New Orleans kept its French and Spanish bones through 1803, then rebuilt itself with Haitian, German and free Creole hands. These three days trace that record in surviving buildings — a 1752 convent, an 1831 slave quarter, Congo Square — rather than in plaques.
Completed in 1752 for French Ursuline nuns, this is the oldest surviving building in the Mississippi Valley and the only French colonial structure left in the Quarter. The audio tour covers the 1727 nuns, the casket girls and the fires it outlived. Mon–Sat 10:00–16:00.
An 1826 raised centre-hall villa where Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard boarded from 1866 to 1868 and novelist Frances Parkinson Keyes later wrote 'Dinner at Antoine's'. Hourly guided tours run Mon–Sat and take in the walled parterre garden.
An 1831 Federal-style mansion built for German-Jewish merchant Samuel Hermann, preserving the last intact stable, slave quarters and open-hearth kitchen in the French Quarter. Guides name the enslaved people who lived and worked on the property.
Raised between 1722 and 1732 in briquette-entre-poteaux — soft brick packed between cypress posts — this is among the oldest structures in the United States serving as a bar. The Lafitte smuggling story is folklore; the French colonial frame is not.
Congress named this the official US museum of the war, sited here because Higgins Industries built the landing craft that put troops ashore at Normandy. Five pavilions cover D-Day, the Pacific campaign and the home front across 6 acres.
Louisiana's oldest continually operating museum, opened in 1891 inside a cypress-panelled Romanesque hall. Jefferson Davis lay in state here in 1893, and the cases hold uniforms, battle flags and personal effects with newer interpretive labelling.
Founded in 1966 in the 1792 Merieult House on Royal Street, the city's main private archive shows Spanish colonial land documents, early Mississippi maps and rotating exhibitions on slavery, yellow fever and the Storyville district.
This paved circle at the edge of Tremé is where enslaved Africans were permitted to gather on Sundays from the 1740s to drum, dance the bamboula and trade — the retained African rhythm that later fed directly into jazz. Free and always open.
Tremé's archive of Black masking traditions, assembled by the late Sylvester Francis: dozens of hand-beaded Mardi Gras Indian suits, jazz funeral footage and social aid and pleasure club regalia, now housed on St Philip Street.
Consecrated in 1842 after free people of colour bought pews and then bought further pews for enslaved worshippers — the 'War of the Pews'. Beside the church stands a memorial cross welded from chains and shackles.
The only Creole colonial country house on the bayou open to the public, built around 1799 and home to James Pitot, first elected mayor of the incorporated city in 1804. West Indies galleries wrap a stuccoed brick core. Tours Wed–Sat.
Edgar Degas stayed with his Creole Musson relatives here in 1872–73 and painted 'A Cotton Office in New Orleans' during the visit. The Italianate double was cut in two and moved in 1920; tours cover the family and the 1874 White League revolt.