Baton Rouge, the Northshore & Plantation Country

A floodplain park on the Tickfaw River, with cypress-tupelo swamp, bottomland hardwoods and about 4.75 miles of trails and boardwalks, plus a nature center with an 800-gallon river aquarium.

Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Lakeshore park on the Northshore where Tchefuncte potters, Acolapissa and Choctaw lived, and where 153 people were enslaved at Marigny's sugar and brick plantation by 1840; the mill ruin still stands.

The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.

A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.

The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.

Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.

James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.