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Industry & violence

in

South Louisianaā€™s

Plantation Country

These arenā€™t the familiar stories of pirates, antebellum romances, and haunted housesā€¦

but the history of greed, corruption, and exploitation that defined lifetimes.

Blood & Oil is the story of Greater New Orleans that starts after the tourist booklets end.

  • Sign reading "Please Keep Off Grass" at Oak Alley Plantation Museum

  • Plantation Entrance sign at Oak Alley Plantation

    Tourism "might supplant the glory days of the Old South by putting that past on show - and perhaps up for sale." - Alisa Y. Harrison, "History as Tourist Bait."

  • Sharecropper cabin at the Whitney Plantation and Slavery Museum

    ā€œThe surge in Black museums is... grass-roots pressure from African-Americans who want a say in how their past is portrayed." - Vanessa Turner-Maybank, in Fath D. Ruffins, Revisiting the Old Plantation

  • Rear of Oak Alley Plantation house museum

    "There tourists experienced an enchanting, innocent, exotic, and seemingly timeless past..." - F. Brundage, Southern Past: A Clash of Race & Memory

  • Sugar kettle in the center of Oak Alley Plantation Museum

    "Here and there in roadside... grazing lots are open, bowl-shaped iron sugar kettles now serving as water troughs for stock." - L. Saxon, WPA Guide to New Orleans 1938

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Destrehan Plantation Museum 2021

Where it all startedā€¦

In 2022, Lauren completed her senior thesis at Mount Holyoke College on the 20th century history of Destrehan Plantation in St. Charles Parish, the oldest Creole plantation still standing in Louisiana today. Laurenā€™s award-winning research and writing led to this podcast, where we:

Take a wider look at South Louisianaā€™s oil boom in the 1900s;

Ask uncomfortable questions about the impact & future of plantation house museums;

And throw out the French-Quarter-tour-guide-version of New Orleans & Louisiana history.

Read Lauren's thesis here
Read Lauren's thesis here
ā€œI fell in love with history because of its beautiful irony: If we seek to understand our present and our future, we have to take the time to look back. ā€
— Lauren, Episode 1