1 Jun 2010

New Orleans Pelicans

Charles Abner Powell (1860-1952), the “father” of the New Orleans Pelicans, came to New Orleans in 1887 and became a member of the city’s first professional team. As manager of the Pelicans, he invented the rain check, conceived the idea of covering the diamond with tarpaulin to prevent flooding of the field during rainstorms, and […]

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25 May 2010

Louisiana State Bank

New Orleans’s banks have had a checkered history. Excessive capitalization, Poor banking laws, the panic of 1837, the capture of the city and its long occupation during Reconstruction, the panics of 1873 and 1879, and the bank holidav of 1933 form vivid chapters in the century and a half of New Orleans banking. One of […]

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19 May 2010

New Orleans WW II History

World War II broke out in New Orleans during Maestri’s administration. New Orleans’s shipyards were quickly expanded-the Delta Shipyards turned out the first 1o,500-ton ship, the Wm. C. C. Claiborne, less than four months after Pearl Harbor-and by May, 1942, Andrew Jackson Higgins ha gathered a force of more than forty thousand workers to turn out […]

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18 May 2010

New Orleans Fine Arts History

The earliest known painter who worked in New Orleans was Jean Pierre Lassus, the surveyor-painter. But he did not remain long in the colony. His Veue et Perspective de la Nouvelle Orleans, painted in 1726, hangs on the walls of the French National Archives in Paris. Any portraits or scenes of New Orleans painted in […]

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