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In an extraordinary feat of research and intrepid historical navigation, Carl A. Brasseaux and Keith P. Fontenot serve as guides through the labyrinthian and often harrowing world of Louisiana bayou steamboat journeys of the mid to late nineteenth century. The bayou country's steamboat saga mirrors in microcosm the tale of America's most colorful -- and most highly romanticized -- transportation era. But Brasseaux and Fontenot brace readers with a boldly revisionist picture of the opulent Mississippi River floating palaces: stripped-down, utilitarian freight-haulers belching smoke from twin stacks, churning through shallow swamps and narrow tributary streams, and encountering such hazards as shoals, sawyers, stumps, highwater and dry-bed seasons, and the remains of vessels claimed by those treacheries. For decades, steamboats transported goods, passengers, and mail between New Orleans and south Louisiana's vibrant interior agricultural region, bearing testimony to the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and tenacity of crews in conquering the challenges posed by a forbidding environment. Brasseaux and Fontenot marshaled a monumental array of information, including sources long-buried in courthouses, private collections, and the records of the Army Corps of Engineers. They offer data on some five hundred steamboats, keelboats, and barges known to have operated in the bayou country. This book is the first major study of a fascinating slice of the steamboat industry, showcasing a trade critically important to New Orleans's prosperity but largely forgotten in southern historiography until now. Encompassing economic, social, transportation, and environmental history, it captures the period just before the iron horse emerged as America's undisputed master of inland conveyance.
Publisher Fact Sheet Bagur examines water transportation & the natural & socioeconomic factors that affected it in Northwest Louisiana, East Texas, & the Red River.
The arrival of the first steamboat, The New Orleans, in early 1812 touched off an economic revolution in the South. In states west of the Appalachian Mountains, the operation of steamboats quickly grew into a booming business that would lead to new cultural practices and a stronger sectional identity. In Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom, Robert Gudmestad examines the wide-ranging influence of steamboats on the southern economy. From carrying cash crops to market to contributing to slave productivity, increasing the flexibility of labor, and connecting southerners to overlapping orbits of regional, national, and international markets, steamboats not only benefited slaveholders and northern industries but also affected cotton production. This technology literally put people into motion, and travelers developed an array of unique cultural practices, from gambling to boat races. Gudmestad also asserts that the intersection of these riverboats and the environment reveals much about sectional identity in antebellum America. As federal funds backed railroad construction instead of efforts to clear waterways for steamboats, southerners looked to coordinate their own economic development, free of national interests. Steamboats and the Rise of the Cotton Kingdom offers new insights into the remarkable and significant history of transportation and commerce in the prewar South.
Louisiana's bayous and their watersheds teem with cypress trees, alligators, crawfish, and many other life forms. From Bayou Tigre to Half Moon Bayou, these sluggish streams meander through lowlands, marshes, and even uplands to dominate the state's landscape. In Bayou-Diversity, conservationist Kelby Ouchley reveals the bayou's intricate web of flora and fauna. Through a collection of essays about Louisiana's natural history, Ouchley details an amazing array of plants and animals found in the Bayou State. Baldcypress, orchids, feral hogs, eels, black bears, bald eagles, and cottonmouth snakes live in the well over a hundred bayous of the region. Collectively, Ouchley's vignettes portray vibrant and complex habitats. But human interaction with the bayou and our role in its survival, Ouchley argues, will determine the future of these intricate ecosystems. Bayou-Diversity narrates the story of the bayou one flower, one creature at a time, in turn illustrating the bigger picture of this treasured and troubled Louisiana landscape.
River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U.S. expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War.
In Troubled Waters, Paul F. Paskoff offers a comprehensive examination of the federal government's river improvements program, which aimed to reduce hazards to navigation on the great rivers of America's interior during the early and mid-nineteenth century. Danger on the rivers came in a variety of forms. Shoals, rapids, ice, rocks, sandbars, and uprooted trees and submerged steamboat wrecks lodged in river beds were the most common perils and accounted for the largest number of steamboat disasters. This daunting array of river hazards required a similarly broad range of efforts to remove or at least ameliorate them. Against a variety of obstacles -- natural, political, and technological -- the river improvements program succeeded in reducing the rate of steamboat loss, even as steamboat traffic dramatically increased. Its success, Paskoff argues, demonstrates that the federal government was far more active than generally thought in promoting economic growth and development in the years leading up to the Civil War.The river improvements program was one of the most volatile issues in national, sectional, and state politics, touching on questions of economic development, constitutional law, partisan politics, and sectional rivalry. Paskoff examines the controversial program from its beginnings during the early republic to 1844, giving careful attention to the policies of Andrew Jackson's administration. He explores the array of objections to the program -- some grounded in a strict interpretation of the Constitution and others in a concern over alleged federal wantonness, corruption, and waste -- and follows the political story through the administration of James K. Polk forward to secession. Paskoff also explains the fiscal, economic, and technological aspects of the hazard problem and its solution, analyzing the federal government's fiscal condition, its capacity to undertake such an ambitious program, and the influence of conditions in the larger economy, including effects of the Mexican War, upon the federal government's finances.Paskoff's lively analysis rests on a bedrock of impressive quantitative evidence, including databases containing every documented steamboat wreck -- more than 1,200 -- on American rivers, lakes, and coastal waters; construction and engine data for more than 600 steamboat packets; and all relevant federal appropriations and expenditures measures, more than 2,300 spending projects in all. Vigorously researched and vividly told, Troubled Waters is an essential contribution to the history of internal improvements in the antebellum United States.
