The Louisiana-French Homeland

Abstract

To understand more fully the geographical mechanisms of the peopling of America, this article provides a basis for a discussion of the geographical development of the Louisiana-French homeland. Within the suggested evolutionary framework, it is possible to see how the concepts of cultural intensity, ethnic persistence, effective landscape imprints, sense of place, and cultural and environmental equilibria coalesced to form the Louisiana-French homeland and to see how this place and its people have fared through lime.

A seven-stage longitudinal model emulates Donald W. Meinig's paradigms on the settlement of the American West and follows the development of the Louisiana-French homeland through the 18th-century stages of transplantation and expansion, the 19th-century stages of competition and accommodation, to the 20th-century stages of attraction, assimilation, and revitalization.