Portal:Louisiana/Selected Biography/3
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Piyush "Bobby" Jindal (born June 10, 1971, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a Louisiana politician. Jindal was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives on November 2, 2004, from Louisiana's First Congressional District, based in the suburbs of New Orleans.
Jindal was born in Baton Rouge to recently arrived Indian immigrants who were attending graduate school. Jindal was a Hindu but converted to Catholicism as a teenager. He is the only Indian-American currently serving in Congress, and the second in congressional history after Dalip Singh Saund, a Democrat who represented California's 29th District from 1957 to 1963.
He was chosen by Scholastic Update magazine as "one of America's top 10 extraordinary young people for the next millennium." He was India Abroad Person of the Year 2005. In 1997, he married Supriya Jolly (born 1972). The couple has three children, Selia, Shaan, and Slade. On Tuesday, August 15, 2006, Jindal assisted in delivering his third child when his wife awoke, in labor. The child was born before ambulances had time to respond.
On Monday, January 22, 2007, Jindal announced his candidacy for Governor of Louisiana in the upcoming election. (read more . . . )Portal:Louisiana/Selected biography/2
Anne Rice (born on October 4, 1941) is a best-selling American author of gothic and later religious themed books. Best known for her Vampire Chronicles, her prevailing thematical focus is on love, death, immortality, existentialism, and the human condition. She was married to poet Stan Rice for 41 years until his death in 2002. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.
Rice was born and spent most of her early life in New Orleans, Louisiana, which forms the background against which most of her stories take place. She was the second daughter in a Catholic Irish-American family; Rice's sister, Alice Borchardt, also became a noted genre author.
She completed her first book, Interview with the Vampire, in 1973 and published it in 1976. This book would be the first in Rice's popular Vampire Chronicles series, which includes 1985's The Vampire Lestat and 1988's The Queen of the Damned. Rice has also published adult-oriented fiction under the pen name Anne Rampling, and has written explicit sado-masochistic erotica as A.N. Roquelaure.
Her fiction is often described as lush and descriptive, and her characters' sexuality is fluid, often displaying homoerotic feelings towards each other. Rice said that the bisexuality was what she was looking for in her characters; a love beyond gender especially with the Vampire Chronicles because the vampires were not of human society, therefore did not go by the expectations of that society. She also weaves philosophical and historic themes into the dense pattern of her books. To her admirers, Rice's books are among the best in modern popular fiction, possessing those elements that create a lasting presence in the literary canon. To her critics, her novels are baroque, "low-brow pulp" and redundant. A critical analysis of Rice's work can be found in S. T. Joshi's book The Modern Weird Tale (2001). (read more . . . )Portal:Louisiana/Selected biography/3
Louis Armstrong (4 August 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo and Pops, was an American jazz musician. Armstrong was a charismatic, innovative performer whose inspired improvised soloing was the main influence for a fundamental change in jazz, shifting its focus from collective melodic playing, often arranged in one way or another, to the solo player and improvised soloing. One of the most famous jazz musicians of the 20th century, he first achieved fame as a cornet player, later on switching to trumpet, but toward the end of his career he was best known as a vocalist and became one of the most influential jazz singers.
In his early years, Armstrong was best known for his virtuosity with the cornet and trumpet. The greatest trumpet playing of his early years can be heard on his Hot Five and Hot Seven records. The improvisations which he made on these records of New Orleans jazz standards and popular songs of the day, to the present time stack up brilliantly alongside those of any other later jazz performer. The older generation of New Orleans jazz musicians often referred to their improvisations as "variating the melody"; Armstrong's improvisations were daring and sophisticated for the time while often subtle and melodic. He often essentially re-composed pop-tunes he played, making them more interesting. Armstrong's playing is filled with joyous, inspired original melodies, creative leaps, and subtle relaxed or driving rhythms. The genius of these creative passages is matched by Armstrong's playing technique, honed by constant practice, which extended the range, tone and capabilities of the trumpet. In these records, Armstrong almost single-handedly created the role of the jazz soloist, taking what was essentially a collective folk music and turning it into an art form with tremendous possibilities for individual expression. (read more . . . )Portal:Louisiana/Selected biography/4
James Houston Davis, better known as Jimmie Davis, was a noted singer of both sacred and popular songs who served two nonconsecutive terms as a Democratic governor of Louisiana. Davis was considered to have been part of the anti-Long faction though Governor Earl Kemp Long endorsed him in the pivotal 1960 runoff election.
