Louisiana
State in southern USA; nicknamed Pelican State
Area:
135,900 sq km/52,457 sq mi
Capital:
Baton Rouge
Towns and Cities:
New Orleans, Shreveport, Lafayette, Lake Charles
Physical:
Mississippi River
Features:
Sabine Wildlife Refuge Tower; Cajun country (Acadiana), including St
Martinville (the 18th- century `Petit Paris´, with the church of St
Martin de Tours and the Petit Paris Museum), and Lafayette (40% of the
population speak Cajun French); Poverty Point State Commemorative Area,
with prehistoric Native American sites dating from 1800-500 BC; Natchitoches,
the oldest permanent European settlement of the Louisiana Purchase;
plantation mansions, many designed by Henry Howard, including Nottoway
(1859, the largest plantation mansion in the South, with 64 rooms),
Madewood, Destrahan Plantation (the oldest surviving plantation in the
Mississippi Valley), Rosedown Plantation and Gardens (1835), and Magnolia
Mound Plantation; New Orleans, the birthplace of Dixieland jazz, with
Mardi Gras celebrations, the French Quarter (Vieux Carré) around Jackson
Square (the site of the original colony founded in 1718; the only surviving
building is the Old Ursuline Convent, 1749), St Louis Cemetery No. 1
(1789), Louisiana State Museum, 1850s House, Beauregard-Keyes House
(home of novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes), St Louis Cathedral (1794),
the Voodoo Museum, and the Garden District with mid-19th-century estates
; Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve; Chalmette National
Historic Park; old houses in St Francisville; the old state capitol,
Baton Rouge (1849); Port Hudson State Commemorative Area, site of Civil
War battle; Tulane University; Audubon State Commemorative Area, where
John James Audubon executed most of his Birds of America paintings;
the American Rose Centre, headquarters of the American Rose Society
at Shreveport
Industries:
Rice, cotton, sugar, oil, natural gas, chemicals, sulphur, fish and
shellfish, salt, processed foods, petroleum products, timber, paper
Population:
(1995) 4,342,300; including Cajuns, descendants of 18th-century religious
exiles from Canada, who speak a French dialect
Famous People:
Louis Armstrong, P G T Beauregard, Truman Capote, Lillian Hellman,
Huey Long
History:
Explored by the Spanish Piñ eda in 1519, Cabeza de Vaca in 1528, and
Hernando de Soto in 1541, and by the French explorer Robert de
la Salle in 1662. He named it after Louis XIV and claimed it for
France. It became Spanish in 1762, then French in 1800, then passed
to the USA in 1803 under the Louisiana Purchase. It was admitted
to the Union as a state in 1812. The Civil War destroyed the plantation
economy. Recovery was slow, but in the 1930s Louisiana became
one of the world's main centres of petrochemical manufacturing,
based on oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico.
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