New Orleans, the Founding Era: La Nouvelle-Orleans, les Annees Fondatrices (in English)
Synopsis "New Orleans, the Founding Era: La Nouvelle-Orleans, les Annees Fondatrices (in English)"
In 2018, in honor of the tricentennial of the founding of New Orleans, a groundbreaking exhibition and companion catalog celebrate the diversity of the city s earliest populations. New Orleans, the Founding Era gathers contributions from nine leading scholars of the French Atlantic world and features an illustrated checklist of artifacts from public and private collections across France, Spain, Canada, and the United States. This dual-language publication from The Historic New Orleans Collection explores the ideas, peoples, and material cultures that shaped one of the most complex and challenging colonization projects in the Americas. Louisiana in the early eighteenth century experienced an intense period of immigration, as nearly six thousand French- and Germanspeaking Europeans and a roughly equal number of enslaved captives taken from Africa arrived in the French territory. Those who survived first the crossing, and then exposure to the New World s diseases, established the roots of a blended, Creole culture that persists to this day. The newcomers mingled with, learned from, and occasionally clashed with the native people who had long occupied the riverfront site chosen for New Orleans. As a cultural, economic, and diplomatic crossroads of both the lower Mississippi valley and the broader Atlantic world, New Orleans was shaped by influences that stretched south from Nouvelle France and the Illinois Country, north from the Caribbean, and east from the Bight of Benin to the Brittany coast. Richly illustrated and compellingly narrated, New Orleans, the Founding Era reflects the kaleidoscopic array of cultures that gave rise to this most cosmopolitan of North American cities.