Recipient of a 2017 Book of the Year Award presented by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Shane K. Bernard's Teche examines this legendary waterway of the American Deep South. Bernard delves into the bayou's geologic formation as a vestige of the Mississippi and Red Rivers, its prehistoric Native American occupation, and its colonial settlement by French, Spanish, and, eventually, Anglo-American pioneers. He surveys the coming of indigo, cotton, and sugar; steam-powered sugar mills and riverboats; and the brutal institution of slavery. He also examines the impact of the Civil War on the Teche, depicting the running battles up and down the bayou and the sporadic gunboat duels, when ironclads clashed in the narrow confines of the dark, sluggish river. Describing the misery of the postbellum era, Bernard reveals how epic floods, yellow fever, racial violence, and widespread poverty disrupted the lives of those who resided under the sprawling, moss-draped live oaks lining the Teche's banks. Further, he chronicles the slow decline of the bayou, as the coming of the railroad, automobiles, and highways reduced its value as a means of travel. Finally, he considers modern efforts to redesign the Teche using dams, locks, levees, and other water-control measures. He examines the recent push to clean and revitalize the bayou after years of desecration by litter, pollutants, and invasive species. Illustrated with historic images and numerous maps, this book will be required reading for anyone seeking the colorful history of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. As a bonus, the second part of the book describes Bernard's own canoe journey down the Teche's 125-mile course. This modern personal account from the field reveals the current state of the bayou and the remarkable people who still live along its banks.
Because of its strong agrarian roots, the South has typically been viewed as a region not favorably disposed to innovation and technology. Yet innovation was never absent from industrialization in this part of the United States. From the early nineteenth century onward, southerners were as eager as other Americans to embrace technology as a path to modernity. This volume features seven essays that range widely across the region and its history, from the antebellum era to the present, to assess the role of innovations presumed lacking by most historians. Offering a challenging interpretation of industrialization in the South, these writings show that the benefits of innovations had to be carefully weighed against the costs to both industry and society. The essays consider a wide range of innovative technologies. Some examine specific industries in subregions: steamboats in the lower Mississippi valley, textile manufacturing in Georgia and Arkansas, coal mining in Virginia, and sugar planting and processing in Louisiana. Others consider the role of technology in South Carolina textile mills around the turn of the twentieth century, the electrification of the Tennessee valley, and telemedicine in contemporary Arizona--marking the expansion of the region into the southwestern Sunbelt. Together, these articles show that southerners set significant limitations on what technological innovations they were willing to adopt, particularly in a milieu where slaveholding agriculture had shaped the allocation of resources. They also reveal how scarcity of capital and continued reliance on agriculture influenced that allocation into the twentieth century, relieved eventually by federal spending during the Depression and its aftermath that sparked the Sunbelt South's economic boom. Technology, Innovation, and Southern Industrialization clearly demonstrates that the South's embrace of technological innovation in the modern era doesn't mark a radical change from the past but rather signals that such pursuits were always part of the region's economy. It deflates the myth of southern agrarianism while expanding the scope of antebellum American industrialization beyond the Northeast and offers new insights into the relationship of southern economic history to the region's society and politics.
The truck system was a global phenomenon in the period 1865-1920, where workers were paid through the company store. In Beyond Racism and Poverty Karin Lurvink looks at how this system functioned on plantations in Louisiana in comparison with peateries in the Netherlands. In the United States, the system is often viewed as a 'second slavery' and strongly associated with racism. In the Netherlands, however, not racism but poverty has been seen as the main reason for its continued existence. By using a variety of historical sources and by analyzing the perspectives of both employers and workers, Lurvink provides new insights into how the truck system worked and can be explained. She reveals how the system was not only coercive but had advantages for the workers as well, which should not be overlooked.
This set provides insight into the lives of ordinary Americans free and enslaved, in farms and cities, in the North and the South, who lived during the years of 1815 to 1860. Throughout the Antebellum Era resonated the theme of change: migration, urban growth, the economy, and the growing divide between North and South all led to great changes to which Americans had to respond. By gathering the important aspects of antebellum Americans' lives into an encyclopedia, The World of Antebellum America provides readers with the opportunity to understand how people across America lived and worked, what politics meant to them, and how they shaped or were shaped by economics. Entries on simple topics such as bread and biscuits explore workers' need for calories, the role of agriculture, and gendered divisions of labor, while entries on more complex topics, such as aging and death, disclose Americans' feelings about life itself. Collectively, the entries pull the reader into the lives of ordinary Americans, while section introductions tie together the entries and provide an overarching narrative that primes readers to understand key concepts about antebellum America before delving into Americans' lives in detail.