New Orleans
New Orleans is a consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U. S. state of Louisiana. With an estimated population of 393,292 in 2017, it is the most populous city in Louisiana. A major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast region of the United States. New Orleans is world-renowned for its distinct music, Creole cuisine, unique dialect, its annual celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras; the historic heart of the city is the French Quarter, known for its French and Spanish Creole architecture and vibrant nightlife along Bourbon Street. The city has been described as the "most unique" in the United States, owing in large part to its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage. Founded in 1718 by French colonists, New Orleans was once the territorial capital of French Louisiana before being traded to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New Orleans in 1840 was the third-most populous city in the United States, it was the largest city in the American South from the Antebellum era until after World War II.
The city's location and flat elevation have made it vulnerable to flooding. State and federal authorities have installed a complex system of levees and drainage pumps in an effort to protect the city. New Orleans was affected by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which resulted in flooding more than 80% of the city, thousands of deaths, so much displacement because of damaged communities and lost housing as to cause a population decline of over 50%. Since Katrina, major redevelopment efforts have led to a rebound in the city's population. Concerns about gentrification, new residents buying property in closely knit communities, displacement of longtime residents have been expressed; the city and Orleans Parish are coterminous. As of 2017, Orleans Parish is the third most-populous parish in Louisiana, behind East Baton Rouge Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish; the city and parish are bounded by St. Tammany Parish and Lake Pontchartrain to the north, St. Bernard Parish and Lake Borgne to the east, Plaquemines Parish to the south, Jefferson Parish to the south and west.
The city anchors the larger New Orleans metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 1,275,762 in 2017. It is the most populous metropolitan area in Louisiana and the 46th-most populated MSA in the United States; the city is named after the Duke of Orleans, who reigned as Regent for Louis XV from 1715 to 1723. It has many illustrative nicknames: Crescent City alludes to the course of the Lower Mississippi River around and through the city; the Big Easy was a reference by musicians in the early 20th century to the relative ease of finding work there. It may have originated in the Prohibition era, when the city was considered one big speakeasy due to the government's inability to control alcohol sales, in open violation of the 18th Amendment; the City that Care Forgot has been used since at least 1938, refers to the outwardly easy-going, carefree nature of the residents. La Nouvelle-Orléans was founded in the Spring of 1718 by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha.
It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Regent of the Kingdom of France at the time. His title came from the French city of Orléans; the French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the Treaty of Paris, following France's defeat by Great Britain in the Seven Years' War. During the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans was an important port for smuggling aid to the rebels, transporting military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River. Beginning in the 1760s, Filipinos began to settle around New Orleans. Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez launched a southern campaign against the British from the city in 1779. Nueva Orleans remained under Spanish control until 1803, when it reverted to French rule. Nearly all of the surviving 18th-century architecture of the Vieux Carré dates from the Spanish period, notably excepting the Old Ursuline Convent. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Thereafter, the city grew with influxes of Americans, French and Africans.
Immigrants were Irish, Germans and Italians. Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on nearby large plantations. Thousands of refugees from the 1804 Haitian Revolution, both whites and free people of color, arrived in New Orleans. While Governor Claiborne and other officials wanted to keep out additional free black people, the French Creoles wanted to increase the French-speaking population; as more refugees were allowed into the Territory of Orleans, Haitian émigrés who had first gone to Cuba arrived. Many of the white Francophones had been deported by officials in Cuba in retaliation for Bonapartist schemes. Nearly 90 percent of these immigrants settled in New Orleans; the 1809 migration brought 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, 3,226 slaves of African descent, doubling the city's population. The city became a greater proportion than Charleston, South Carolina's 53 percent. During the final campaign of the War of 1812, the British sent a force of 11,000 in a
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Abolitionism in the United States
Abolitionism in the United States was the movement before and during the American Civil War to end slavery in the United States. In the Americas and western Europe, abolitionism was a movement to end the Atlantic slave trade and set slaves free. In the 17th century, enlightenment thinkers condemned slavery on humanistic grounds and English Quakers and some Evangelical denominations condemned slavery as un-Christian. At that time, most slaves were Africans, but thousands of Native Americans were enslaved. In the 18th century, as many as six million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves, at least a third of them on British ships to North America; the colony of Georgia abolished slavery within its territory, thereafter, abolition was part of the message of the First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s in the Thirteen Colonies. Rationalist thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment criticized slavery for violating natural rights. A member of the British Parliament, James Edward Oglethorpe, was among the first to articulate the Enlightenment case against slavery.
