Reflections about the Vidrine Family throughout the course of its 275 year history in Louisiana

Opelousas Post was in Opelousas, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana.

"The third edition of Ecology and Classification of North American Freshwater Invertebrates continues the tradition of in-depth coverage of the biology, ecology, phylogeny, and identification of freshwater invertebrates from the USA and Canada. This text serves as an authoritative single source for a broad coverage of the anatomy, physiology, ecology, and phylogeny of all major groups of invertebrates in inland waters of North America, north of Mexico." --Book Jacket.

The earliest mention of the name Ardoin appears to come from the year 600 and appeard as St. Hardoin and St. Harduin in France. Etienne Ardoin (b.1733) was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and later settled in the French settlement of Kaskaskia, Illinois. Several of his children moved down the Mississippi Rier to Louisiana and settled in what came to be known as Opelousas and some of the surrounding communities which still have a strong French-Creole influence. Descendants live in Louisiana and other parts of the United States.

French Louisiana music emerged from the bayous and prairies of Southwest Louisiana in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pioneered by impoverished Acadian and Afro-Caribbean settlers, the sound is marked by a high-pitched fiddle playing loud and fast above the bellow of a diatonic accordion. With lyrics about disaster and heartache sung cheerfully in a French dialect, the effect is dissonant and haunting. French Louisiana music was largely ignored in mainstream music culture, except by a handful of collectors, scholars, and commercial promoters who sought to popularize it. From the first recordings in the 1920s to the transformation of the genre by the 1970s, the spread of this regional sound was driven by local, national, and international elites who saw the music's traditions and performers in the context of larger social, political, and cultural developments, including the folk revival and the civil rights and ethnic revival movements. Patricia Peknik illuminates how the music's history and meaning were interpreted by a variety of actors who brought the genre onto a national and global stage, revealing the many interests at work in the popularization of a regional music.

"This narrative is comprised of a series of twenty-one letters to the Marquis de L'Estrade describing Bossu's life and travels in the vast Louisiana country from 1751 to 1762. His ventures ranged from Fort Chartres, in present-day Illinois, to Mobile, and along the Mississippi. His visit to New Orleans took place only thirty years after its founding, and he was able to gather considerable information from the memories of locals. ... Almost all of the second volume of this edition is given over to the catalogue of plants, making it an important piece of American natural history." -- William Reese Company catalog 347 "The Streeter Sale Revisited Fifty Years Later."

The first serious historical examination of a distinctive multiracial society of Louisiana

Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Book Prize for the Best Book on Louisiana History, French Roots in the Illinois Country creates an entirely new picture of the Illinois country as a single ethnic, economic, and cultural entity. Focusing on the French Creole communities along the Mississippi River, Carl J. Ekberg shows how land use practices such as medieval-style open-field agriculture intersected with economic and social issues ranging from the flour trade between Illinois and New Orleans to the significance of the different mentalities of French Creoles and Anglo-Americans.