Baton Rouge audiotours

Baton Rouge stands on one of the first natural bluffs above sea level you encounter traveling north along the Mississippi River from the Gulf of Mexico, which is why French explorers in 1699 chose it as a landmark and named it for the reddened cypress pole boundary marker they found there. The city has been Louisiana's capital since 1849, and its political culture is as baroque as any in the country. Huey Long, the populist governor who served from 1928 to 1932 before becoming a US Senator, commissioned the 34-story State Capitol, the tallest in the United States, and was assassinated in its marble corridors in 1935. His statue stands outside it, pointing at the building as if he still owns the place.

The downtown waterfront on the Mississippi is anchored by the USS Kidd, a World War II Fletcher-class destroyer preserved as a museum ship, and the Old State Capitol, a Gothic Revival castle on the bluff that Mark Twain memorably called a 'monstrosity' in Life on the Mississippi.

The LSU campus to the south, with its Spanish Revival architecture and oak-lined paths, is the engine of much of the city's culture and its football-obsessed autumn calendar. Tiger Stadium, which holds over 100,000 people and generates a noise level measurable on seismographs during night games, is a spectacle unlike anything else in American sport.