Cultural_New+Orleans+1940-1950

1.New Orleans 1940- 1950 2. Samantha De Bonis

3.

4. Similar to the early American settlements along Massachusetts Bay and Chesapeake Bay on the Atlantic coast, New Orleans served as a distinctive cultural gateway to North America, where peoples from Europe and Africa initially intertwined their lives and customs with those of the native inhabitants of the New World. The resulting way of life differed dramatically from the culture that was spawned in the English colonies of North America. The New Orleans Creole population (those with ancestry rooted in the city's colonial era) ensured not only that English was not the prevailing language, but also that Protestantism was scorned, public education unheralded, and democratic government untried. As times were changing in America, isolation helped magnify the differences from new orleans and the rest of the country. As a result of this, "it remained for the next hundred years an outpost of the French and Spanish empires until Napoleon sold it to the United States with the rest of the Louisiana purchase in 1803" (Hirsch). After this time period there was a un-president amount of arguments on which culture the state should adopt. This created many riots as well as troubled revolutions, as more and more people decedent to new orleans the more deputes occur. As a result of this they split the state and almost had two different governments (the native pride and the new comers). Evidence of this early cleavage still survives in the city's oldest quarters. A ride on a St. Charles streetcar will take a visitor away from the exotic French Quarter (the original downtown old city or Vieux Carré of the Creoles), initially through a business district more like that of the rest of America, and then through neighborhoods such as the lower and upper Garden Districts that look a little like Charleston or Savannah. Further still, through the University district, neighborhoods emerge filled with Victorian homes once common in American cities. "Because the highest ground in this largely below sea level city runs along the natural levees of the city, the streetcar takes its riders on a passage through historical eras and their evolving architectural taste"(logsdon). Indeed, one of the city's nicknames, the Crescent City, came from the pattern of its growth along the river, which made a large bend through the delta starting at the original French settlement and moving out to the once separate town of Carrollton. The streetcar, the oldest surviving trolley in the United States, was constructed to connect those two 19th century settlements. Furthermore, the culture of this state has been divided for centuries however connected by the one and only represented street car.

Works cited Hirsch, Arnold R. "The People of New Orleans." The People of New Orleans. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2013.

Logsdon, Joseph. "New Orleans." New Orleans at It's Best. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2013.

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