If you we’re looking for just one book…

THE WORLD THAT MADE NEW ORLEANS

If you're looking for one single book to give you a general overview of the history of New Orleans, this is it! Ned Sublette does a great job sharing our history and unearthing the cultural influences that make New Orleans the unique city that it is.

THE GREAT POWER OF SMALL NATIONS

In The Great Power of Small Nations, Elizabeth N. Ellis (Peoria) tells the stories of the many smaller Native American nations that shaped the development of the Gulf South. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Ellis’s narrative chronicles how diverse Indigenous peoples―including Biloxis, Choctaws, Chitimachas, Chickasaws, Houmas, Mobilians, and Tunicas―influenced and often challenged the growth of colonial Louisiana. The book centers on questions of Native nation-building and international diplomacy, and it argues that Native American migration and practices of offering refuge to migrants in crisis enabled Native nations to survive the violence of colonization.

RETURN TO YAKNI CHITTO: HOUMA MIGRATIONs BY MONIQUE VERDIN

In South Louisiana, we live on a power point of our planet. A place where water comes to be purified. A place where 1,000-year-old cypress trees once grew. A place where fish still come to spawn and birds to nest. A place close to the Gulf of Mexico but where, as the old people used to say, "sweet water" could still be found that was fresh and good to drink. There is no sweet water down the bayou in Terrebonne Parish anymore. In this work Monique Verdin attempts to make sense of the strange beauty left here―the magic that is entangled in the ugliest underbelly of a plantation economy surrendered to the petro-chemical industry. As indigenous and métis people reclaiming New Orleans' original name, Bulbancha, Verdin reflects on the connections of unexpected, non-coincidental, life-affirming experiences that fuse the stories of the native people of Southern Louisiana with our hopes and prayers for a better future.

THE HISTORIC INDIAN TRIBES OF LOUISIANA

Although many specialized studies have been written about Louisiana's Indian tribes, no complete account has appeared regarding their long, varied history. The Historic Indian Tribes of Louisiana: From 1542 to the Present is a highly informative study that reconstructs the history and cultural evolution of these people. This study identifies tribal groups, charts their migrations within the state, and discusses their languages and customs.

AMERICAN INDIANS IN EARLY NEW ORLEANS: FROM CALUMET TO RAQUETTE

From a peace ceremony conducted by Chitimacha diplomats before Governor Bienville’s makeshift cabin in 1718 to a stickball match played by Choctaw teams in 1897 in Athletic Park, American Indians greatly influenced the history and culture of the Crescent City during its first two hundred years. In American Indians in Early New Orleans, Daniel H. Usner lays to rest assumptions that American Indian communities vanished long ago from urban south Louisiana and recovers the experiences of Native Americans in Old New Orleans from their perspective.

MOBILIAN TRADE LANGUAGE PHRASEBOOK & LEXICON

The Mobilian Trade Language (aka Mobilian Jargon) is a Native American pidgin, primarily based on Muskogean languages, that was spoken in the North American Southeast until the 1950s. For centuries, Mobilian Trade Language served as a lingua franca for various indigenous groups (and later Europeans and Africans) that came together for trade and ritual. As a pidgin, the language is grammatically streamlined and easy to learn. This book is a phrasebook with bidirectional lexicon that can help reawaken this now dormant language by providing a handy lexical reference and common phrases.

1491 BY CHARLES C. MANN

This book explores Native cultures in the Americans before Columbus sailed to the continent in 1492. I’m including this on the list because Charles C. Mann includes an exploration of Hernando de Soto (the first European to discover the river) and the effects European presence had on the Native population along the Mississippi.

JOLLIET AND MARQUETTE: A NEW HISTORY OF THE 1673 EXPEDITION

Often viewed in isolation, the Jolliet and Marquette expedition in fact took place against a sprawling backdrop that encompassed everything from ancient Native American cities to French colonial machinations. Mark Walczynski draws on a wealth of original research to place the explorers and their journey within seventeenth-century North America. His account takes readers among the region’s diverse Native American peoples and into a vanished natural world of treacherous waterways and native flora and fauna.

