- Title
- North Carolina historical review [1928 : October]
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-
- Date
- October 1928
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-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
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North Carolina historical review [1928 : October]
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The North Carolina
Historical Review
Volume V October, 1928 Number 4
THE PRESERVATION OF LOUISIANA
HISTORY
By Grace King
A student of history welcomes the opportunity to talk about
the archives of Louisiana, a subject fraught with interesting epi¬
sodes and experiences. In the middle of the last century Louis¬
iana archives lay in a kind of terra incognita, whose aspect chilled
all ardor of investigation.
The earliest historians of the State, Francois Xavier Martin and
Charles Gayarre, our first native Louisiana historian, gave no help
to would be writers. Martin’s dry chronicle published in New
Orleans in 1827, stepped majestically from great event to great
event, making no detours or elucidations; while Gayarre ’s Esquisses
Historiques, published three years later, could be called truthfully
only a translation of Martin into French if one did not feel behind
the narrative the throbbing of youthful blood and a mind of fresh
initiative. The excuse has been made for both historians that liv¬
ing so close to colonial days, and in the midst of traditions fresh
from original sources, they felt dispensed from the necessity of
consulting documentary evidence. They wrote what they knew,
and so correct were they in their accounts that they are quoted
today as authorities.
Louisiana, to recall the high points of her adventurous history
was, from 1699 to 1763, a colony of France; then it became a prov¬
ince of Spain, passing in 1803 into the possession of the United
States after a short return to France under Bonaparte. Termi¬
nating a probation as territory, it was admitted into the Union
in 1811, from which is seceeded in 1861 to enter the Southern
Confederacy.
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