Charting Louisiana: Five Hundred Years of Maps

Front Cover
Alfred Emmette Lemmon, John T. Magill, Jason R. Wiese, John R. Hébert
Historic New Orleans Collection, 2003 - History - 383 pages

New Orleans thrived under Spanish rule (1762-1803), linked through trade and empire to the nerve centers of the circum-Caribbean. Curator Alfred E. Lemmon's introduction in this bilingual volume explores the far-reaching ways in which the Spanish influence is evident in the city to this day, in architecture, agriculture, science, and the arts. Two additional essays by noted scholars examine other facets of the city's development during this period: Light Townsend Cummins reflects on the city's role as an outpost of the Enlightenment in the Americas, while Richard Campanella explores the growth of city planning and urbanism.

The Spanish period saw shifts in the legal landscape surrounding slavery, as well as the dramatic growth of the city's population of free people of color. The daily lives of New Orleanians, and the city's constant interaction with the Caribbean and the greater Spanish empire, are documented in the surviving examples of material culture, maps, manuscripts, and artworks presented here.

Distributed for The Historic New Orleans Collection

About the author (2003)

Alfred E. Lemmon is Director of the Williams Research Center of The Historic New Orleans Collection. An authority on French and Spanish colonial cultural history, he has been published in numerous books, encyclopedias, and scholarly journals in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Light Townsend Cummins is the Guy M. Bryan Professor of History, Emeritus, at Austin College and served as the official State Historian of Texas in 2012. Richard Campanella, Senior Professor of Practice at the Tulane School of Architecture, is the author of ten books and over two hundred other publications on New Orleans and Louisiana geography, history, architecture, urbanism, and culture.

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