Founder of the Province of Georgia, Oglethorpe banned slavery on humanistic grounds. He argued against it in Parliament and encouraged his friends Granville Sharp and Hannah More to vigorously pursue the cause. Soon after his death in 1785, Sharp and More joined with William Wilberforce and others in forming the Clapham Sect. Although anti-slavery sentiments were widespread by the late 18th century, many colonies and emerging nations continued to use and defend the traditions of slavery. During and following the American Revolution, Northern states, beginning with Pennsylvania in 1780, passed legislation during the next two decades abolishing slavery, sometimes by gradual emancipation. Massachusetts ratified a constitution. In other states, such as Virginia, similar declarations of rights were interpreted by the courts as not applicable to Africans. During the ensuing decades, the abolitionist movement grew in Northern states, Congress regulated the expansion of slavery as new states were admitted to the Union.
Britain banned the importation of African slaves in its colonies in 1807 and banned slavery in the British Empire in 1833. The United States criminalized the international slave trade in 1808 and made slavery unconstitutional in 1865 as a result of the American Civil War. Historian James M. McPherson defines an abolitionist "as one who before the Civil War had agitated for the immediate and total abolition of slavery in the United States", he does not include antislavery activists such as Abraham Lincoln, U. S. President during the Civil War, or the Republican Party, which called for the gradual ending of slavery. Abolitionism in the United States was an expression of moralism, operating in tandem with other social reform efforts, such as the temperance movement; the first Americans who made a public protest against slavery were the Mennonites of Germantown, Pennsylvania. Soon after, in April 1688, Quakers in the same town wrote a two-page condemnation of the practice and sent it to the governing bodies of their Quaker church, the Society of Friends.
The Quaker establishment never took action. The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was an unusually early and forceful argument against slavery and initiated the spirit that led to the end of slavery in the Society of Friends and in the state of Pennsylvania; the Quaker Quarterly Meeting of Chester, made its first protest in 1711. Within a few decades the entire slave trade was under attack, being opposed by such leaders as William Burling, Benjamin Lay, Ralph Sandiford, William Southby, John Woolman. Slavery was banned in the Province of Georgia soon after its founding in 1733; the colony's founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, fended off repeated attempts by South Carolina merchants and land speculators to introduce slavery to the colony. In 1739, he wrote to the Georgia Trustees urging them to hold firm: "If we allow slaves we act against the principles by which we associated together, to relieve the distresses. Whereas, now we should occasion the misery of thousands in Africa, by setting men upon using arts to buy and bring into perpetual slavery the poor people who now live there free."
The struggle between Georgia and South Carolina led to the first debates in Parliament over the issue of slavery, occurring between 1740 and 1742. The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was the first American abolition society, formed 14 April 1775, in Philadelphia by Quakers; the society suspended operations during the American Revolutionary War and was reorganized in 1784, with Benjamin Franklin as its first president. Rhode Island Quakers, associated with Moses Brown, were among the first in America to free slaves. Benjamin Rush was another leader. John Woolman gave up most of his business in 1756 to devote himself to campaigning against slavery along with other Quakers. One of the first articles advocating the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery was written by Thomas Paine. Titled "African Slavery in America", it appeared on 8 March 1775 in the Postscript to the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser. Beginning with Vermont in 1777, most states north of the Ohio River and the Mason–Dixon line abolished slavery.
