History
Spain was largely a benign absentee landlord administering it from Havana, Cuba and contracting out governing to people from many nationalities as long as they swore allegiance to Spain. During the American War of Independence, the Spanish funneled their supplies to the American rebels through New Orleans and the vast Louisiana territory beyond.
Although only maintaining it for 40 years, the Spanish were largely responsible for establishing much of the character of New Orleans and Louisiana that is normally associated with the French. For instance, the buildings in the "French Quarter" of New Orleans are actually Spanish colonial era constructions. Also, Spanish control of the region continued and strengthened the Catholic influence that had begun with the French.
Read more about this topic: Louisiana (New Spain)
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“The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)