It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Le dernier lever des couleurs : La cession de la Nouvelle-Orléans.
This painting, whose author is unknown depicts the official ceremony transfering Louisiana under the US sovereignty on the 10th of March 1804.
Anonymous portrait claimed to be of Jean Lafitte in the early 19th century, Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas
Jean Lafitte (c. 1776 – c. 1823) was a French pirate and privateer in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 19th century.
Lafitte is believed to have been born either in France or the French colony of Saint-Domingue. By 1805, he operated a warehouse in New Orleans to help disperse the goods smuggled by his brother Pierre Lafitte. After the United States government passed the Embargo Act of 1807, the Lafittes moved their operations to an island in Barataria Bay, Louisiana. By 1810, their new port was very successful; the Lafittes pursued a successful smuggling operation and also started to engage in piracy.
Though Lafitte tried to warn Barataria of a British attack, the American authorities successfully invaded in 1814 and captured most of Lafitte’s fleet. In return for a pardon, Lafitte helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in 1815. The Lafittes became spies for the Spanish during the Mexican War of Independence and moved to Galveston Island, Texas, where they developed a pirate colony called Campeche.
Benjamin West’s painting of the delegations at the Treaty of Paris: John Jay,John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin. The British delegation refused to pose, and the painting was never completed.
The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War between Great Britain on one side and the United States of America and its allies on the other. The other combatant nations, France, Spain and the Dutch Republic had separate agreements
French castle at Fort Niagara. Fort Niagara is a fortification located near Youngstown, New York, on the eastern bank of the Niagara River at its mouth, on Lake Ontario.
René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle built the first structure, called Fort Conti, in 1678. In 1687, the Governor of New France, the Marquis de Denonville, constructed a new fort at the former site of Fort Conti. He named it Fort Denonville and posted a hundred men under the command of Capt. Pierre de Troyes, Chevalier de Troyes. The winter weather and disease was severe, and all but twelve perished by the time a relief force returned from Montreal. It was decided in September 1688 to abandon the post and the stockade was pulled down. In 1726, a two story “Maison a Machicoulis” or “Machicolated House” was constructed on the same site by French engineer Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Lery. It was called the “House of Peace” or trading post to appease the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois. The name used today, “The French Castle” was not used until the 19th Century. The fort was expanded to its present size in 1755 due to increased tensions between French and British colonial interests.
1869 - Père Marquette and the Indians
Wilhelm Lamprecht (German 1838-1906)
Father Jacques Marquette S.J. (June 1, 1637 – May 18, 1675), sometimes known as Père Marquette or James Marquette, was a French Jesuitmissionary who founded Michigan’s first European settlement, Sault Ste. Marie, and later founded St. Ignace, Michigan. In 1673 Father Marquette andLouis Jolliet were the first Europeans to explore and map the northern portion of the Mississippi River.
Mary Putnam Jacobi
Mary Corinna Putnam (August 31, 1842 – June 10, 1906) was an American physician, writer, and suffragist who was the first woman admitted to the Faculté de Médecine de Paris.
French map from 1725 showing the “Plan Profile and Elevation of Fort Condé at Mobile.”
The French founded the first European settlement in the region at Old Mobile, in 1702.The city was moved to the current site of Mobile in 1711. This area was French from 1702 to 1763, part of British West Florida from 1763 to 1783, and split between the United States and Spain from 1783–1821.
Thomas Bassett, a loyalist to the British monarchy, was the one of the earliest white settlers in the state outside of the Mobile area. He settled in the Tombigbee settlements, in what is now Washington County, during the early 1770s.
What is now the counties of Baldwin and Mobile became part of Spanish West Florida in 1783, part of the independent Republic of West Florida in 1810, and was finally added to the Mississippi Territory in 1812.
The area making up today’s northern and central Alabama and Mississippi, then known as the Yazoo lands, had been claimed by the Province of Georgia after 1767. Following the Revolutionary War, it remained a part of Georgia, although heavily disputed.
With the exception of the immediate area around Mobile and the Yazoo lands, what is now central Alabama was made part of the Mississippi Territory upon its creation in 1798. The Yazoo lands were added to the territory in 1804, following the Yazoo land scandal. Spain had kept a governmental presence in Mobile after 1812.