THE LA SALLE EXPEDITION ON THE Mississippi River

The La Salle Expedition on the Mississippi River presents the definitive English translation of Nicolas de La Salle’s diary account of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s 1682 discovery expedition of the Mississippi River from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This previously unknown manuscript copy was discovered recently in the collection of rare books in the Texas State Archives.

LA SALLE: EXPLORER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN FRONTIER

Seventeenth-century North America was a dangerous, untamed land, a vast wilderness where settlers, fur traders, and missionaries all struggled to eke out an existence. But the New World was also a place that attracted a special breed—men with a thirst for adventure and discovery. Robert Cavelier de La Salle, whose energy and single-minded ambition made him one of the greatest explorers of the time, was such a man.
At the age of twenty-four, La Salle crossed the Atlantic to America. Like Columbus before him, he was obsessed with finding a western passage to China. But the New World so intrigued him and inflamed his imagination that he abandoned the Far East for the mysteries of the still uncharted regions of North America.

IBERVILLE’S GULF JOURNALS

Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville was the head of the Naval officers that established the first French Settlement on the Gulf Coast.

Fleur de Lys and Calumet BY ANDRE PENICAUT

Andre Penicaut, a carpenter, sailed with Iberville to the French province of Louisiana in 1699 and did not return to France until 1721. The book he began in the province and finished upon his return to France is an eyewitness account of the first years of the French colony, which stretched along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas and in the Mississippi Valley from the Balize to the Illinois country. As a ship carpenter, Penicaut was chosen as a member of several important expeditions: he accompanied Le Sueur up the Mississippi River in 1700 to present-day Minnesota, and he went with Juchereau de St. Denis on the first journey from Mobile to the Red River and overland to the Rio Grande, to open trade with the Spaniards in Mexico. Penicaut helped to build the first post in Louisiana, at Old Biloxi, and the second post on the Mobile River.

LA RÉVOLTE DES NATCHES BY ARNAUD BALVAY

When the French Commander, Sieur de Chépart, encroached on Natchez land to further his tobacco enterprise resistance would ensue. It wasn’t the first squirmish that the French would have with the Natchez. Chief Tattoed Serpant tried to maintain peace between the two peoples. After his death and further land confiscation the Natchez would act to protect their territory. In doing so they killed over 200 French settlers. In response Governor Etienne Périer ordered the nearby peaceful Chaouchas to be slaughtered. The genocide would continue as the French tracked the Natchez, killed most, and sold some into slavery in Saint-Domingue.

BIENVILLE: FATHER OF LOUISIANA

This book looks at the life of Jean Baptiste Le Moyne Bienville, the French governor of Louisiana and the founder of New Orleans.

THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA BY ANTOINE-SIMON LE PAGE DU PRATZ

Le Page, who arrived in Louisiana August 25, 1718, three months after leaving La Rochelle, spent four months at Dauphin Island before he and his men made their way to Bayou St. John where he set up a plantation. He had at last reached New Orleans, which he correctly states, existed only in name, and had to occupy an old lodge once used by an Acolapissa Indian. Le Page writes extensively about the First Nations people that occupied the region.

MILLIONAIRE: THE PHILANDERER, GAMBLER, AND DUELIST WHO INVENTED MODERN FINANCE

John Law is one of the chief architects behind the founding of New Orleans. A man of legends and with a story you simply can’t make up. The word Millionaire would be coined out his outlandish claims of the fortunes that were to be obtained by investing in Louisiana. To truly understand the founding of New Orleans, John Law’s story and the Mississippi Bubble can’t be overlooked.

THE ACCIDENTAL CITY BY LAWRENCE N. POWELL

This is the story of a city that shouldn’t exist. In the seventeenth century, what is now America’s most beguiling metropolis was nothing more than a swamp: prone to flooding, infested with snakes, battered by hurricanes. But through the intense imperial rivalries of Spain, France, and England, and the ambitious, entrepreneurial merchants and settlers from four continents who risked their lives to succeed in colonial America, this unpromising site became a crossroads for the whole Atlantic world.

