Common Routes: St. Domingue Louisiana

From European contact through the present day, St. Domingue (Haiti) and Louisiana have been bound together by shared economies, cultural enterprises, and peoples. Common Routes: St. Domingue Louisiana, a ground-breaking exhibition at The Historic New Orleans Collection in the spring of 2006, illuminated this shared history. The exhibition catalogue features essays by noted scholars Franklin Knight, John Garrigus, Laurent Dubois, Gilles-Antoine Langlois, Alfred Lemmon, and John Lawrenceas well as reproductions of images and artifacts featured in the exhibition. Readers will find the stories of individuals rooted in the intersection of cultures and re-routed across oceans in search of fortune or freedom. Among the protagonists are the thousands of immigrants who settled in Louisiana in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Their civic and artistic contributions imbued New Orleans with a distinctive cultural dye that marks the city's character to this day.

The catalogue for this exhibition is a gorgeous volume, including an introduction by Alfred E. Lemmon, John H. Lawrence and Guy Vadenboncoeur; and essays "From European Discovery to the Treaty of Ryswick, 1492-1697" by Franklin W. Knight, "History of St. Domingue, 1697-1791" by John Garrigus, "Colonial Plantations" by Gilles-Antoine Langlois, "The Revolutionary Period in Haiti, 1791-1804" by Laurent dubois, and "Common Routes: St. Domingue and Louisiana" by Lemmon and Larence. The 10,000 former residents of St. Domingue who made their way to Louisiana after the revolutionary period in Haiti made their mark on our culture in every way from the arts to plantation architecture and law. The catalogue includes reproductions of the fascinating paintings, scultpture, maps and other documents in the exhibit, ranging form a biography of Christopher Columbus by his son, written in 1681, portraits of revolutionary Touissaint L'Ouverture, to representations of musican Louis Moreau Gottshalk and chess genius Paul Morphy, who were part of the second generation of emigres. And let us not forget that John James Audobon was born in St. Domingue. As Lemmon and Lawrence write, "If Louisianians remain Frenchmen at heart, two centuries after the Purchase, the St. Domingue emigres deserve much of the creidt." This beautiful book reminds us why. --The Times-Picayune