May 8, 2018

Yesterday, May 7, marked the 300th anniversary of the 1718 founding of New Orleans, one of the world’s busiest ports and the largest city in Louisiana. The city is also a business, cultural, and industrial center of the southern United States. True to the character of New Orleans, the city famous for Mardi Gras is celebrating its birthday in grand style. Tricentennial events began late in 2017 and will continue throughout 2018.

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New Orleans Tricentennial Logo. Credit: © New Orleans Tricentennial

The city’s famous St. Louis Cathedral is hosting a celebration of 300 years of Roman Catholicism in the United States. The women of New Orleans, from nuns and chefs to jazz singers and civil rights activists, are being honored in a city-wide and year-long event called “Builders and Rebuilders.” The city’s early French history is detailed in an exhibition called “New Orleans, the Founding Era” at the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum and research center in the storied French Quarter. The era of Spanish rule (1762-1800) is recalled in a series of portraits at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

St. Louis Cathedral faces Jackson Square in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana. Credit: Sara Dreyfuss

Numerous concerts and festivals are celebrating the city’s famous jazz music scene and its delicious and renowned Cajun cuisine. Notable projects for the tricentennial include the renovation of the city’s historic Gallier Hall, an expansion of Louis Armstrong International Airport, and improvements to famed Bourbon Street and to parks along the riverfront.

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Louisiana. Credit: WORLD BOOK map

New Orleans lies along the Mississippi River, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of where the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico. It is the South’s oldest major city. New Orleans was founded in 1718 by Jean Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. Bienville was governor of the French colony of Louisiana. He named the city La Nouvelle-Orléans (French for New Orleans) after Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who ruled France for King Louis XV, then a youth. The city became part of the United States with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.

February 8, 2018

In honor of Black History Month, today World Book looks at the Whitney Plantation, an open-air historical museum near New Orleans, Louisiana, dedicated to the victims of slavery in the United States. The sprawling Whitney Plantation Historic District includes fields of sugar cane, a French Creole barn, the opulent “Big House,” quarters in which enslaved people lived, and haunting ceramic statues of the “children of Whitney.” Whitney Plantation is one of many sites featured on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

Statues of slave children await visitors to the Antioch Baptist Church which was relocated to Whitney Plantation. Credit: Corey Balazowich (licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0)

Whitney Plantation was originally known as Habitation Haydel after the family who owned it from the late 1700′s until after the American Civil War (1861-1865). According to an 1819 document, the Haydel family owned 40 men, 21 women, and 9 children. By 1860, there were 101 people enslaved on the Haydel property. The slaves worked the sugar cane and rice fields, maintained the many plantation buildings, and cooked, cleaned, and cared for the Haydel family—as well as for one another. After the war ended and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution officially abolished slavery in the United States in December 1865, distilling and sugar magnate Bradish Johnson purchased Habitation Haydel and renamed it in honor of his grandson, Harry Payne Whitney.

Credit: © African American History Month

New Orleans attorney and real estate developer John Cummings purchased the Whitney Plantation in 1999. He soon began turning it into a museum, and set about restoring the grounds, constructing new buildings, hiring artists and scholars, and digging into the plantation’s historical records. Cummings’s staff at Whitney obtained the oral histories of about 4,000 Louisiana slaves compiled by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930′s. Memorial walls constructed at Whitney list the single names of thousands of Louisiana slaves, and a “Field of Angels” remembers the many slave children who died at Whitney and other Louisiana plantations. Other installations and placards re-create the harsh lives of the slave population. The Whitney Plantation opened to visitors in 2014 and has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1992.