These states enacted the first abolition laws in the entire New World. Slavery in Massachusetts was abolished by the judiciary; the State Constitution adopted in 1780 declared all men to have rights, making slavery unenforceable. Emancipation in many free states was gradual. Enslaved people
Thomas Lincoln
Thomas Lincoln was an American farmer and father of 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Unlike some of his ancestors, Lincoln could not write, but he was a well-respected community and church member known for his honesty. Lincoln struggled to make a successful living for his family and met challenges of Kentucky real estate border disputes, the early death of his first wife, the integration of his second wife's family into his own family before making his final home in Illinois. Lincoln was descended from Samuel Lincoln, a respected Puritan weaver and trader from the County of Norfolk in East Anglia who landed in Hingham in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1637; some Lincolns migrated into Berks County, where they intermarried with Quakers, but did not retain the peculiar ways. According to the National Humanities Center, both Quakers and Puritans were opposed to slavery. Noteworthy ancestors include Samuel's grandson, Mordecai who married Hannah Salter from a prominent political family, made a name for himself in Pennsylvania society as a wealthy landowner and ironmaster.
Mordecai and Hannah's son, John Lincoln settled in Rockingham County and built a large, prosperous farm nestled in Shenandoah Valley. Abraham Lincoln, instead of being the unique blossom on an otherwise barren family tree, belonged to the seventh American generation of a family with competent means, a reputation for integrity, a modest record of public service. John Lincoln gave 210 acres of prime Virginian land to his first son, Captain Abraham Lincoln, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. In 1770, Abraham married Bathsheba Herring, born in Rockingham County, Virginia. Thomas was born in 1778 in Virginia to Bethsheba Lincoln; the Lincolns sold the land to move in the 1780s to western Virginia, now Springfield, Kentucky. He amassed an estate of 5,544 acres of prime Kentucky land, realizing the bounty as advised by Daniel Boone, a relative of the Lincoln family. In May 1786, Lincoln witnessed the murder of his father by Native American Indians "... when he was laboring to open a farm in the forest."
Lincoln's life was saved that day by Mordecai. One of the most profound stories of President Abraham Lincoln's memory was: While Abraham Lincoln and his three boys, Mordecai and Thomas, were planting a cornfield on their new property, Indians attacked them. Abraham was killed instantly. Mordecai, at fifteen the oldest son, sent Josiah running to the settlement half a mile away for help while he raced to a nearby cabin. Peering out of a crack between logs, he saw an Indian sneaking out of the forest toward his eight-year-old brother, still sitting in the field beside their father's body. Mordecai picked up a rifle, aimed for a silver pendant on the Indian's chest, killed him before he reached the boy. Between September 1786 and 1788 Bathsheba moved the family to Beech Fork in Nelson County, now Washington County. A replica of the cabin is located at the Lincoln Homestead State Park; as the oldest son, in accordance with Virginian law at the time, Mordecai inherited his father's estate and of the three boys seems to have inherited more than his share of talent and wit.
Josiah and Thomas were forced to make their own way. "The tragedy," wrote historian David Herbert Donald, "abruptly ended his prospects of being an heir of a well-to-do Kentucky planter. From 1795 to 1802, Thomas Lincoln held a variety of ill-paying jobs in several locations, he served in the state militia at the age of 19 and became a Cumberland County constable at 24. He moved to Hardin County, Kentucky in 1802 and bought a 238-acre farm the following year for £118; when he lived in Hardin County, he was a jury member, a petitioner for a road, a guard for county prisoners. Lincoln was active in community and church affairs in Hardin Counties; the following year his sister Nancy Brumfield, brother-in-law William Brumfield and his mother Bathsheba moved from Washington County to Mill Creek and lived with Lincoln. In 1805, Lincoln constructed most of the woodwork, including mantels and stairways, for the Hardin house, now restored and called the Lincoln Heritage House at Freeman Lake Park in Elizabethtown.