When Andrew Jackson’s forces occupied Mobile in 1814 he demonstrated the United States’ de facto authority over the region, which effectively ended Spanish influence, although not its claim, while gaining an unencumbered passage to the Gulf of Mexico from the hinterlands of the territory.
The Alabama Territory was created by the United States Congress on March 3, 1817. St. Stephens, now a ghost town, served as the territorial capital from 1817 to 1819.
Philippe Petit, a French high wire artist, walks across a tightrope suspended between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York on Aug. 7, 1974.
Corpses on the beach next to two Churchill tanks of the 14th Armoured Regiment (Calgary) stuck in pebbles. Behind them, thick smoke coming from LCT 5.Department of National Defence / National Archives of Canada C-014160.
In 1942, the Combined Operations Headquarters had good reasons for attempting a raid on Dieppe: on the eastern front a decisive battle was pitching the advancing German troops against the resistance of the Red Army and the Russian people. Stalin asked Churchill and Eisenhower to help the USSR by opening up a Western front in continental Europe, to prevent Hitler from throwing all the might of his armies against the Soviets. As a result, Great Britain planned a series of major raids against German defence installations along the Channel. Only one such operation was actually conducted: Dieppe.
The Allies’ long-term goal was to get a foothold on the continent and set up a bridgehead from where ground forces could move into Europe. But before it could attempt a large-scale landing, the Combined Operations Headquarters had to test some of its assumptions in real action. Would it be possible to capture a fortified seaport large enough to be used afterwards by invading troops, and that, without destroying its infrastructures? Amphibious landing techniques had been successfully tested in previous operations but how would the new barges designed to carry tanks and heavy artillery behave? There was a need to test the complex combination of land, naval and air manoeuvres required by a large-scale invasion in real action conditions, in order to check the efficiency of new equipment, communication lines and chains of command. The August 19th, 1942, raid was to answer all those questions.
Dieppe was a seaside resort in Normandy, built along a long cliff that overlooked the Channel. The cliffs are cut by gaps through which the Scie and Arques rivers flow to the sea. The city boasted a medium-sized harbour that carried a special significance for French Canadians as it was a departure point for ships sailing off to New France. In 1942, the casino on the boardwalk had been partially demolished by the Germans to facilitate the defence of the coast. They had set up two large artillery batteries in Berneval and Varengeville. For the British Commanders, Dieppe was also within the range of the RAF’s
At Dieppe, 907 Canadians, including 56 officers, lost their lives in a battle that lasted for only nine hours. A total of 3,369 men were killed or wounded. At Dieppe, the Canadian Army lost more prisoners than in the whole eleven months of the later campaign in North-West Europe, or the twenty months during which Canadians fought in Italy.
6,108 men took part in the raid (from the Land Forces), 1,946 were taken prisoner, 2,460 were wounded. 4,963 were Canadians (907 fatalities), 1,075 were British Commandoes (52 fatalities), 50 were American Rangers (3 fatalities), with 20 others.
In addition, the Royal Navy suffered 75 killed, with 269 missing or prisoners. Overhead the RAF and RCAF lost 119 aircraft - the highest single-day total of the war (62 fatalities) while the Luftwaffe lost just 46.
Dieppe was a pathetic failure. Sixty years later, it seems obvious that Jubilee was a bizarre operation with no chance of success whatsoever and likely to result in a huge number of casualties. In August 1942, British and Allied officers did not have yet the knowledge and combat experience to make a proper assessment of the risks of such an operation. This catastrophe was useful precisely in providing that knowledge which was later to make victory possible.
The Dieppe fiasco demonstrated that it was imperative to improve communications at all levels: on the battlefield, between the HQs of each unit, between air, naval and ground forces. The idea of capturing a well-defended seaport to use as a bridgehead was dropped after August 19th, 1942. In addition, the raid on Dieppe showed how important it was to use prior air bombings to destroy enemy defences as much as possible, to support assault troops with artillery fire from ships and landing crafts, to improve techniques and equipment to remove obstacles to men and tanks.
