of Africans in colonial Louisiana. The second part of the book focuses on the challenge of incorporating New Orleans into the United States. As Paul F. LaChance points out, the French immigrants who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase slowed the Americanization process by preserving the city's creole culture. Joesph Tregle then presents a clear, concise account of the clash that occurred between white creoles and the many white Americans who during the 1800s migrated to the city. His analysis demonstrates how race finally brought an accommodation between the white creole and American leaders. The third section centers on the evolution of the city's race relations during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell begin by tracing the ethno-cultural fault line that divided black Americans and creole through Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Arnold R. Hirsch pursues the themes discerned by Logsdon and Bell from the turn of the century to the 1980s, examining the transformation of the city's racial politics. Collectively, these essays fill a major void in Louisiana history while making a significant contribution to the history of urbanization, ethnicity, and race relations. The book will serve as a cornerstone for future study of the history of New Orleans.