Davis became a commercially successful singer of rural music before he entered politics. His early work was in the style of early country music luminary Jimmie Rodgers, and he was also known for recording raunchy blues tunes like "Red Nightgown Blues." Some of these records included slide guitar accompaniment by black bluesman Oscar Woods.
He is associated with several popular songs, most notably "You Are My Sunshine," which was designated an official state song of Louisiana in 1977. He claimed that he wrote the song while attending graduate school at LSU, but research indicates he bought it from another performer Paul Rice, who had recorded it with his brother Hoke, who recorded together as the Rice Brothers under Paul Rice's name. The practice of buying songs from their composers was a common practice during the 1930s through the 1960s. Some writers in need of cash often sold tunes to others.
Davis was elected as the city's Democratic public safety commissioner. (At the time, Shreveport had a commission form of government. In the 1970s, the city switched to the mayor-council format.) Davis was elected in 1942 to the Louisiana Public Service Commission but left the rate-making body, which meets in Baton Rouge, two years later to become governor. (read more . . . )Portal:Louisiana/Selected biography/5
Huey Pierce Long, Jr., nicknamed The Kingfish, was an American politician from the U.S. state of Louisiana. A Democrat, he was noted for his radical populist policies. He served as Governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and as a U.S. senator from 1932 to 1935. Though a backer of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, Long split with Roosevelt in June 1933 and allegedly planned to mount his own presidential bid.
Long created the Share Our Wealth program in 1934, with the motto "Every Man a King," proposing new wealth redistribution measures in the form of a net asset tax on large corporations and individuals of great wealth to curb the poverty and crime resulting from the Great Depression. Charismatic and immensely popular for his social reform programs and willingness to take forceful action, Long was accused by his opponents of dictatorial tendencies for his near-total control of the state government. At the height of his popularity, the colorful and flamboyant Long was shot on September 8, 1935, at the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge; he died two days later at the age of 42. His last words were reportedly, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do."
As governor, Long inherited a dysfunctional system of government tainted by influence peddling. Corporations often wrote the laws governing their practices and rewarded part-time legislators and other officials with jobs and bribes. Long moved quickly to consolidate his power, firing hundreds of opponents in the state bureaucracy from cabinet-level heads of departments and board members to rank-and-file civil servants and state road workers. Like previous governors, he filled the vacancies with patronage appointments from his own network of political supporters. Every state employee who depended on Long for a job was expected to pay a portion of his or her salary directly into Long’s political war-chest; these funds were kept in a famous locked "deduct box" to be used at his discretion for political purposes.
Once his control over the state’s political apparatus was strengthened, Long pushed a number of bills through the 1928 session of the Louisiana State Legislature fulfilling some of his campaign promises, including a free textbook program for schoolchildren, an idea advanced by John Sparks Patton, the Claiborne Parish school superintendent. He also supported night courses for adult literacy and a supply of cheap natural gas for the city of New Orleans. Long began an unprecedented building program of roads, bridges, hospitals and educational institutions. His bills met opposition from many legislators and the media, but Long used aggressive tactics to ensure passage of the legislation he favored. He would show up unannounced on the floor of both the House and Senate or in House committees, corralling reluctant representatives and state senators and bullying opponents. These tactics were unprecedented, but they resulted in the passage of most of Long’s legislative agenda. By delivering on his campaign promises, Long achieved hero status among the state's majority rural poor population.
When Long secured passage of his free textbook program, the school board of Caddo Parish (home of conservative Shreveport), sued to prevent the books from being distributed, saying they would not accept "charity" from the state. Long responded by withholding authorization for the location of a nearby Air Force base until the parish accepted the books. (read more . . . )
