History of Louisiana

The territory of Louisiana roughly 10,000 years ago; first traces of permanent settlement, ushering in the Archaic period, appear at about 5,500 years ago (Mound Builders).

The area formed part of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. The Marksville culture emerges about 2,000 years ago out of the earlier Tchefuncte culture. It is considered ancestral to the Natchez and Taensa peoples. About 1,000 years ago, the Mississippian culture emerged from the Woodland period. The emergence of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex coincides with the adoption of maize agriculture and chiefdom-level complex social organization beginning in c. 1200 CE. The Mississippian culture mostly disappeared before the 16th century, with the exception of some Natchez communities that maintained Mississippian cultural practices into the 18th century.

European influence begins in the 16th century, and La Louisiane (named for Louis XIV of France) became a colony of the Kingdom of France in 1682 and passed to Spain in 1763. It became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Antebellum Louisiana was a leading slave state; in 1860, 47% of the population was enslaved. Louisiana seceded from the Union (American Civil War) on 26 January 1861. New Orleans, the largest city in the entire South and strategically important as a port city, was taken by Federal troops on 25 April 1862. During the Reconstruction Era, Louisiana was part of the Fifth Military District. In 1898, the white Democratic, planter-dominated legislature passed a new disfranchising constitution, whose effect was immediate and long lasting. The disfranchisement of African Americans did not end until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

...
Wikipedia