In 1806, he ferried merchandise on a flatboat to New Orleans down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers for the Bleakley & Montgomery store in Elizabethtown. On June 12, 1806, Lincoln married Nancy Hanks at Beechland in Kentucky. Nancy Hanks, born in what was Hampshire County, was the daughter of Lucy Hanks and a man who Abraham believed to be "a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter." She was called Nancy Sparrow and adopted daughter of Elizabeth and Thomas Sparrow. Dennis Hanks, Abraham's friend and second cousin, reported that Nancy Hanks Lincoln had remarkable perception. Nathaniel Grisby, a friend and neighbor, said. Nancy taught young Abraham to read using the Bible, modeled "sweetness and benevolence". Abraham said of her, "All that I am or hope to be I get from my mother". Lincoln developed a modicum of talent as a carpenter and although called "an uneducated man, a plain unpretending plodding man", he was respected for his civil service, storytelling ability and good-nature, he was known as a "wandering" laborer and uneducated.
A rover and drifter, he kept floating about from one place to another, taking any kind of job he could get when hunger drove him to it. Aside from making cabinets and other carpentry work, Lincoln worked as a manual labor
Ashlar
Ashlar is finely dressed stone, either an individual stone, worked until squared or the structure built of it. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit cuboid, mentioned by Vitruvius as opus isodomum, or less trapezoidal. Cut "on all faces adjacent to those of other stones", ashlar is capable of thin joints between blocks, the visible face of the stone may be quarry-faced or feature a variety of treatments: tooled, smoothly polished or rendered with another material for decorative effect. One such decorative treatment consists of small grooves achieved by the application of a metal comb. Used only on softer stone ashlar, this decoration is known as mason's drag. Ashlar is in contrast to rubble masonry, which employs irregularly shaped stones, sometimes minimally worked or selected for similar size, or both. Ashlar is related but distinct from other stone masonry, finely dressed but not quadrilateral, such as curvilinear and polygonal masonry. Ashlar may be coursed, which involves lengthy horizontals layers of stone blocks laid in parallel, therefore with continuous horizontal joints.
Ashlar may be random, which involves stone blocks laid with deliberately discontinuous courses and therefore discontinuous joints both vertically and horizontally. In either case, it uses a joining material such as mortar to bind the blocks together, although dry ashlar construction, metal ties, other methods of assembly have been used; the dry ashlar of Inca architecture in Cusco and Machu Picchu is fine and famous. The word is attested in Middle English and derives from the Old French aisselier, from the Latin axilla, a diminutive of axis, meaning "plank". "Clene hewen ashler" occurs in medieval documents. Ashlar blocks have been used in the construction of many buildings as an alternative to brick or other materials. In classical architecture, ashlar wall surfaces were contrasted with rustication; the term is used to describe the dressed stone work of prehistoric Greece and Crete, although the dressed blocks are much larger than modern ashlar. For example, the tholos tombs of Bronze Age Mycenae use ashlar masonry in the construction of the so-called "beehive" dome.
This dome consists of finely cut ashlar blocks that decrease in size and terminate in a central capstone. These domes are constructed using the corbel arch. Ashlar masonry was heavily used in the construction of palace facades on Crete, including Knossos and Phaistos; these constructions date to the MM III-LM Ib period, ca. 1700–1450 BC. In modern European masonry the blocks are about 35 centimetres in height; when shorter than 30 centimetres, they are called small ashlar. In some Masonic groupings, which such societies term jurisdictions, ashlars are used as a symbolic metaphor for how one's personal development relates to the tenets of their lodge; as described in the explanation of the First Degree Tracing Board, in Emulation and other Masonic rituals the rough ashlar is a stone as taken directly from the quarry, allegorically represents the Freemason prior to his initiation. Ablaq Dimension stone Opus quadratum Rustication Stone cladding Stone veneer
Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial travel guide from Wikivoyage
