My Thanks to Sarah and Rachel

Without the repeated encouragement of two ladies, I would never have begun this blog. Sarah Fischer of Literacy AmeriCorps New Orleans and Rachel Nicolosi of the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans inspired me to undertake this quest to record in blog form the fascinating world which is the history of Old New Orleans. (See more about Sarah and Rachel's work in literacy education at http://www.literacygno.org/ .)
In this blog you will meet kings, paupers, and pirates, scalawags and heroes, men of genius and total fools, honest men, holy men, Voodoo Queens, liars, and rogues. You will visit the Dueling Oaks, the Cabildo where the Louisiana Purchase was signed, the banks of the Bayou St. John where Marie Laveau held Voodoo ceremonies; and you will travel along the mighty Mississippi River. You will visit (virtually) graveyards and ghosts, famous back alleys in the Vieux Carre' (named for pirates and a priest), and the finest Creole restaurants in the grandest hotels where the best cuisine in the world was created. You will see many wars, slavery, freedom, and peace. You will meet a general named Jackson and a buccaneer named Lafitte. You will see death on a battlefield in Chalmette and on a more massive scale from "Yellow Jack" or Yellow Fever. And you will see the birth of the madness of Mardi Gras, the most extreme celebration event in American history. You will learn where Jazz came from. You will see a Southern city that is unlike the rest of the Anglo South. You will see a parade of immigrants (both free and enslaved) -- the French, the Spanish, the Africans, the Irish, the Germans, the Italians and Sicilians, and others, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish -- who made-up the most multicultural city in the South and perhaps in all of America. You will see all this and more because it all happened in Old New Orleans, in Old NOLA.
This entire blog, Old NOLA Journal, is dedicated to these two ladies who led me to tell this fascinating tale. Thank you, Sarah and Rachel ! I hope my blog will be worthy of your encouragement.
-- Adrian