BIENVILLE’S DILEMMA BY RICHARD CAMPANELLA

All New Orleans' glories, tragedies, contributions, and complexities can be traced back to the geographical dilemma Bienville confronted in 1718 when selecting the primary location of New Orleans. "Bienville's Dilemma" presents sixty-eight articles on the historical geography of New Orleans, covering the formation and foundation of the city, its urbanization and population, its "humanization" into a place of distinction, the manipulation of its environment, its devastation by Hurricane Katrina, and its ongoing recovery.

MUTINOUS WOMEN: HOW FRENCH CONVICTS BECAME FOUNDING MOTHERS OF THE GULF COAST

In 1719, a ship named La Mutine (the mutinous woman), sailed from the French port of Le Havre, bound for the Mississippi. It was loaded with urgently needed goods for the fledgling French colony, but its principal commodity was a new kind of export: women.

Falsely accused of sex crimes, these women were prisoners, shackled in the ship’s hold. Of the 132 women who were sent this way, only 62 survived. But these women carved out a place for themselves in the colonies that would have been impossible in France, making advantageous marriages and accumulating property. Many were instrumental in the building of New Orleans and in settling Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, and Mississippi.

Joan DeJean draws from an impressive range of sources to restore the voices of these women to the historical record, Mutinous Women introduces us to the Gulf South’s Founding Mothers.

MANON LESCAUT BY ABBÉ PRÉVOST

This is one of my all time favorite novels. To my knowledge it’s the first novel to mention and describe New Orleans. If you read Mutinous Women (linked above) then this is required reading! Manon Lescaut was banned when it was first published in France in the 1730’s. The story is full of twist and turns and ultimately lands Manon Lescaut in La Pitié-Salpêtrière. When she’s deported from La Havre to New Orleans she’s followed by her lover Des Grieux. The novel has been brilliantly translated into Opera by Puccini…it’s also worth an investigation. This new translation includes the vignette and eight illustrations that were approved by Prévost and first published in the edition of 1753.

AFRICANS IN COLONIAL LOUISIANA

Although a number of important studies of American slavery have explored the formation of slave cultures in the English colonies, no book until now has undertaken a comprehensive assessment of the development of the distinctive Afro-Creole culture of colonial Louisiana. This culture, based upon a separate language community with its own folkloric, musical, religious, and historical traditions, was created by slaves brought directly from Africa to Louisiana before 1731.

SOUL BY SOUL: LIFE INSIDE THE ANTEBELLUM SLAVE MARKET

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each. What emerges is not only the brutal economics of trading but the vast and surprising interdependencies among the actors involved.

CRUCIBLE OF WAR: THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR AND THE FATE OF EMPIRE IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, 1754-1766

In this vivid and compelling narrative, the Seven Years' War–long seen as a mere backdrop to the American Revolution–takes on a whole new significance. Relating the history of the war as it developed, Anderson shows how the complex array of forces brought into conflict helped both to create Britain’s empire and to sow the seeds of its eventual dissolution.

Beginning with a skirmish in the Pennsylvania backcountry involving an inexperienced George Washington, the Iroquois chief Tanaghrisson, and the ill-fated French emissary Jumonville, Anderson reveals a chain of events that would lead to world conflagration. Weaving together the military, economic, and political motives of the participants with unforgettable portraits of Washington, William Pitt, Montcalm, and many others, Anderson brings a fresh perspective to one of America’s most important wars, demonstrating how the forces unleashed there would irrevocably change the politics of empire in North America.

THE WAR THAT MADE AMERICA: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

In this edition Fred Anderson offers a more condensed history of Crucible of War (linked above). This book is based on the PBS series with the same title (Check it out here). The French and Indian War -the North American phase of a far larger conflagration, the Seven Years' War-remains one of the most important, and yet misunderstood, episodes in American history. Fred Anderson takes readers on a remarkable journey through the vast conflict that, between 1755 and 1763, destroyed the French Empire in North America, overturned the balance of power on two continents, undermined the ability of Indian nations to determine their destinies, and lit the "long fuse" of the American Revolution. Beautifully illustrated and recounted by an expert storyteller, The War That Made America is required reading for anyone interested in the ways in which war has shaped the history of America and its peoples.